The Importance Of The Anthropocene

What is the Anthropocene? What is the Anthropocene, and why is it important? According to Paul Robbins, John Hintz, and Sarah A Moore (2014), the Anthropocene is an expression that is occasionally used in order to describe our current geologic epoch. It is said to have started from the time people first started having a control over ecosystems; influencing environmental ecologies all over the world (Robbins, Hintz, & Moore, 2014 p.4). With this definition, it is implied that humans have had a large enough impact on the earth in order to significantly change it to the point it cannot go back to the way it was. Therefore, the question then becomes, have we as humans really changed the world so much to cause permanent damage and, if so, should …show more content…
As it does so, this makes the acidity of the oceans much higher. It will eventually reach a point in which corals can no longer grow and produce reefs. If this scenario were to happen, in geologic terms it would be called a “reef gap.” Elizabeth Kolbert reports that reef gaps have been the signal for each of the last five mass extinctions (Kolbert, 2011, p.3). When a coral reef dies off as does the organisms that call it their home, hints the mass extinction …show more content…
Some say it started in the sixteen hundreds and others tend to argue that the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century was the first part of the Anthropocene. The industrial revolution would be noticeable in the ice cores that would show the significant rise in carbon dioxide levels (Kolbert, 2011, p.3). Yet, others still argue that there is no hard evidence to prove there is an Anthropocene epoch, we still live in the time period referred to as the Holocene epoch which began 11,700 years ago. There have also been arguments by scientists who suggest that the population of humans has grown so rapidly as to increase the control over the earth’s systems that we should call the current epoch the Anthropocene (Monastersky, 2015, p.145). Yet, confirmation of the said change in the earth will be the deciding factor as to if there is actually a human-caused geological time division. According to Monastersky, the past century of time would still be less than a millimeter thick in the stratigraphy of the earth’s rocks (Monastersky, 2015, p.147). Therefore why give something a name that has only few evidence, if that, and that points more toward the future? In other words, we should wait until there is a significantly think layer of stratigraphy on the earth in order to name it so we do not want to do anything