Simon Turner is a senior research fellow in geography at University College London. Since 2020 he has been secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). He is the scientific coordinator for the AWG and HKW collaborative project to seek a global boundary stratotype section and point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene. For over twenty-five years he has been unearthing sedimentological stories from aquatic sediments and decoding what they can tell us about recent environmental change. His PhD was an investigation of how the stratigraphy of coastal wetlands in Sicily record historical land-use, industrial contaminants, and hydrological changes. Further collaborative geographical and archaeological research has taken him around the world where anthropogenic disturbance has both influenced and driven the evolution of lake, wetland, and coastal wetland systems. He specializes in applying multiple physical, chemical, paleoecological and statistical analyses to investigate the changing composition of sediments and materials they contain, illustrating the range of human activities that can be identified, how significant human impacts were in the past (especially in the last century), and how legacy historical contaminants persist in contemporary ecosystems.