Spheroidal carbonaceous particles are a defining stratigraphic marker for the Anthropocene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been recent debate over stratigraphic markers used to demarcate the Anthropocene from the Holocene Epoch. However, many of the proposed markers are found only in limited areas of the world or do not reflect human impacts on the environment. Here we show that spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs), a distinct form of black carbon produced from burning fossil fuels in energy production and heavy industry, provide unambiguous stratigraphic markers of the human activities that have rapidly changed planet Earth over the last century. SCPs are found in terrestrial and marine sediments or ice cores in every continent, including remote areas such as the high Arctic and Antarctica. The rapid increase in SCPs mostly occurs in the mid-twentieth century and is contemporaneous with the 'Great Acceleration'. It therefore reflects the intensification of fossil fuel usage and can be traced across the globe. We integrate global records of SCPs and propose that the global rapid increase in SCPs in sedimentary records can be used to inform a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age for the Anthropocene. A high-resolution SCP sequence from a lake or peatland may provide the much-needed 'Golden Spike' (Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".