ANTHROPOCENE

The Great Acceleration

since 1950 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

The Great Acceleration is the sharp and simultaneous rise, after 1950, of some two dozen measures of human activity and of the Earth's response, from population and energy to carbon dioxide and plastics.

The Great Acceleration is the simultaneous inflection, after 1950, of some two dozen indicators: their curves bend sharply upward. The indicators measure human activity and the response of the Earth system, the planet's air, water, land and life taken as a whole. They include population, energy consumption, carbon dioxide, nitrogen fertiliser, plastic production, water use, international tourism, telecommunications and gross domestic product. After 1950 the indicators leave the range of values within which they had remained during the Holocene, the geological epoch of the last twelve thousand years. They leave this range within the same decade, and this simultaneity is the principal argument for treating them as a single phenomenon.

Why it matters

On a timeline of four and a half billion years, one species, humans, became within a few decades a planetary factor, a force that acts on the whole planet. This conclusion rests on no single curve: the curves that measure human activity and those that measure the Earth system inflect together.

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.99861.4 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day