We have literally killed what is perhaps the most favorable geological epoch for life and the emergence of civilizations, now, comes the Anthropocene, which can be a good thing, or something really terrible.

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Hello dear friends of EcoTrain, today I bring you an article about how the climate change caused by humans has possibly accelerated a process that normally takes our planet millions of years, and I will talk about the causes, possible consequences and the possibilities that will bring this transformation of the world that we have brought about.
The Holocene is dead, long live the Anthropocene.

In the year 2000, biologist Eugene Stormer and chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene to define what, if recognized by the International Union of Geological Sciences [IUGC], would be a new geological era in the long life of our planet, the recognition of this era would mean the official end of the previous one, the Holocene, which lived only between 11,000 and 12,000 years. The new era would be marked by a phenomenon that has been transforming, or better said Terraforming, the earth for a couple of centuries, but especially since the 50's, this phenomenon is the existence of the human race. And the transformations include changes in the chemical composition of the soils, the salinity of the seas, all life on earth [biosphere], the air, and even a very different fossil stratum that we will leave behind.

Recognizing this new epoch also invites us to face a series of realities and decisions related to it, the first we could say is the fact that we are now masters of nature, but with that title comes the responsibility of deciding what we will do with it, will we succeed with our power in making a better world? or will we condemn our species, and tens of thousands with it, to a new mass extinction? We will address this later.

But for now, to understand what a geological epoch change means, and why the debate about whether or not it is happening is so important to the scientific community, we must understand a little about how geologists view time, and the world.

I want you to take a closer look at the following image, because it is fundamental to understand what we are talking about here.

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The first thing to understand is that the planet earth is old, we are talking about 4.6 BILLION years.

Second, geologic eras are extremely long, usually measured in the range of TENS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS.

Another important point, geologic eras are usually demarcated by geologists by examining different layers of the earth's crust, sometimes the seabed, and even ancient glaciers, and based on the fossils found in them, the chemicals present, and other residues such as ash or signs of heavy erosion, For example, in layers between 252 million years old and 65 million years old, geologists, paleontologists and other science disciplines can date the progression of the evolution of large reptiles by the fossils found, These reptiles would come to be known as dinosaurs, but the strata corresponding to about 65 million years mark a difference in that the amount of fossils of different forms of life increases, and traces of ash and immense detonations appear, as if a great cataclysm had occurred, when you go forward from there, you see that there are no more dinosaurs, so you can assume the end of the age of dinosaurs, known as the Mesozoic, and the end of the Cretaceous period, marked with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Now, with this method, scientists have been able to demarcate the different periods of the history of our planet, and as you can see, the time scales are immense, the last period we live in, the Holocene [RIP] began about 11 thousand years ago, a minutiae a nothing in time measures for a geologist, and the transition was marked by the end of a series of terrible ice ages, the stabilization of climate cycles, the conversion of most of the planet into life-friendly territory, and the extinction of megafauna, i.e., mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and 3-meter wolves. [Bad for humans]

All these changes were favorable for a species that although it had a tremendous potential, it needed some stability to be able to exercise it because compared to other animals, it was rather defenseless, without claws, without fangs, without speed, without strength, without camouflage the human being in the ancient world was an easy target for predators, and not a formidable threat to larger animals, but his intellect, would allow him to take advantage of this new world, and dominate it.

In this part I want to make a parenthesis. Humans have no record of how we fared during the epochal change, if there were humans but they were few, they were scattered, and not at all advanced in matters of literature. In fact, for a long time it was considered that civilization began about 5000 years ago, since only from that time we have some kind of historical record.

But now there is evidence that humans have at least 10,000 years of trying to do this thing called civilization. As shown by ancient buildings such as those at Gobekli Tepe.

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More on this here https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
Personally I tend to believe that human civilization is older than that, but that's material for another post.

The point is that human beings certainly saw the end of the ice ages, and perhaps, we do have a record of what happened, only that it was not transmitted in papyrus or stone tablets, but in Oral form, and the event was so traumatic, that such stories are part of our religions even today.

And you see, every religion has its great cataclysm, the end of the Mayan suns, the Ragnarok of the Norse, the great flood of Noah's epic, are just some of the examples but the list goes on, maybe those are the ancient memories of our distant ancestors, and how they dealt with the melting of the glaciers, and the increase of volcanic activity at the end of the Pleistocene period? I could certainly write several articles on this, but it will be a debate for another time.

What is concrete is that we can say that the human race did not enjoy the transition period to the Holocene, but the Holocene was the best thing that could have happened.
And with only about 11,000 years to the Holocene we killed it. And how did we kill it?
Well, those who support the theory [and I now consider myself one of them] point mainly to the tremendous transformation of the soils that we have made, not only collapsing entire mountains looking for minerals, but digging deep quarries, plowing millions of miles to cultivate crops, re-channeling rivers, creating lakes and more....

But those are just the visible physical effects, deeper, and even more insidious are the effects at the chemical level, we have completely altered the balance of nature in a very short time, the millions of tons of hydrogenated and potation-based fertilizers have changed the composition of millions of square kilometers, plastic has not only introduced chemicals, sometimes toxic, into the soil, but also into the sea, and the mere existence of plastic molecules in all the oceans of the globe threatens the fundamental building blocks on which life in the seas is based, such as plankton.

The evidence of this is accumulating in soils and glaciers, even the ash from burning coal or other fuels to produce energy is accumulating in soil strata, which will serve as evidence against us for future generations, or perhaps... future races, when it is investigated who killed the Holocene?

The most notable symptom of the death of the Holocene is climate change, the planet has warmed almost 1 degree warmer since 1950 alone. It may not seem like much, all these elements together are affecting life on the planet, rainfall and droughts are becoming more unpredictable, entire species are becoming extinct overnight, entire sectors of our planet's fauna have disappeared, there are no large fish in the sea anymore, whales are few and far between, on land, large predators such as tigers or lions have been brought to the brink of total extinction, animals such as elephants have disappeared, and immense numbers of pigs and cattle have appeared all over the world, so that the fossils of the future, and the soil strata will be so different that geologists will see them and think that some catastrophe has changed the world in our time. And that catastrophe is us, bringing about a mass extinction event similar to the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs, because nature cannot keep pace to adapt to the drastic changes we are bringing.

This is a very educational video on the subject, although it is a bit long.