The epoch of the “Age of man” known as the Anthropocene has commenced in the 1610 as scientists are now suggesting. This now piles up on a number of theories which suggests the timeline of the commencement of the Anthropocene era.
Scientists believe that human activity played big role on our planet beginning at that time. The formulation of their theory is established from ‘golden spikes’ or distinct signals of transformation.
Mark Maslin from University College London, one of the co-authors of the study from said “We look for these golden spikes - a real point in time when you can show in a record when the whole Earth has changed.”
The most primitive of these signals are derived from the European colonization of the Americas back in the 1500s which triggered staggering changes in the ecosystem for the upcoming century, making revolutionary transformation of the Earth.
Co-author Dr. Simon Lewis, also of UCL, said “The rapid global trade after that time moved species around. Maize from Central America was grown in southern Europe and Africa and China. Potatoes from South America were grown in the UK, and all the way through Europe and China.”
He also added, “Species went the other way: wheat came to North America and sugar came to South America - a real mixing of species around the world. We saw these species jump continents, which is a geologically unprecedented impact, setting Earth off on a new evolutionary trajectory.”
According to Lewis, the fatal diseases brought by the Europeans to the Americas are another symbol of golden spike in the timeline of geology.
Lewis told the BBC World Service’s Science in Action program, “Around 50 million people (in the Americas) died, and most of those people were farmers. And this farmland grew back to the original vegetation - tropical forest, dry forest or savannah. And about half the dry weight of a tree is carbon, so all that growing vegetation removed enough carbon from the atmosphere to see a pronounced dip in the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration that can be seen in ice core records.”
He also added “It provides an exact marker of the Anthropocene at 1610, the lowest of point of CO2 in the ice-core record at the time.”
This new suggestion adds up to the theories already established regarding the initiation of the epoch. One proposal being that Anthropocene was initiated at the beginning of the industrial revolution while another one suggests the day the first nuclear test was carried out.
The Anthropocene Working Group is still reviewing their theories for determining when the epoch really began and will share their results in the upcoming year 2016.
Officially, the Earth is at its Holocene period, which started at 12,000 to 11,000 years back.
