Science Café | The Anthropocene: Inside the Quest for the Human Epoch at Crawford Lake, Ontario
The annually deposited laminated sediments at Crawford Lake, Ontario, provide a perfect record of indigenous farming in the area in the Middle Ages, the arrival of the first settlers in 1822, a massive increase in industrially derived fly ash peaking in the early 1950s and a nuclear testing radioactive bomb spike that also starts in the early 1950s. These fly ash and nuclear testing signals are key indicator proxies of “The Anthropocene”; a proposed geological epoch starting in 1950 that encompasses the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geologic record and associated systems.
This time period coincides with the start of the Great Acceleration, a post-WWII time period during which dramatic socioeconomic changes, as well the Atomic Age, have left and continue to leave a permanent signature in the geologic record. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has identified 12 potential GSSP candidates; a leading candidate of which is Crawford Lake, within the Golden Horseshoe, at the western end of Lake Ontario.
The lake is protected within the Crawford Lake Conservation Area and is of additional cultural significance as the sedimentary record of the lake also preserves evidence
of habitation history of Indigenous villages that were on the lake edge from the late 13th to early 16th centuries. Following a first round of voting the AWG will reveal its top three choices for the Anthropocene GSSP on December 8th, 2022, with the final GSSP candidate to be revealed by mid-January 2023.
Join Tim Patterson, Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, whose research team is helping pinpoint the Anthropocene’s origins.
“In the vernacular, it’s called a golden spike,” Patterson says, “a place you can put your finger on, and say that it’s the boundary between one geologic unit and the next.
A clear, identifiable point that marks the end of one era, and the beginning of the next.”
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