This Ontario lake has been chosen to help mark a planetary milestone. If ratified, Crawford Lake will officially represent the “Anthropocene” epoch, when humanity’s impacts began influencing every part of the earth.
MILTON, Ont.—Crawford Lake — deep, still, and to some, sacred — has been keeping score.
The term “Anthropocene” is used by different people in different ways, but always refers to the period of time when humanity’s profound and damaging impacts began influencing every part and process of our planet. Tuesday’s announcement does not make the Anthropocene official, at least not by the standards of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the scientific body charged with defining ages, epochs and other units of the geologic time scale.
In typical lakes, the top layers of water intermix with the deepest layers. But in meromictic lakes, the deepest waters do not mix; the lowest layer is almost like an isolated body of water. Because the deep waters are protected from disturbances above, anything that falls into the lake settles into the sediment at the bottom in a slow, gentle drift.
At Crawford Lake and the other sites considered as golden spike candidates, the clearest signal captured in the early 1950s is a big spike in plutonium isotopes — fallout from testing and detonation of nuclear bombs, some halfway around the planet. Humans are intimately related to their environment, but the relationship doesn’t have to be negative, Brothers said, pointing to the corn pollen left behind by Indigenous crop-growers.
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