Mass Deaths in Americas Start New CO2 Epoch

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 03/16/15

David Biello reports that the mass deaths after Europeans reached the Americas may have allowed forests to regrow, reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and kicking off a proposed new Anthropocene geologic epoch. The atmosphere recorded the mass death, slavery and war that followed 1492. The death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas allowed forests to grow in former farmlands. By 1610, the growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least seven parts per million in atmospheric concentrations of the most prominent greenhouse gas and start a little ice age. Based on that dramatic shift, 1610 should be considered the start date of a new, proposed geologic epoch called the Anthropocene, or recent age of humanity according to the authors of a new study. Placing the Anthropocene at this time highlights the idea that colonialism, global trade and the desire for wealth and profits began driving Earth towards a new state, argues ecologist Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds and University College London. We are a geological force of nature, but that power is unlike any other force of nature in that it is reflexive, and can be used, withdrawn or modified. The Anthropocene is not a new idea. As far back as the 18th century, the first scientific attempt to lay out a chronology of geologic history of the Earth ended with a human epoch. By the 19th century, the idea was commonplace, appearing as the Anthropozoic - human life rocks - or the - Era of Man - in geology textbooks. But by the middle of the 20th century, the idea of the Holocene, a word which means entirely recent in Greek and designates the most recent period in which the great glacial ice sheets receded had come to dominate and incorporated the idea of humans as an important element of the current epoch but not the defining one.