Milton’s Crawford Lake shows start of new time period, experts say

Crawford Lake in Milton could define the start of a new time period called “Anthropocene,” according to international researchers.

Researchers say that the Anthropocene is a proposed new time period shaped by the significant global impacts of recent human activity.

Crawford Lake was picked as the most suitable location for the Anthropocene out of 12 different conservation sites in the world.

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) said there is evidence of a tipping point in Earth systems at this period in history on Tuesday.

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AWG also says the conditions of the tipping point are different from the Holocene period, which began nearly 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.

Hassaan Basit, President and CEO of Conservation Halton, says the lake has been contributing to local and international research since the late twentieth century.

“In the 1970s, corn pollen grains detected in the lake’s sediment led to the archaeological discovery of a 600-year-old Indigenous village, which we teach visitors about today,” Basit said.

Experts from Brock, Carleton and Queens Universities, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Royal Ontario Museum found that the layers of the bottom of the lake are similar to tree rings.

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The experts say this shows a “plutonium fallout signal” related to nuclear weapon testing that occurred in the Pacific Ocean from the 1950s through 1963. It is the primary marker proposed to identify the start of the Anthropocene period.

AWG will propose “Crawfordian” as the first age of the Anthropocene time period to the International Union of Geological Sciences and two other scientific bodies.

If the proposal receives a majority vote by all bodies, Anthropocene will be confirmed as the latest time period, making Crawford Lake one of more than 70 worldwide sites to define boundary points in geological time.