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06 Francine McCarthy: A lake in the Anthropocene
82 Plays7 months ago
Micropaleontologist Dr Francine McCarthy goes deep into the sediments of Crawford Lake, a small and unassuming lake in the Niagara Escarpment town of Milton, Ontario. In 2023, Dr McCarthy led a team that identified Crawford Lake as the best location on earth that captured evidence of human caused planetary change. Endorsed by the Anthropocene Working Group, It was proposed as the best ‘golden spike’ site of the Anthropocene. Dr McCarthy shares how she first encountered the lake, her research on microscopic organisms of the Great Lakes Region, and personal reflections on the Anthropocene.
Bio:
Dr Francine McCarthy is a professor of Earth Sciences at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. She is a micropaleontologist who reconstructs paleoenvironments through careful analysis of small organisms fossilized in lake sediments. Her research has spanned small lake to marine environments and everything in between. She has worked around the world but primarily focuses in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. Her interdisciplinary research has been conducted in collaboration with several geologists, biologists, geographers, and archaeologists from government, university, and the private sector.
This conversation is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with Music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to Plant Kingdom
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Catherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay respect to their elders past, present, and future.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Francine McCarthy
00:00:22
Speaker
Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers. We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants and nature.
00:00:37
Speaker
Today's conversation is with Dr. Francine McCarthy. This is a very special conversation for me, one where we go deep into Crawford Lake, a small and unassuming lake in my hometown of Milton, Ontario.
Crawford Lake and the Anthropocene
00:00:51
Speaker
Last year, Crawford Lake was identified by the Anthropocene Working Group as the best location on Earth that records evidence of human-caused planetary change. Or in other words, it was proposed as the golden spike site of the Anthropocene.
00:01:07
Speaker
Obsessed with this story, I reached out to Francine McCarthy, the leader of Team Crawford. Dr. Francine McCarthy is a professor and graduate program director at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. She is a micro paleontologist who reconstructs paleo environments through careful analysis of small organisms fossilized in lake sediments. She's worked around the world, but primarily focuses in the Great Lakes region of Canada.
00:01:34
Speaker
Her interdisciplinary research has been conducted in collaboration with geologists, biologists, geographers, and archaeologists from the government, university, and private sectors. Here's our conversation.
McCarthy's Research Focus
00:01:54
Speaker
Thank you so much, Francine. I really wanted to start with a bit of background on your research and your specialty before diving right into Crawford Lake, which I'm really, really excited to speak with you about. You have the amazing specialty on your website of being a micropaleontologist. What does that mean? So we study very, very small fossils that you can't see with the naked eye.
00:02:20
Speaker
And are there specific geologic eras or periods that you're most interested in? Almost exclusively, my research has been on the Cenozoic Era, which is the
00:02:30
Speaker
since the dinosaurs became extinct and very much focused on the last couple of million years, which we call the quaternary period, and even more specifically on the last few thousand years. So the interval of time when here in North America
00:02:50
Speaker
There's interaction between humans and the environment that we can really discern in the sedimentary record. So the time since indigenous people began living in fixed settlements and practicing agriculture, that's really my area of specialization. Yeah, very, very recent is like hundreds of thousands of years, tens of thousands. Thousands. Thousands, yeah.
00:03:18
Speaker
I think you have just covered this, but are there particular regions where you do a lot of research? Is it centered around Great Lakes region?
Understanding Algae and Human Impact
00:03:28
Speaker
Certainly, the Great Lakes region is my number one research area in part because I live here.
00:03:36
Speaker
But also because even before I lived here, my master's thesis was on Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes. So I came from Nova Scotia to Ontario to study Lake Ontario. So yeah, the primary focus has been the Great Lakes, but I've worked in other parts of Eastern North America, quite a bit in Massachusetts, actually, for various reasons. And I've worked in the oceans, the North Atlantic and the North Pacific Ocean.
