Scientists Say Canadian Lake Marks Earth's 'Anthropocene Epoch'

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) –A group of scientists revealed on Tuesday that Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, has been chosen as a primary marker of the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch.

“An international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene,” the University of Southampton said in a statement.

The Anthropocene is a proposed geologic epoch that started in the middle of the 20th century when humans began having a significant impact on the Earth.

Secretary of the working group Simon Turner noted sediments from the lake’s bottom provide a record of environmental changes during the last millennia. He said seasonal changes in water chemistry and ecology have created annual layers that can be sampled for multiple markers of historical human activity.

Scientists have gathered core sample sections from a number of places around the world and researched them in several laboratories, according to the statement. They found that a key marker of human influence on the environment is the presence of plutonium, it added.

Other geological indicators of human impact include high levels of ash from coal-fired power stations, and high concentrations of heavy metals and plastic materials, according to the statement.

“From the hundreds of samples analysed, the core from Crawford Lake has been proposed as the GSSP, along with secondary supporting sites that show similar high-resolution records of human impact,” the statement said.

Crawford Lake is a small and deep lake is a protected conservation area in Southern Ontario, Canada as part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

The lake began attracting the interest of scientists in the 1970s when archeologists began searching there for signs of early indigenous settlements and found thousands of artifacts, according to the media.