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Record W4412110159 · doi:10.2478/host-2025-0008

Humans and the Great Lakes— Anthropogenic Impact and the Search for the “Anthropocene Golden Spike”

2025· article· en· W4412110159 on OpenAlex
Francine M.G. McCarthy

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueHoST - Journal of History of Science and Technology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicTransboundary Water Resource Management
Canadian institutionsBrock University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAnthropoceneSpike (software development)GeographyEnvironmental ethicsEnvironmental scienceEcologyBiologyComputer sciencePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.849
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.060
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.311
Teacher spread0.292 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it