ANTHROPOCENE

The Great Acceleration

since 1950 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

After 1950 the graphs all bend at once. Population, energy use, carbon dioxide, fertiliser, plastic, water, tourism, telephones, economic output: two dozen measures of what people do and of how the planet answers leave the range they had held throughout the ten thousand years of the Holocene, and they leave it within the same decade.

Why it matters

Four and a half billion years converge on a few decades in which one species became a planetary force. What makes the pattern a fact rather than a slogan is that the bend is not in one curve but in all of them, and that the ones measuring us and the ones measuring the Earth bend together.

Sources

1. Steffen et al. (2015), The Anthropocene Review · The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration
2. Syvitski et al. (2020), Communications Earth & Environment · Extraordinary human energy consumption and resultant geological impacts beginning around 1950 CE
3. Steffen et al. (2015), Science · Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet
4. Waters et al. (2016), Science · The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.99861.4 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day