David Biello reports that fire ranks among humanity oldest and most powerful tools. Now the residue from all the oil and coal burned to power modern civilization may provide the best marker for the start of a new geologic epoch that highlights Homo sapiens world-changing impact, known as the Anthropocene, or new age of humans.
Soot is not the only potential marker. Other proposals include the radionuclide spike in the wake of the first atom bomb explosion in 1945 to a dip in CO2 levels around 1610 occasioned by the mass deaths that followed European arrival in North and South America a century or so earlier.
But none of these alternatives are directly tied to a change in the entire planet. Soot, on the other hand, is the aftermath of the coal and oil burning that is also responsible for changing the global climate.
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