Studying everything from atomic bomb fallout to pesticide residues, scientists are close to defining the start of the Anthropocene—the geologic age of human impact.
BerlinOn a stage in central Berlin one night last month, Jens Zinke slid a white slab out of a clear plastic sleeve. At first it looked like a piece of Styrofoam, with a pencil-sized groove cut along its surface. But on closer inspection the slab proved as hard as rock: It was a piece of coral cut from Flinders Reef, a towering undersea formation some 150 miles off the east coast of Australia.
Flinders is the kind of secluded place you’d think would preserve pristine nature. The immediate area “is devoid of the usual human influences—tourism, agricultural runoff, and industrial pollution,” says Zinke, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.
That may make the