My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadigel people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. Happy Monday. It's the twenty first of August. I'm Sam Kazlowski.
I'm Zara Seidler.
You may not have heard of Crawford Lake in Canada because at first glance it's really just a sinkhole. But for those in the know, and you're about to be in the know, this little body of water holds the key to understanding humanity's impact on the planet, from hydrogen bomb tests to the use of fossil fuels. In today's deep Dive, tda's deputy editor, Emma Gillespie is going to share with us what secrets have been discovered so far and what it all means for humanity. But first, here's
the headlines. Well, after over a month of magnificent football. We have a new world champion. The final of the fee for Women's World Cup was held in Sydney last night and Spain beat England one nil to take out their first ever Women's World Cup. There was a first half goal to Spain and whilst England tried their very best through a very edgy and extended overtime to try and claw one back, sending the game into extra time, they were unsuccessful. The Spaniards are deserved winners of the trophy.
In absolutely terrifying news, up to forty new species of the wishbone spider have been discovered in Queensland. The Queensland Museum says research has collected one hundred and thirty six spider specimens across eastern Australia over the last six months. Wishbone spiders are burrowing spiders found in dry and tropical regions of Australia. It's hoped the discoveries will help protect the spiders into the future.
A new variant of COVID nineteen has now spread to four countries, that's the UK, US, Israel and Denmark, with the WHO classifying it as a variant under monitoring, which means it will be tracked globally. Some scientists are concerned with the level of mutation found in this particular strain. However, they do not expect similar levels of disease and death as with the alpha, delta or omicron variants. This variant is nicknamed the pirilla variant and the good News.
The A League Women's competition has announced a special standalone celebration to mark its opening round. The competition will start a week before the men's and for the first time in history, the women's season will last for twenty two games. The move is aimed at attracting more fans to A League games. Following the Matilda success at the.
World Cup, scientists have found evidence that human activity has fundamentally altered the Earth in such a significant way that we might have actually entered a new geological period. It's called the anthroposcene epoch. Oh my gosh. To make sense of what that means and why we should care, I've got someone new on the microphone for you, Emma Gillespie, Deputy editor at The Daily OS. Welcome to your pod debut.
Hello, Thank you for having me.
It's so fantastic to have you on to talk about your specialty area geological periods. So for starters, what is an epoch?
For starters? I just wanted on the record that I am not a geologist. I just happen to be wanting to share the news with you. So an epoch, Sam is It's kind of hard to understand, but please stay
with me. The history of the Earth, right, it spans four point five billion years, and modern humans i e. Us only emerged as a species around two hundred thousand years ago, so in this game of things, we actually haven't really been here here for that long, but our actions have already made a huge impact on the planet. So it's hard to comprehend what that means, what a thousand years is, let alone what a billion years looks like.
But thankfully we have these clever people called geologists to explain and unpack that for us.
They're rock stars.
They are rock stars. Geologists are scientists to yep. They study rocks, minerals, that kind of thing, and they work to make sense of the billions of years of history of the Earth. So to make sense of that enormous amount of time, they divide the timeline of our history into sections or epochs, So finding records embedded in the Earth helps geologists pinpoint the beginning of new epochs, those sections marked by major changes to the Earth's atmosphere, biology,
and geology. Now, that's all well and good, but in everyday terms, eld to think of epochs like this. If you imagine that we're all reduced to rubble, the buildings around us, the world that we live in and as we know it, are all just dust.
We're gone, Happy Monday.
Happy Monday. In the future, what would explorers of Earth discover about our way of life today? So without us here, geology actually offers a tangible representation of our actions, our life, the way that we lived.
I always get a little bit overwhelmed when we're talking about this kind of you know, long term impact on the planet.
Existence is completely fair enough, it's overwhelming.
Why do scientists think that we've entered a new epoch? But also more than that, why should I care that we've entered a new epoch?
Yeah, it's a really good question. So it starts in Canada, this story where scientists claim that they've discovered evidence of the beginning of what they refer to as the anthroposcene epoch, the age of humans. And this is a big deal because it means that we have had a physical impact that's been so significant it's pushed the planet into this new phase, rather than a new epoch being caused by a natural phenomenon like an asteroid strike.
So the Earth is.
Being rapidly transformed, especially by the impact of human caused climate change. But now we have a definitive fingerprint of that human impact on Earth's history in our geology, and.
I imagine that can't be undone that can't be wound back.
