When I heard that Crawford Lake in southern Ontario was selected as the “Golden Spike” candidate for placing the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch in 1950 — essentially, the best place in the world to show how humans impacted the planet’s fossil record — I was not surprised.
As the Allan and Helaine Shiff Curator of Climate Change at the Royal Ontario Museum, a metre-long sediment core from Crawford Lake was the first object I accepted into the collection as curator in April 2022.
