Lesson: Anthropocene

Time flies by quickly, doesn’t it? Things seem to be changing too rapidly. At least for us humans. Geologically speaking, change takes a long time. We envision the dinosaurs suddenly dying out after a monstrous meteorite struck the earth, or was it due to volcanic activity? Nobody can say for sure because nobody was there to write it down. To get back to my point, it didn’t happen as suddenly as we think. A meteorite didn’t hit the earth on a Monday afternoon, and by Tuesday morning, everything woke up dead – change takes time. At the moment, we are living in the Holocene era. Many scientists believe it’s time to begin a new period called the Anthropocene due to the changes that human activity has inflicted upon the earth. One scientist says the new era should start about 1950. Have we humans been on Earth long enough to create a new geological epoch? In 100,000,000 years, will there be evidence of our activity in the geological record? Will it have begun in 1950? This time we’re going to think big.