We can't wind back the clock, but we can take the knowledge from this discovery forward into understanding, you know, how to care for the planet moving forward. But there's
actually some beef in the science community about this. Some people say that we're still in the Holocene epoch that began more than ten thousand years ago after the last major ice age, But much of the science community believe that we have been in this anthroposcene epoch for some time now, And like I said, that is really significant because it means that we've had such a dramatic physical impact on the makeup of planet Earth that, unlike other
epochs that lasted you know, millions of years, we have triggered a new one within a relatively short period of time.
Right, So we've brought this one on prematurely, and then I'm sure if we continue to behave in the way that we are, the next one could come even sooner. Exactly kind of the theory. So if I was a geologist, how would I go about actually determining if we've moved from one epoch to another.
So the idea that we have entered the anthropscene epoch is pretty much thanks to a chunk of mud from this lake in Canada. That's the reason why we're having this conversation right now. So the Anthroposcene Working Group are a collective of international scientists and UNI researchers, and they recently claim to have discovered this evidence in a small body of water called Crawford Lake west of Toronto in Canada. This is a really really deep body of water, but
it's pretty tiny on the map. It's essentially a sinkhole. But this is the site that's been considered ground zero for this new epoch.
Is that for any particular reason.
So a lake provides a really good opportunity to look at the particles of our atmosphere because if you think about the nature of a body of water. Particles sink on the top of the lake and then they settle at the bottom the lake floor, forming layers of sediment. So we're talking about solid material from somewhere else that is floating around in the atmosphere, settles on a lake
and sinks to the lake floor. So sediment, which is basically mud in this instance, and sediment's actually a really helpful way for geologists to record changing environmental conditions over time. I think it's like a beautiful rainbow cake. Yeah, yeah, And every layer of the cake is a different indicator of the geology in the sediment, environmental markers that show us what was really present in the atmosphere at a particular time.
So we've got this chocolate mud cake and it's got different layers, What then, does that tell us about the last few decades. Let's leave the ten thousand years even alone. What is to tell us about the last forty fifty years?
So from this big chunk of mud cake, scientists were able to document what they call a golden spike among the layers of sediment. So what that means is a dramatic and at least in geological terms, sudden change in the conditions of the Earth. These layers contained various human made materials such as microplastics, particles from fossil fuel burning, and even plutonium from bomb testing in the fifties.
Wow, so there's evidence of that in the mud.
Exactly, Yes, and that's from a time known as the Great Acceleration when things really ramped up across fossil fuel combustion, nitrates and pesticides from agriculture, nuclear testing, plastics production, all that kind of thing. And the researchers argue that this discovery pretty much definitively supports this notion of a new epoch that has been floating around for a while, that irreversible changes to the planet's ecosystem have been caused by human activities.
So, going back to that scientific debate that you talked about at the beginning, it does seem that this mudge in a lake in Canada is giving the idea that we're in a new epoch some more weight. What happens from here.
So this group who found the sediment and the layers, they submit their discovery now to the International Union of Geological Sciences. These guys are the scientific body responsible for naming geological chapters. I tell you there's a scientific body for everything and everyone, and they're the people that will decide if we are officially in the anthroposcene epoch.
So what an incredible room to be in. You have that meeting, What.
A powerful room. It's up to them to literally officially recognize that, Yep, it's happened, we're in the anthroposcene epog. But what also comes from this SAM is this reinforcement that human activity is impacting the world around us, and it can help scientists forecast what that means for the future. So, you know, we're constantly talking about these crises of biodiversity loss, over population, climate change, and it can all sound like
doom and gloom. But what we have here is kind of a reference point for scientists to understand the trajectory, the path that we're on. And there is a school of thought in science that you know, it's important to acknowledge the mistakes of the past, where we've come from, what's gone wrong, in order to kind of get back on track to say, like we can return the Earth maybe not to pristine condition, but epox before our arrival
lasted millions of years. There's no reason why we can't go back to Epoch's lasting millions more, but we have to come to a place where the science community agrees where we're at. So it's expected that we'll get a final decision about whether or not we really are in the anthropist scene by the end of twenty twenty four.
Well, Emma, thanks so much for joining us on Daily OS. It's nice that we've entered the Emma era of the podcast.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, and thank you for sticking with me. If you're still listening, just know I appreciate it. I know this is dance stuff.
Thanks for joining us for that very very very very deep dive see what I did there on the Daily OS today. If you learn something from today's episode, or you've got some more weird and wonderful ways that we can explain the news to you, don't forget to leave a comment in Spotify, just in that little question box. We'll speak to you tomorrow. Till then, have a fantastic start to the week.