The British geologist Charles Lyell proposed the word Pleistocene in 1839 to define the last prehistoric epoch, today considered a succession of ice ages that began about 2.58 million years ago. The French paleontologist Paul Gervais suggested in 1867 to call the current chapter in the planet’s history Holocene, which began more than 10,000 years ago, after the last ice age. In 2000, Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, proclaimed that in his opinion the planet had already entered a new geological epoch, forever marked by the dirty impact of human beings: the Anthropocene. Even the Royal Spanish Academy, in the 2021 Language Dictionary, ended the Holocene and inaugurated the Anthropocene.
The fierce battle to change the geological epoch or not takes place in four groups of experts, one within the other, like Russian dolls. A team of specialists, the Anthropocene Working Group, began researching the idea in 2009 and last October presented a 200-page proposal to declare the new epoch. That group is within the Quaternary Stratigraphy Subcommittee, whose members are those who have now rejected the proposal by 12 votes to 4. This Subcommission in turn belongs to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which could also overthrow the proposal. And the final word would in any case be the executive of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), which rules over everyone and will meet starting August 25 at a congress in Busan (South Korea).
Jan Zalasiewicz is one of the strongest defenders of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. Last year he won the Ig Nobel Prize, a humorous parody of the Swedish awards, for explaining geologists’ fascination with sucking rocks. Zalasiewicz chaired the Anthropocene Working Group from its founding in 2009 until 2020, when he became head of the top expert committee, the Quaternary Stratigraphy Subcommittee. The geologist denounces that his first vice president, the Chinese Liping Zhou, and the secretary, the Italian Adele Bertini, instigated the vote behind his back. Defenders of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch claim that they learned of the result from the press. Other members of the Subcommittee leaked the results on March 5 to the American newspaper The New York Timeswhich published them on its paper cover with the headline: “Geologists say it’s not time to declare an epoch created by humans.”
The secretary general of the International Union of Geological Sciences, Stan Finney, is Californian, but he is married to a Spanish woman and lives six months a year in the Madrid town of Aranjuez. Finney denies the “serious violations” of the statutes denounced by Zalasiewicz and his second vice president, Canadian Martin Head. The American suggests that it is an improvised ruse to not accept the result. Head himself has been there for more than 12 years and could not vote, Finney stresses. “The time to address this issue was in 2020, when Zalasiewicz began his term as president, not three years later and after losing a vote,” criticizes the UICG secretary general. “If there has been negligence, it is his responsibility,” he says.
Zalasiewicz and his colleagues are not giving up. A couple of months ago they reported the alleged bad practices of their rivals to the UICG Geoethics Commission, which issued a report on January 19. Zalasiewicz assures that the fifth committee involved ruled that the Anthropocene Working Group has received unfair treatment, with illogical requests and without enough time to refute the objections. “[La Comisión de Geoética] “recommended the urgent suspension of any voting procedure,” Zalasiewicz states in his report. The UICG executive, headed by the British John Ludden, decided to go ahead with the vote, according to the sources consulted.
The only Spaniard in the Anthropocene Working Group, the geologist Alejandro Cearreta, does not hide his disappointment. “The criticisms and attacks on the concept of Anthropocene and the group’s activity have been numerous and have changed over time, in a process similar to what has been happening with climate change and the IPCC. [el grupo de expertos de Naciones Unidas]: denialism, retardism…”, says Cearreta, professor of Paleontology at the University of the Basque Country. The researcher regrets the rush that has had to be made to present his proposal, even with the covid pandemic already unleashed. The UICG has been criticizing for years, including on social networks, the supposed slowness of the Anthropocene Working Group and its alleged strategy of publishing “multitude of press releases” instead of a scientific proposal.
Stan Finney, the secretary general of the IUCG, believes that the proposal to declare the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch helped to “raise awareness of the immense and growing impact of humans”, with a message that has resonated among scientists, but also in artists and citizens in general. However, he maintains that it is “an obsolete dogma.” Finney and other colleagues proposed a “practical solution” in 2022: not to consider the Anthropocene as an epoch, but as a geological event, like other major transformations of the planet. The Great Oxidation—when microbes began emitting oxygen 2.4 billion years ago and changed the face of the Earth—is simply an event.
“The community, not just geologists, already sees the Anthropocene this way, but the Anthropocene Working Group is stuck in its outdated dogma. They can no longer rectify, only resist. And, as they have done in their 15 years of existence, they attack everyone who does not accept the dogma,” says Finney. On June 1, 2023, Jan Zalasiewicz, Alejandro Cearreta and other colleagues published their scientific arguments to argue that the Anthropocene is not an event, but a geological epoch.
Geologist Jan Piotrowski, from Aarhus University (Copenhagen), was one of the 12 experts who voted against the proposal. “It was a legal vote, carried out by a group of people representing the Quaternary Stratigraphy Subcommittee. The voting process, including the census of voting members, had not previously been questioned. In my opinion, the result is a binding decision,” he states.
Piotrowski emphasizes that the 12 experts who voted negatively do not question the validity of the Anthropocene as a valid geological term. “We all agree that there is an overwhelming impact of humans on the planet. What we suggest is that it be a geological event,” he points out. Piotrowski admits that this is not the definitive outcome of the Anthropocene as a candidate epoch. “In the nomenclature of geological time there is nothing written in stone. It may be that, in time, new ideas emerge that cause the Anthropocene to be reconsidered. The end is open,” he says.
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