We now have a place to match to the name for our epoch:

The Human Age Has a New Symbol. It’s a Record of Bomb Tests and Fossil Fuels.

A scientific panel has picked Crawford Lake, Ontario, to represent the Anthropocene, a proposed, and hotly contested, new chapter in geologic time.

For almost 15 years, a panel of scholars has been chewing over a big question: Has our species transformed the planet so much that we have plunged it into a new interval of geologic time?

On Tuesday, the panel announced a key part of its case for declaring that we had. The group said it had chosen a secluded lake in Ontario to represent the start of Anthropocene epoch, a potential new chapter in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history that could soon sit alongside the Cambrian, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous in marking periods of momentous planetary change.

The scientists picked Crawford Lake over 11 other candidate sites because it contained the clearest and most pronounced evidence of humankind’s influence on the global geologic record, representatives for the group said at a news briefing in Lille, France. This evidence includes sharp changes in plutonium and radiocarbon from nuclear detonations, and in fly ash from accelerated burning of fossil fuels.

“It is a reflection of that tipping point in Earth history when the Earth system ceased to behave the way it had for 11,700 years,” said Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, and a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, the panel that since 2009 has been discussing whether, and how, to grant the human age a place on the official geologic timeline…

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