It made world news last week when a small lake in Canada was chosen as the “Golden Spike” – the location where the emergence of the Anthropocene is most clear. The Anthropocene is the proposed new geological epoch defined by humanity’s impact on the planet.
It took 14 years of scouring the world before the geoscientists in the Anthropocene Working Group chose Lake Crawford – the still, deep waters of which are exceptionally good at preserving history in the form of sediment layers. Core samples from the lake give us an unusually good record of geological change, including, some scientists believe, the moment we began to change everything. For this group, that date is around 1950.
