Humanity's #Legacy on Planet's History #Cataclysmic?

" ...is likely to leave a legacy of the Anthropocene as one of the most cataclysmic events in the history of our planet.”

The Age of Humans

BY DAVID MARINELLI

t was Nobel Prize winning Dutch chemist, Paul Crutzen, who coined the term ‘Anthropocene’ (The Age of Humans) to represent this human dominated geological epoch. He put forward his arguments in a short essay published in the journal Nature called the Geology of Mankind in January 2002. His argument was based on the following facts:

• Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface area of the planet
• Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted
• Fertiliser plants produce more Nitrogen than is fixed naturally by terrestrial ecosystems
• Fisheries production remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans coastal waters
• Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff

The 5th Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, also known as the K-T extinction, occurred 66 million years ago and it annihilated 76% of all plant and animal species on Earth. This is the mass extinction that also killed off all the dinosaurs. It was caused by an asteroid hitting the planet at the Yucatan Peninsula that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean Sea. The bolide was travelling at seventy thousand kilometres per hour and coming in at a low trajectory from the southeast. It hit the ground as a plane landing and blasted into the air more than fifty times its own size in pulverized rock. A vast cloud of searing vapour and debris raced over North America, vapourising everything in its path. All this sulphur laden ejected debris had two major catastrophic effects. Firstly as it fell back to Earth through the atmosphere it incandesced scorching the surface of the Earth and secondly the sulphur blocked the rays of the sun depressing global temperatures and catapulted the earth into a perennial winter.

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