Geology doesn’t actually require any amount of time to delineate different epochs, and the clear and measurable changes that have occurred clearly set our current time apart from the Holocene. Microplastics contamination, climate alteration, and atmospheric composition changes due to fossil fuels makes us extremely geologically distinct from 11,000 years ago, or even just 300 years ago.
I don’t claim to know where that line should be drawn, but lumping our current world together with the Holocene just because it wasn’t that long ago in geological terms, doesn’t make sense. Knowing nothing about our current society, looking at rock 5,000 years ago and rock from now, geologists would think some catastrophic changes had occurred.
I mean, it kind of needs time for there to be enough of a layer. You’re talking about a science that looks at the distant past and asking it to talk about at least the next several thousand years before they happen. It’s not the place to do it.
Something catastrophic could happen that makes the impact of the human-derived section of the layer we’re currently putting down miniscule by comparison. It’s unlikely, but the point is that we don’t know yet.
Geology isn’t really a good medium for activism of that particular variety.
Geology doesn’t actually require any amount of time to delineate different epochs, and the clear and measurable changes that have occurred clearly set our current time apart from the Holocene. Microplastics contamination, climate alteration, and atmospheric composition changes due to fossil fuels makes us extremely geologically distinct from 11,000 years ago, or even just 300 years ago.
I don’t claim to know where that line should be drawn, but lumping our current world together with the Holocene just because it wasn’t that long ago in geological terms, doesn’t make sense. Knowing nothing about our current society, looking at rock 5,000 years ago and rock from now, geologists would think some catastrophic changes had occurred.
I mean, it kind of needs time for there to be enough of a layer. You’re talking about a science that looks at the distant past and asking it to talk about at least the next several thousand years before they happen. It’s not the place to do it.
Something catastrophic could happen that makes the impact of the human-derived section of the layer we’re currently putting down miniscule by comparison. It’s unlikely, but the point is that we don’t know yet.
Geology isn’t really a good medium for activism of that particular variety.