Driving east from Prince George, past McBride and into Mt. Robson Park, you come to a series of naked
mountains.
Mt. Robson is the first of these but there are others as you continue towards Edmonton.
They have distinctive features to them. Looking at Mt. Robson from the roadside parking lot - on a sunny day - it is quickly apparent that it is made of layers.
Lots and lots of layers of sedimentary rock laid one on top of the other.
What you are observing in these
successive layers is time. Geologic time.
The vast stretches of time when sediment from the land accumulates on the floor of oceans and the slightly less vast stretch of time where this rock was pushed up out of the ocean to form the rocky mountain range.
Indeed, Mt. Robson is a map to the past with each layer telling us something about the climate, conditions, chemistry, and life as each layer
accumulated.
Or may be a book would be a better analogy with each layer another page in the history of this world.
And in those pages are points where the world turned. Epochs, periods, and eras are all written in the layers.
The Hadean giving way to the Archean and the Archean giving way to the Proterozoic.
We, modern humans, presently live in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era.
Or, at least, that is where we have been living some geologists would
argue.
They would argue that there is enough evidence to designate a new epoch.
There's no disputing the fact that humans are leaving their mark on the planet but is this imprint distinctive and enduring enough to designate a new
epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Man?
They would say yes.
Most people are aware of the boundary between the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, when an asteroid wiped out the dominant life forms on this planet and dinosaurs went extinct.
However, that is only the most recent time that life was almost wiped out and it was not even the worst extinction event.
In past 540 million years, there have been five events in which more than 50 per cent of the species alive were relegated to history.
Are we on the cusp of the sixth great mass extinction of life on this planet?
It is questions like these that keep geologists, ecologists, biologists, and anyone else interested in the state of the planet up at night.
It is questions like these that should be worrying our leaders - particularly politicians responsible for our
environment.
The evidence that we are changing the planet shows up in a number of subtle ways. For example, carbon naturally occurs in two isotopes - one that is called carbon-12 and has a nucleus with six protons and six neutrons and another called carbon-13 which has six protons and seven neutrons in its nucleus.
There is also a radioactive isotope of carbon, carbon-14, that is used in
dating artifacts.
They are virtually indistinguishable.
Virtually but not totally.
The world is presently being flooded with carbon-12 due to fossil-fuel burning and there is now a measureable difference in the carbon composition of biological specimens such as sea shells, coral, and such.
Like it or not, we are changing
the planet.
The oceans are more acidic now than they have been at any time in the past 800,000 years and probably beyond.
80 per cent of the surface of the planet has been remodeled by human activity.
Our atmosphere has 392 ppm of
carbon dioxide - a 100 ppm higher than at any time in the past 400,000 years.
To a geologist, while the question is still not totally settled, these sorts of changes point to a major shift in
geologic strata.
Quite possibly to a new epoch.
Set against this science, then, is the Harper Government.
Canada Says Kyoto Protocol 'Biggest Blunder proclaim the headlines. Minister Kent, in an interview on CBC, said as much.
He went on to point out that Canada only accounts for two per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions.
Why ruin the Canadian economy went it won't have a significant effect was his argument.
No, all those other polluters need to clean up their act first.
Sounds almost reasonable except when you look at our emissions on a per capita basis.
That is what truly matters. And under that microscope, we are the second leader emitters of greenhouse gases - beaten out just barely by the United States.
Indeed, if we get a cold winter, we might leap back into first place.
Canada has only 0.44 per cent of the world's population but produce two per cent of the emissions.
Don't you think that tells us that
something is wrong?
Geologic time moves slowly and it may be years before we know whether or not we are truly in a new epoch but it should be obvious, by now, that we are changing this planet.
