Science - USA (2022-05-06)

6 MAY 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6593 563

His team sees not only the bomb spike and

surge of spherical ash, but also a rise in

DDT, a once-ubiquitous pesticide. Mean-

while, in Japan, sediment samples from

Beppu Bay show an increase in total nitro-

gen from fertilizer runoff around this time,

says Michinobu Kuwae, a paleoceano-

grapher at Ehime University. “Humankind

must notice that we are already in the An-

thropocene,” he says.

Corals are another ocean record under

consideration, but they seem to be less suited

for a golden spike, says Kristine DeLong, a

paleoclimatologist at Louisiana State Uni-

versity, Baton Rouge. The coral she studied

from a pristine reef in the Gulf of Mexico did

not even capture the bomb spike. “It’s kind

of nice, these corals weren’t impacted,” she

says. What they do display are strange in-

creases in barium—likely from barite, a min-

eral used in offshore oil drilling.

A late addition to the slate of candidates

came from a Polish peat bog near a moun-

tain summit in a region known for its mines

and heavy industry. The bog is fed only by

rain, so it forms a great archive of atmo-

spheric pollution, says Barbara Fiałkiewicz-

Kozieł, a geoecologist at Adam Mickiewicz

University. Its sediments capture the typi-

cal 1950s markers, along with spikes in

lead, aluminum, titanium from nearby

smokestacks—and even the extinction of

amoebas that once thrived in the peat. “I

have 30 different proxies,” she says. “And ev-

ery proxy gives a very distinct answer.”

After the AWG settles on a site, the pro-

posal must be approved by 60% of the two

dozen or so members of the Subcommission

on Quaternary Stratigraphy. From there it

will go to the executive committee of the

ICS—and finally to the International Union

of Geological Sciences (IUGS). These are not

rubber stamps; proposals for stratigraphic

divisions routinely fail, and when they do,

they cannot be reconsidered for 10 years.

“There’s no guarantee that the Anthropocene

will be agreed upon,” says Jan Zalasiewicz, a

Leicester stratigrapher and longtime AWG

head who now leads the quaternary sub-

commission. “There are influential strati-

graphers who are very uncomfortable with

a formalized Anthropocene.”

One of those stratigraphers is IUGS head

Stanley Finney of California State Univer-

sity, Long Beach. From the start, he says, the

AWG has operated backward, starting with

the proposed Anthropocene and looking for

markers, rather than starting with the geo-

logic record itself. The group “has not been

open-minded,” he says. In his view, the An-

thropocene should not be shoehorned into

the record of geologic time because, so far,

it is just one human lifetime long, based on

centimeters of mud and signals that may

not persist once those sediments turn into

rocks. Even the plutonium will be largely

undetectable after 100,000 years.

Despite his personal opposition, Finney

says he won’t stand in the way if the ICS is

open and follows procedure. But he would

prefer to categorize the Anthropocene as

an “event,” an informal term geoscientists

use for everything from gradual planet-

wide changes that take millions of years to

large asteroid impacts. Waters agrees the

Anthropocene can be an event, but argues

that shouldn’t preclude a more formal des-

ignation. He points out how the dinosaur-

killing Chicxulub impact 66 million years

ago is an event—but also one that marks

the geological divide between the Creta-

ceous and the Paleogene periods.

AWG member Erle Ellis, a landscape

ecologist at the University of Maryland,

Baltimore County, believes the odds of ap-

proval for an Anthropocene epoch aren’t

great, but says the “event” idea could fare

better. For years, the ICS has fretted about

provoking negative publicity if it rejects the

Anthropocene proposal. With an “event,”

Ellis says, the ICS can still acknowledge the

significant impact that humanity is mak-

ing on Earth. “The Anthropocene is never

going to be rejected,” he says. “It’s simply a

matter of how it’s going to be defined.” j

NEWS

F

resh from a tumultuous 2020 census,

the U.S. Census Bureau has quietly be-

gun what it hopes will be a major over-

haul of how it conducts the decennial

census and manages 130 surveys that

paint a statistical picture of the country.

Its goals are to hold down costs, reduce

the burden on survey respondents, and do

better at finding people from groups of-

ten undercounted. Agency officials believe

the changes will result in more useful and

timely information about the nation’s resi-

dents and the economy.

An independent team of former census

directors and prominent social scientists

based at the University of Virginia (UVA)

is helping the agency meet those goals, and

last week it released a progress report on its

4-year effort. “The Census Bureau is already

moving in the right direction, and we’re

hoping to help them get there by exploring

some of the scientific issues that need to be

addressed,” says Sallie Keller, a UVA statis-

tician leading the team along with former

Census Director Kenneth Prewitt.

“We understand that we need to take a

different approach for 2030,” says Robert

Santos, a statistician who began a 5-year

term as Census director in January. The

agency faces ever-rising costs (the 2020

census cost $14.2 billion), declining re-

sponse rates, diminished public trust in

government, and heightened concerns

about privacy. “We’re looking to see how

far we can go with the vision that has been

expressed by the University of Virginia

team,” Santos says.

The research community, which could

gain easier access to a richer trove of data

sets, is rooting for the Census Bureau to

succeed. But many are skeptical that it can

Census aims

for better U.S.

statistical

portrait

Agency wants to retool

its surveys and decennial

census to improve efficiency

and generate better data

DEMOGRAPHY

By Jeffrey Mervis

NAME LOCATION TYPE

Beppu Bay Kyushu Island,

Japan

Marine

sediments

Crawford Lake Ontario,

Canada

Lake muds

Ernesto Cave Italy Cave deposits

Flinders Reef Coral Sea,

Australia

Coral

Gotland Basin Baltic Sea Marine

sediments

Palmer ice core Antarctic

Peninsula

Ice sheet

San Francisco

Estuary

California,

United States

Marine

sediments

Searsville

Reservoir

California,

United States

Lake muds

Sihailongwan Lake Jilin province,

China

Lake muds

Śnieżka bog Poland Peat layers

Vienna Museum

excavation

Austria Urban soil

West Flower

Garden Bank

Gulf of Mexico Coral

Marking time

By December, a winner could emerge from 12 sites

competing to be the Anthropocene’s “golden spike.”

But its adoption by the bureaucracy that governs

geologic time is not guaranteed.

SCIENCE science.org

0506NewsInDepth_15558970.indd 563 5/3/22 5:45 PM