New year, new epoch?

First things first, HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all! Hopefully the somewhat inevitable hangover from last night's celebrating isn't causing you too much discomfort on the first day of 2016. I may be being a bit ambitious in trying to write a post today, so I'll keep it short and sweet.

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What is in store for you this year? For myself, 2016 is the year I will graduate from UCL with a BSc in Geography, having had the most incredible whirlwind 3 years of my life. 2016 is the year I will hopefully join either a Master's programme or get my first full-time real-life-adult job (terrifying thought!). Failing that, 2016 will be the year I save some money and explore the world, broadening my horizons (I know, how cliché...). For the Anthropocene, its fate has yet to be decided.

2016 marks the year that the AWG are set to meet and make a formal proposal to the ICS (International Commission on Stratigraphy), deciding whether to formalise the Anthropocene as an official epoch of the Geological Time Scale. If formalised as an epoch, this will ultimately bring an end to the Holocene. There have also been suggestions that the Anthropocene may instead be considered at a lower hierarchial level (i.e. an age/stage), thus becoming a subdivision of our existing Holocene Epoch.

As it stands, there is no firm consensus. Though in January 2015, 26 members of the AWG argued mid-20th century markers were "stratigraphically optimal" and the Trinity atomic bomb blast of 1945 would be a good start date (Zalasiewicz et al 2015), the remaining half of the AWG were not on board with the idea (Monastersky 2015). One member of the AWG, Erle Ellis, proposed that the working group should hold off for ~1000 years to avoid making a premature decision (Monastersky 2015). Those who have come to disagree with the idea entirely and feel they have nothing left to add, such as Michael Walker, have left the working group (Monastersky 2015). Walker was part of a great achievement just a few years ago, covered in an earlier blog post - finding and deciding on the GSSP which formally marks the start date of the Holocene (Walker et al 2009). Gibbard, a member of the AWG and a voting member of the Quaternary subcommission, admits he has not been convinced by arguments in favour of the Anthropocene, mostly because this new epoch will not actually help geologists who study the Holocene or Pleistocene (Monastersky 2015). Gibbard doesn't want to "ruin the party", and admits a great deal of useful thoughts and conclusions are arising from thinking about the world through Anthropocene-lenses (Monastersky 2015). Gibbard and Walker (2013) argue the current view of the Earth Science community is that the Anthropocene should remain an informal term. But what about other, broader academic circles?

Even if the working group make a robust proposal, it needs to get past a long line of hurdles first. A recent Nature article demonstrates that the proposal needs at least 60% support by Quaternary subcommission members to proceed to the next stage, where the same minimum level of support is required by leaders of the ICS. The final hoop to jump through is persuading the executive committee of the IUGS to approve the proposal. It is a gruelling process that sees many proposals completely revised, and some even scrapped entirely. Whatever the outcome, 2016 is likely to be a momentous year for the Anthropocene, and thus both Earth and human history.