Humans and the Great Lakes— Anthropogenic Impact and the Search for the “Anthropocene Golden Spike”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Since Paul Crutzen introduced the term Anthropocene twenty-five years ago, it has become conflated with the concept of anthropogenic impact, which is globally diachronous. Crutzen introduced the term as a geological epoch to reflect the altered state of the Earth System, however, signifying an end to the Holocene Epoch whose relative stability fostered the evolution of human culture. The culmination of a fifteen-year effort to formally define the Anthropocene as an epoch was the proposal of a “golden spike” in sediments from a small Canadian lake in a conservation area near Toronto. Several episodes of anthropogenic impact are recorded in its annually laminated sediments in addition to the signature of the Great Acceleration of the mid-twentieth century. Evidence of the rapid increase in fossil fuel consumption, industrial production and human population can be precisely dated in the varved sediment of this unique lake, and the sharp increase in radionuclides with the introduction of the H-bomb allows the use of the anthropogenic isotope plutonium-239 as a globally synchronous marker of the base of the proposed Anthropocene epoch. The International Union of Geological Sciences rejected adding the Anthropocene to the Geological Time Scale, rejecting the idea that human activities have shifted the planetary system away from Holocene norms. Arguably, ignoring evidence that Anthropos has altered how the atmosphere, biosphere, and other components of the Earth System interact is at least as political as adding the Anthropocene to the Geologic Time Scale, impeding scientific communication efforts to deal with the climate crisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".