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A 2013 art installation at Edge Hill University near Liverpool, by Robyn Woolston included this mock sign |
Have we really altered the global environment?
When did these impacts reach a critical point?
These are just some of the questions that Jonathan Dean, Melanie Leng and Anson Mackay have attempted to answer in a major new piece of research. Here Jonathan tells us more about their research and why you might have been born in a different geological age to your grandparents…
Our paper has just been published in The Anthropocene Review, which is available for free here. It stemmed from the increasing debate in the geological and wider scientific communities regarding whether a new geological age called the Anthropocene should be defined.
At the moment, the Anthropocene is an informal term that denotes the impact humans have had on the Earth. It is argued that, since humans are the dominant force of global environmental change, it is no longer appropriate for us still to be in the same geological age as when humans were living in caves and not flying round the world emitting vast amounts of CO2.
A working group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy is set to present its preliminary findings in 2016 on whether a change should be made to geological time. The major sticking point is likely to be where to set the beginning of the Anthropocene, with some people arguing for thousands of years ago when humans started chopping down forests and farming, to the last few centuries with the Industrial Revolution, to sometime in the future when greenhouse gas emissions are predicted to lead to large temperature increases. As isotope geochemists, we decided to review how isotope records can help with this debate.

Another example is that of lead isotopes. These can be used as a fingerprint to trace the sources of lead pollution, since human mining and smelting release lead with different isotope ratios to natural processes. This has allowed researchers not only to show that lead pollution found in ice from Greenland dating to 2,000 years ago was due to human, not natural processes, but that it was lead released by mining and smelting of Spanish lead by the Romans!
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A petrochemical refinery in Grangemouth, Scotland Wikipedia source |
By Jonathan Dean
You can follow us on twitter: @jrdean_uk, @MelJLeng and @AnsonMackay
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