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A new era has dawned on the earth
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
Members of the International Commission studying the sequence of rock complexes have announced the beginning of a new geological era. This statement was made in Cape Town, South Africa, at the International Congress of Geologists. The new era was called the Anthropocene and its distinctive feature is that human actions have come to dominate the work of all ecosystems on Earth. In essence, our planet is a huge spaceship, and people on it are the crew. If we assume that we actually live on a spaceship, then systematic interference with the work of the ship's life support systems would ultimately lead to a crash. And, according to scientists, the Anthropocene era is a warning and should remind us of the danger.
Natural scientists have been warning for decades about the beginning of the Anthropocene, a new geological and historical period in which humans dominate the planet. To confirm their owls, scientists cite the rapid rate of extinction of various representatives of the animal world, and the irreversible changes in the ecological system of our planet caused by human actions.
Geologists, on the contrary, reject concepts of this kind and believe that no human actions throughout the entire period of development can significantly change the rocks in the earth so that in the future it would be possible to establish from them the beginning of a new era, marking the development of mankind.
In geology, historical epochs are divided by 2 main parameters - noticeable traces of long-term changes in earth rocks and traces of short-term global changes. The establishment of a new era is quite clearly indicated by imprints in earth rocks at the junction of the Cretaceous and Cenozoic periods, where a trace of a meteorite fall has been preserved. At the border of this period, global climate changes occurred on the planet, which caused the death of large animals, in particular dinosaurs.
According to geologists, no clear changes have occurred in the earth's rocks, and in order to talk about the establishment of a new era, it is necessary to determine which event will mark the beginning of the Anthropocene.
According to various versions, the new era could have begun at the beginning of the 17th century, in the mid-50s, and in 1964.
This week, experts who have been working on this rather complex issue have concluded that the beginning of the new era occurred in the 1950s, when radioactive dust from nuclear weapons tests and industrial emissions polluting the atmosphere could have left significant geological traces in the earth's rocks.
If the scientists' assumption is accepted, then the duration of the previous Holocene era, which began with the stabilization of the planet's climate, will be only about 12 thousand years. This, in turn, may give rise to new disputes in scientific circles, between representatives of natural sciences and geologists.
The beginning of the Anthropocene era will be finally recognized after a formal proposal is submitted to the International Commission on Stratigraphy and final approval by the International Union of Geological Sciences.
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