From 2020 to 2022, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is coordinating a global investigation to confirm the Anthropocene as a potential geological time unit by examining key anthropogenic signatures in the geological record. In order to place this new human-made epoch at the current end of a geologic timescale encompassing 4.5 billion years of geological evolution, the working group has to consider the onset of the Anthropocene pragmatically, working through the formal standards of the chronostratigraphic system. Taking geological samples from around the globe and from a variety of environmental archives in marine and terrestrial deposits, different research teams coordinated by the AWG work to identify, analyze, and date the potential geological reference point—the so-called Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP)—for the lower stratigraphic boundary of the Anthropocene.

The anthropogenic markers investigated by the AWG are varied and multiple. They include novel materials such as plastics or black carbon from combustion processes, organic pollutants, biotic signals such as neobiota, the changing compositions of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in airs and sediments, as well as the release of artificial radiogenic substances into the global environment. Across the board, these markers portray the dramatic changes that have taken place particularly around the middle of the twentieth century. They represent a record of the multiple and lasting impacts that modern industrial societies have begun to have on the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, signaling, amongst other consequences, the advent of a new era of extensive species migration and widespread extinction, the profound alteration of planetary biogeochemical cycles, and the emergence and dispersal of anthropogenic radionuclides resulting from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.

As the working group assesses the material evidence for a globally synchronous and lasting chemical or physical record of human activities, it reconnects the term “Anthropocene” to its actual chronostratigraphic meaning. As a conceptual descriptor of the present moment in human and Earth history, the Anthropocene, however, already encompasses much more than the confirmation of an epoch by the traditions and standards of stratigraphy, a scientific discipline that, by its own definition, had so far excluded human agency. Ever since its popularization in academic, artistic, and media circles since the late 2000s, the meta-category of the Anthropocene has become an attractor for debate and contention, changing perceptions of human agency and shaping efforts of cross-disciplinary integration.

Against this backdrop, the two-year “Anthropogenic Markers” project invited AWG scientists and a variety of scholars and artists to explore the evidence traces and evidence making of Anthropocene stratigraphy. Through an online event and a three-day workshop at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), the project has set up a conversation across different disciplines and methods, allowing geological, historical, and artistic perspectives to inform each other through the registers of particular matters, epistemic questions, and shared concerns.

The result is the publication of seven thematic dossiers focusing on and departing from a selection of key stratigraphic markers. The dossiers do not attempt to systematically organize all markers according to their properties, but instead allow for different perspectives, framings, and approaches. Each dossier opens with an introductory essay, authored by a group of AWG members and their associated GSSP project teams. These openers detail the dossier subject from a stratigraphic perspective with a special focus on scientific content and methods. The dossiers’ main contents then consist of a curated collection of individual and joint contributions developed by the participants of the project, presenting a cyclorama of the historical details and political grain of the matters that mark the Anthropocene—and a memento as to why the existential rupture of the Anthropocene can only be grasped when context joins stratigraphy.

Christoph Rosol and Giulia Rispoli

Site key image and all dossier artwork by Protey Temen, © All rights reserved Protey Temen

The “Anthropogenic Markers” project is a direct contribution of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) to the ongoing collaboration between the AWG, HKW, and MPIWG that together coordinate, fund, and contextualize the extensive endeavor of finding and defining the Anthropocene GSSP.