Related: Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/22/geologists-r...
This makes it sound like the designation is latent, even if rejected by committee right now. They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear boundaries. But the boundaries of other epochs are also only estimated and didn't unfold completely overnight, not even for the K-Pg impactor, probably the most sudden change in the geological record…
You mean aren't admitting the anthropocene as an epoch? That's not what the article says. The reason it's not admissible as an epoch is because we might blow ourselves up tomorrow and wipe out industrial civilisation. And the whole layer of steel and concrete we laid down would be very thin in the record, like the K-Pg impact. The banded iron formations are kind of on the boundary, they're associated with the Great Oxygenation Event but you could also maybe call it the Jatulian period. That was a couple hundred million years.
> There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.
Those are classified as events, not epochs. The K-Pg impact was an event.
Ed. I guess you could also say why can't we have a new Anthropocene period caused by an Anthropocene event, but I don't know what to tell you, it's just confusing to do that. That's why the K-Pg impact is followed by the Danian age, not the The-Start-Of-This-Period-Has-A-Lot-Of-Iridium age. I don't get why the proposal didn't want to call it the Crawfordian if that's where the canonical marker is found