The Anthropocene: Inconvenient Facts for a Human-driven Earth System

Findings Published in Prestigious Journal Science / Earth Scientist Reinhold Leinfelder from Freie Universität Berlin Is Contributing Author. An international group of Earth scientists as well as scientists from other disciplines has determined that the impact of human activities on the Earth marks a new geological era: the Anthropocene. The researchers, including Reinhold Leinfelder from Freie Universität Berlin, consider the beginning of the era to be the mid-20th century. The Anthropocene is characterized by the proliferation of materials such as elementary aluminum, concrete, plastic, fly ash, and the so-called fallout from nuclear weapon tests over the entire planet. All this is accompanied by increased emissions of greenhouse gases and unprecedented invasions of transglobal species. In the investigation 24 members of the international Anthropocene Working Group demonstrated that human activities have changed the Earth system to such a great extent that a number of signals can be observed in sediments and ice. These signals are sufficiently different from the considerably more stable Holocene epoch of the last 11,700 years, which made the development of human civilization possible in the first place, to justify establishing an Anthropocene epoch in the geological time scale, according to the findings of the study.