The Manhattan Project ushered in not only the nuclear age but the Anthropocene, the epoch in geological time that denotes humans' transformation of the Earth's chemistry, climate and biodiversity.
My father’s family farmed on the Los Alamos plateau, before the land was seized to develop the first atomic bomb. Their lives there were among the many secrets they wrapped in a shroud of silence.Radioactive plutonium that drifted to Earth in the first years of Oppenheimer’s nuclear age provides geologists with a recognizable, mappable layer in the Earth’s crust — perhaps the most pervasive signal of any marker between geologic time periods.
A worldwide spike in fly ash from burning coal also occurs in 1950. And so most stratigraphic experts have settled on 1950 as the curtain-raiser for the Anthropocene. The first device that blasted fallout into the atmosphere exploded at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945. The next month the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki — killing 200,000 people, bringing World War II to a close. But we kept developing, testing and exploding fission and fusion weapons after the war, more than 2,000 times, across the world. Only North Korea is still testing today.
Geologic epochs last for thousands and even millions of years. But the Anthropocene — initiated by human interference and likely to end by it as well — may be the shortest of them all.
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