[j9461701]

I find myself in an odd position - I am pro-Anthropocene but I find this reasoning suspect:

> But the Anthropocene’s future as an informal time period is assured. It’s too apt—and too important—a term to be abandoned. As Paul Crutzen pointed out in 2002, barring a “meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic,” humans “will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.” Science recently summed up the situation this way: “the anthropocene is dead. long live the anthropocene.”

If this was all the justification I would be against the anthropocene being accepted. As the anti-anthro crowd says, geology is not the study of "maybes" or "if this trend continues".

Instead I am pro-anthropocene because even if humanity died today, there would still be an extremely weird layer of rock that would need to be explained and the existing human impacts on the enviroment would still take millions of years to dissipate. Further, '1952' is in the past. It's very recent, but it is in the past. Stratigraphy is the study of layers, and humanity has undeniably created a clear and very odd layer in the rock. Therefore, a new age is justified to me.

[mordymoop]

Also, geology isn’t just sedimentation. Erosion, from various causes, removes layers of rock, sometimes sweeping away thousands of feet of sediment. Our mining industry has removed rock on the scale of a significant meteor bombardment. Future geologists might ask “why is there a massive stratigraphic absence here?” as often as they ask “why is there a weird sedimentary layer here?”

[Grimblewald]

Also movement of large amounts of rocks from one area to another. Our concrete momuments to arrogance and excess, even when theyre rubble, will be hard to explain without the human element.

[mulmen]

They won’t be because they are themselves consequences of nature.

[graemep]

> Instead I am pro-anthropocene because even if humanity died today, there would still be an extremely weird layer of rock that would need to be explained and

Would there be enough to make it an epoch rather than just an event though? Most opinions on the "silurian hypothesis" thought experiment seem to suggest not. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industri...

Our current impacts are significantly different from what they were four hundred years ago. They will probably be even more different in another few centuries. Assuming we do not wipe ourselves out, our eventual impact will be very different from our current impact. Maybe we will even reverse many things, and a millennium is just a blip in geological time.

In any case, the Holocene is defined by human impacts on the environment, so really Anthropocene is more of an alternative name for the Holocene than a separate epoch: https://www.britannica.com/science/Holocene-Epoch

[bjornsing]

Makes sense to me. What’s the counter argument?

[defrost]

There's some long hashing out of pro's and cons in the Smithsonian link and thread comments here

Myths about the Anthropocene ( 67 points, 2 days ago, 58 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014