{"id":86107,"date":"2023-07-11T13:04:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T17:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=86107"},"modified":"2025-09-30T09:48:02","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T13:48:02","slug":"crawford-lake-research-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/crawford-lake-research-anthropocene\/","title":{"rendered":"Crawford Lake Named as Defining Site for Proposed Anthropocene Epoch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Crawford Lake Named as Defining Site for Proposed Anthropocene Epoch\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Carleton University’s <\/em>Tim Patterson<\/em><\/a> is one of the principal investigators of a project at Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario, where he is studying well-preserved layers of sediment found on the bottom of this deep lake.  In pulling and analyzing ice cores, Patterson, alongside researchers at Brock University and a multi-institutional team of experts, has uncovered evidence of the \u2018Great Acceleration’ \u2013 a period of intense resource use, population growth, and environmental impact in the mid-20th<\/sup> century.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 11, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) announced that out of the 12 sites in consideration worldwide, Crawford Lake was selected as the site that could formally define the start of the Anthropocene \u2013 a proposed new epoch shaped by the significant global impacts of recent human activity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on the groundbreaking research project below. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By Dan Rubinstein<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In April of this year, Carleton University environmental geologist Tim Patterson<\/a> and his research team returned to Crawford Lake<\/a>, a place now very familiar to them, to extract more “freeze cores” from the lakebed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lower reaches of this small, steep-sided, deep lake \u2014 located in a conservation area just west of Toronto<\/a> \u2014 are chemically distinct and permanently isolated from the waters above, making it inhospitable to most organisms. The sediments at the bottom thus remain undisturbed, with distinct layers deposited annually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when Patterson pushed a flat-faced metal rod filled with a slurry of dry ice and alcohol into the lakebed, the sediment that froze to it provided a perfectly preserved tree-ring-like record of industrial emissions, radioactive elements and other chemical signals released into the atmosphere over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Tim
Tim Patterson, Professor of Earth Sciences at Carleton University<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After being winched out of the lake, these cores, up to two metres tall and 15 centimetres wide, were analyzed by Patterson and his students in their lab at Carleton, as well as by a large team of national and international collaborators, including Indigenous partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The data they came up with was a key part of the successful campaign to have Crawford Lake declared the “golden spike” for the Anthropocene<\/a> \u2014 ground zero for the start of a new geological epoch,<\/a> circa 1950, in which unprecedented human activity has had a significant impact on the planet’s climate and biosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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