A formal Anthropocene is compatible with but distinct from its diachronous anthropogenic counterparts: a response to W.F. Ruddiman’s ‘three flaws in defining a formal Anthropocene’ - Normandie Université Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Progress in Physical Geography Année : 2019

A formal Anthropocene is compatible with but distinct from its diachronous anthropogenic counterparts: a response to W.F. Ruddiman’s ‘three flaws in defining a formal Anthropocene’

Jan Zalasiewicz
Reinhold Leinfelder
Will Steffen
Jaia Syvitski
Michael Wagreich
Daniel Richter
Davor Vidas
Mark Williams

Résumé

We analyse the ‘three flaws’ to potentially defining a formal Anthropocene geological time unit as advanced by Ruddiman (2018). (1) We recognize a long record of pre-industrial human impacts, but note that these increased in relative magnitude slowly and were strongly time-transgressive by comparison with the extraordinarily rapid, novel and near-globally synchronous changes of post-industrial time. (2) The rules of stratigraphic nomenclature do not ‘reject’ pre-industrial anthropogenic signals – these have long been a key characteristic and distinguishing feature of the Holocene. (3) In contrast to the contention that classical chronostratigraphy is now widely ignored by scientists, it remains vital and widely used in unambiguously defining geological time units and is an indispensable part of the Earth sciences. A mounting body of evidence indicates that the Anthropocene, considered as a precisely defined geological time unit that begins in the mid-20th century, is sharply distinct from the Holocene.

Dates et versions

hal-02194153 , version 1 (25-07-2019)

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Citer

Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Waters, Martin Head, Clément Poirier, Colin Summerhayes, et al.. A formal Anthropocene is compatible with but distinct from its diachronous anthropogenic counterparts: a response to W.F. Ruddiman’s ‘three flaws in defining a formal Anthropocene’. Progress in Physical Geography, 2019, 43 (3), pp.319-333. ⟨10.1177/0309133319832607⟩. ⟨hal-02194153⟩
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