The International Commission of Stratigraphy awards a golden spike–which is promptly driven into the ground–when scientists provide geological proof that a new epoch has begun. By that definition, are we in the Anthropocene, a human-driven age of climate turmoil? Perhaps more importantly: Does it matter that we establish the Anthropocene by measuring rock when signs of the deleterious human effect on the planet are manifest in many other ways?

In “Written in Stone,” an Aeon article, James Westcott wonders about the rush by some geologists to make the Anthropocene “official,” especially by measures that perhaps aren’t the most vital ones. An excerpt:

For a potentially epoch-making event, the press conference after the AWG’s first face-to-face meeting in Berlin in October was muted, and sparsely attended. And yet Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester and chairman of the AWG, had important news to impart. He reported a growing feeling within the group that a strong case for formalising the Anthropocene can be made when the AWG submits its report to the International Commission of Stratigraphy in 2016.

The AWG will recommend a start date for the Anthropocene in the early 1950s (relegating many of our parents and grandparents to an entirely different epoch). Why then? Well, the flurry of post-war thermonuclear test explosions left a radionuclide signature that has spread across the entire planet in the form of carbon 12 and plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,110 years. The early 1950s also coincides with the beginning of the Great Acceleration in the second half of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented economic and population growth with matching surges – charted by Will Steffen and colleagues in Global Change and the Earth System (2004) – in every aspect of planetary dominance, from the damming of rivers to fertiliser production, to ozone depletion.

The Anthropocene’s advocates have a huge buffet of evidence that human activity amounts to an almost total domination of the planet – one of the latest being new maps that show the extent to which the United States has been paved over. But their problem in terms of formalisation on the Geological Time Scale is that the Earth has only just begun to digest this deadly feast through the pedosphere (the outermost layer) and into the lithosphere (the crust beneath it). The challenge is to convince geologists accustomed to digging much further back in time that the evidence accumulating now will be significant, stratigraphically speaking, deep into the future. Geologists are being asked to become prophets. …

Whatever happens after the AWG submits its recommendation in 2016, anthropocenists are, ironically, selling their theory short by seeking a place on something as esoteric as the Geological Time Scale. The Anthropocene, in all its multi-faceted, Earth system-altering horror, is more serious than that. The hope of course is that if we can name a new epoch after us then it will finally be a truth universally acknowledged that humans have more power than they know how to handle, and we will be able to start picking up the pieces.•