What is the Anthropocene Working Group?

What is the Anthropocene?

Thousands of scholarly articles and millions of mentions on the internet reflect a wide variety of ideas about what the Anthropocene actually is and means. A scientific reality is that hundreds of signals preserved in geological deposits, myriad data from other scientific fields, and societal norms indicate that since the middle of the 20th century, human impacts have been causing an abrupt, rapid transformation of the Earth System, measurably different from those earlier in human history.  It is this last seven decades or so that justifiably can be recognized as the Anthropocene epoch.

Other usages regard the Anthropocene as the long, several-tens-of-millennia arc of human impacts, that some term an ‘Anthropocene event’, rather than recognizing a much shorter, more obvious and intense, and globally simultaneous Anthropocene epoch. The two concepts are clearly separate. The Anthropogenic Modification Episode also references the long history of transformative anthropogenic alteration of the planet. This term then avoids the inevitable confusion of using the same term ‘Anthropocene’ to refer both to the scientifically-determined epoch of the last seven decades, and the more diffuse imprint extending back over perhaps fifty thousand years. The AnthropogenicModification Episode includes not only the Anthropocene epoch itself, nested at the end, but also the many ‘events’ in human history that maybe seen as precursors to it.

Status of formalizing the Anthropocene epoch

A proposal was submitted to the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) in October 2023. The proposal was rejected under questionable circumstances, not on scientific grounds, but because some voters felt seven decades was too short to recognize a new geological epoch.  Notwithstanding this, the scientific reality of an Anthropocene epoch beginning ca. 1952, representing an Earth System that has departed from the conditions that characterised the Holocene Epoch, is unequivocal based on geological, biological, Earth System, and societal evidence, whether or not it is made a formal part of the Geological Time Scale.

What now for the Anthropocene Working Group?

Set up in 2009 as a working group of the SQS, the AWG continues as a now independent body to work to develop, discuss, and communicate the Anthropocene epoch concept. Its original task, of working towards consideration of the Anthropocene as a Geological Time Scale unit continues, with its detailed proposal yet to receive open scrutiny and considered assessment. In the interim, its workincludes: working towards a broad, worldwide consensus on the identity and meaning of the Anthropocene across a range of disciplines; continuing to identify, characterize and analyse Anthropocene phenomena and territories in a wide range of settings; exploring the key driving forces that led to, and continue to drive, the trajectory of the Anthropocene within Earth and human history; and encouraging communication around the Anthropocene, not least as regards living with its new realities. We encourage members to introduce and develop appropriate initiatives.