International scientists, including researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), have proposed 1952 as the starting point of the Anthropocene.
KAIST said on the 16th that Park Buhm-soon, chair professor at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy and director of the Center for Anthropocene Studies, had published a paper with international collaborators proposing a definition of the Anthropocene and directions for future research and application.
The Anthropocene is a concept describing an era in which human activity influences the global environment, including the climate and ecosystems, on a scale large enough to alter it. Over roughly two decades, the concept has spread beyond the natural sciences into the humanities and social sciences, education and the arts, but differing interpretations and claims have persisted over its meaning and starting point. A proposal to recognize the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch was put forward but rejected in 2024.
In response, the international team sought to define the meaning of the Anthropocene consistently and to set out research directions that can be applied across disciplines. The researchers first noted that describing the Anthropocene broadly as simply "a period in which humans have affected the environment" makes it difficult to show how recent rapid planetary change differs from past human impacts. Humans have altered the environment for a very long time, they said, but what deserves attention is that since the mid-20th century those effects have grown large enough to destabilize the entire planet.
To that end, the researchers took as their point of comparison the Holocene, the final stage of the Quaternary period that has lasted roughly 11,700 years since the end of the last ice age and the formally recognized geological epoch in which we now live. Within the relatively stable climate and environment of the Holocene, which began after the last ice age, humans developed agriculture, cities and civilization. The researchers stressed that identifying the point at which that stability began to be severely disrupted is necessary to assess more clearly how rapidly and extensively the global environment is changing today.
The researchers proposed 1952 as the starting point of the Anthropocene. The year coincides with the "Great Acceleration," a period in the mid-20th century when industrialization and urbanization advanced rapidly and numerous indicators of human activity and the global environment shifted abruptly. The team pointed in particular to the fact that nuclear testing was conducted widely around 1952 and later halted, leaving stratigraphic evidence across the globe. Clarifying the starting point and the meaning in this way, the researchers said, allows scientists and policymakers in different fields to compare and discuss changes in the global environment using the same standard.
"The Anthropocene is a common language for understanding how rapidly and extensively humans are changing the Earth," Park said. "If we clarify its meaning and criteria, we can compare changes in the global environment more accurately and discuss how to respond together."
The paper was written with international scholars from several fields, including Jan Zalasiewicz, professor at the University of Leicester in Britain and co-chair of the Anthropocene Working Group; Julia Adeney Thomas, professor at the University of Notre Dame in the United States; and Jürgen Renn, professor at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. It was published on the 8th of last month as part of a special feature on the Anthropocene debate in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.