The Earth recently entered a new epoch – the Anthropocene. Since the dawn of modern mechanised industry and the use of fossil fuels, the story goes that human beings have become the dominant force for…
16 milliseconds after the beginning of the Anthropocene: The Trinity nuclear test.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Human beings don’t merely inhabit the world. They alter it, on an increasingly epic scale. It is said that we now live in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which geology and climate are controlled as much…
On climate change and other environmental problems, the humanities, creative arts, and media professions are a key resource for generating critical understanding, inspiration, and collaboration.
The Dawn of the Anthropocene -- New York City, September 2014.-- L. Reese
There is a growing movement among writers, scientists, and scholars to pin a new label on our modern era. According to these thinkers, pressing environmental problems like climate change are a sign that…
Is anyone listening, and does it matter?
Adrees Latif/Reuters
Humans have so much influence over the global environment today that we have crossed a major threshold in Earth’s long history, entering a new stage in geological time which some scientists call the Anthropocene…
Anthropocene landscapes are different places to what has gone before.
Craig Mayhew/Robert Simmon/NASA
Just over ten years ago the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen coined the term “Anthropocene” for a globe totally transformed and dominated by humans, a state he suggested we were in…
The polar vortex played havoc with Niagara Falls (and much of the rest of North America too).
EPA/Rick Warne
A string of events earlier this year provided a sobering snapshot of a global climate system out of whack. Europe suffered devastating floods, Britain’s coastline was mauled, and the polar vortex cast…
For millennia, humans have had the tools to change the atmosphere: when will we develop a sense of caution?
AK Rockefeller/Flickr
The era in which humans have had the power to alter the conditions for all life on Earth is widely thought to have begun with the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This era has been dubbed the “Anthropocene…
Our impact on the earth has brought on a new geographical epoch – The Age of Humans.
AAP/Damien Shaw
In response to the heatwave that set a new Australia-wide record on 7 January, when the national average maximum reached 40.33°C, the Bureau of Meteorology issued a statement that, on reflection, sounds…
Humanity’s control of fire has led to a vastly changed atmosphere.
Jason A Samfield
The evidence for a rapid shift in state of the terrestrial atmosphere-ocean system over the last two centuries (see figure 1) requires a deep time perspective, beyond events of the day. Tracing the original…
Allan and Helaine Shiff Curator of Climate Change, Royal Ontario Museum and Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto