Brock University Professors of Earth Sciences Francine McCarthy and Martin Head, along with Geography and Tourism Studies Professor Michael Pisaric, are involved in international efforts to define the Anthropocene formally as a new epoch in geologic time, in recognition of a major shift in Earth’s response to overwhelming human impacts in the mid-20th century.

Part of the process involves finding a location on Earth that shows the clearest boundary in the geologic record between the Holocene and the proposed Anthropocene.

Since 2018, McCarthy has been leading a multi-institutional research team at Crawford Lake in Milton, Ont., to study sediment collected from the bottom of the lake for evidence of how human activity has changed the Earth to such an extent as to bring it into a new epoch.

Brock University has created the Crawford Lake research website to explain and explore this complex and impactful research.

Compelling text, photographs and videos tell the story of how the Earth has been transformed and the work that has gone into unearthing the clues Crawford Lake is yielding from its depths.