Regular readers will know that I have strong views on attempts to burden stratigraphy with a new Epoch: the Anthropocene. The central one is that the lead-in to a putsch has as much to do with the creation of a bandwagon, to whose wheels all future geologists will be shackled, as it does to any scientific need for such a novelty. Bound up as it is with the fear that Earth may be experiencing its sixth mass extinction, the mooted Anthropocene will likely become a mere boundary marked by future stratigraphers as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point or GSSP between the existing Holocene Epoch and that sequence of sedimentary strata and their fossil record that will be laid down on top of it. Or not, if humanity becomes extinct should the economically induced, dangerous modifications of our homeworld of the last few decades or centuries not be halted. Either way, it defies the stratigraphic ‘rule book’.
No one can deny that humanity’s activities are now immensely disruptive to surface geological processes. Nor is it possible to rule out such disruptive change to the biosphere in the near-future that a latter-day equivalent of the K/Pg or end-Permian events is on the cards: such confidence does not spring from the interminable succession of grand words and global inaction reiterated in December 2015 by the UN Paris Agreement on economically-induced climate change. Still, it was a bit of a relief to find that palaeontological evidence, or rather statistics derived from the fossil record in North American sedimentary rocks since the Carboniferous, emphasises that there is no need for the adoption of Anthropocene as an acceptable geological adjective.
To ecologists, extinctions are not the be all and end all of disruption of the biosphere. Major shifts in life’s richness are also recorded by the way entire ecosystems become disrupted. A classic, if small-scale, example is that way in which the ecosystem of the US Yellowstone National Park changed since the eradication by 1926 of the few hundred grey wolves that formerly preyed mainly on elk. In the 20 years since wolf reintroduction to the Park in 1995 the hugely complex but fragile Yellowstone ecosystem has showed clear signs of recovery of its pre-extirpation structure and diversity.
A consortium of mainly US ecologists, led by Kathleen Lyons of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, has assessed linkages between species of fossil animal and plants since the Carboniferous (S.K. Lyons and 28 others, 2015. Holocene shifts in the assembly of plant and animal communities implicate human impacts. Nature, published on-line 16 December 2015 doi:10.1038/nature16447). They found that of the 350 thousand pairs of species that occurred together at different times throughout the late Palaeozoic to the last Epoch of the Cenozoic, the Holocene, some pairs appeared or clustered together more often than might be expected from random chance. Such non-random association suggests to ecologists that the two members of such a pair somehow shared ecological resources persistently, hinting at relationships that helped stabilise their shared ecosystem. For most of post-300 Ma time an average of 64% of non-random pairs prevailed, but after 11.7 ka ago – the start of the Holocene – that dropped to 37%, suggesting a general destabilisation of many of the ecosystems being considered. This closely correlates with the first human colonisation of the Americas, the last of the habitable continents to which humans migrated. This matches the empirical evidence of early Holocene extinctions of large mammals in the Americas, which itself is analogous to the decimation of large fauna in Australasia during the late Pleistocene following human arrival from about 50 to 60 ka ago. Significant human-induced ecological impact seems to have accompanied their initial appearance everywhere. The ecological effects of animal domestication and agriculture in Eurasia and the Americas mark the Holocene particularly. In fact, in Europe the presence of Mesolithic hunter gatherers is generally inferred, in the face of very rare finds of artefacts and dwellings, from changes in pollen records from Holocene lake and wetland sediments, which show periods of tree clearance that can not be accounted for by climate change.
There is no need for Anthropocene, other than as a political device.
Earth-logs 