00:04:06
Speaker
So I have worked a fair bit around the world, but almost always in the Northern Hemisphere and at mid-latitude. Yeah, well, there's enough water to keep you busy in that region. And what kind of organisms or records can you find in the lake beds? Well, there are all kinds of different things. So there are algae, the primary producers, the base of the food chain,
00:04:35
Speaker
There are a number of different kinds of algae. The kind I focus on most is dinoflagellates. They produce a little resting cyst that preserves in the sediments. There are various kinds of green algae, like if you ever, especially in the late summer, go to a shallow pond, you'll see that green scum over the top of the lake. Those are various kinds of green algae.
00:04:58
Speaker
and they also leave a fossil record. There are numerous kinds of algae that live in lake waters that preserve in the sediments, and then there are the things that eat the algae, so the little zooplankton, and then all the way up the food chain. So once they get big enough that you can see them with the naked eye, like little fish, I don't study them. I specifically study things that you have to look under the microscope to see. So I mostly study the little algae,
00:05:27
Speaker
but I also study the little zooplankton that eat the algae. I guess what can you piece together about the environment and our climate based on what the composition is that you're finding? So the algae mainly indicate the conditions in the water that are either
00:05:53
Speaker
conducive to them being happy or not. So there are different kinds of algae that like colder conditions or warmer conditions, but mainly the thing that will control
00:06:04
Speaker
whether you have a lot of algae or not and which kinds you have is the availability of nutrients. So there's a concept called eutrophication, the increase in nutrient availability in bodies of water. That is something that the fossil record of algae really helps you understand. And because whenever people are living and doing what it takes to make a living in the vicinity of a body of water, they do cause
00:06:33
Speaker
the concentration of nutrients to increase. So that's the main thing that we can see from looking at the algae and the little zooplankton that eat the algae. In the same slides that we look at under the microscope, we also see lots of pollen, which is actually what I started working on for my master's thesis.
00:06:57
Speaker
And the pollen records the vegetation, and the vegetation is closely controlled by climate. So in the same slide, the pollen can tell us most about the climate, temperature, precipitation, et cetera. Whereas the algae and the little zooplankton, things like cladocerins, for instance, or rotifers, little tiny animals that eat the algae, will tell us a lot about the nutrient concentration.
00:07:27
Speaker
The other thing that I should mention before I leave this topic is that there are various characteristics of a body of water that are important to algae, not just the nutrients.
Lake Erie: A Case Study
00:07:38
Speaker
Acidification has been, particularly a few decades ago, was a huge issue before they amended the amount of the concentration of emissions that would come out of factories and industry. And that acid rain reduced
00:07:56
Speaker
the pH made it more acidic. And so we do actually see significant changes in the population of algae and the little guys that eat the algae associated with that kind of change in the water quality, which is also human induced because it is a pollution issue. Yeah. And have those communities and lakes recovered since the legislation and policy
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, they, they have certainly recovered from the acid rain issue has been dealt with in large part because
00:08:40
Speaker
the technical fixes, the scrubbers and so on, really very efficient at lowering the sulfur dioxide emissions especially, and that we see very clearly, the recovery in the lakes.
00:08:57
Speaker
What we don't see is much of a recovery after nutrients have been added. And that tends to be true when we look at
00:09:12
Speaker
lake ecosystems that there are some aspects like pH that are fairly easy to redress and there are others like the change in the ecosystem associated with eutrophication that are kind of one way. Yeah, acid rain is always kind of used as an example, a success example, but
00:09:35
Speaker
There's never one problem is there, which is the colossal topic we'll get into. Right. So I mean, and just on that, I mean, Lake Erie was declared dead a long time ago and then it came back to life and now it's dying again for different reasons.
00:09:50
Speaker
So, I mean, you can fix some problems, but then others flare up. And yeah, so that's part of the interesting challenge, but it's also frustrating. And what did that mean, Lake Erie was declared dead? Was that what it kind of sounds like, that all the life had died? Yeah, well, I mean, it was the headline in, you know, I think it was Life magazine, Lake Erie is dead. And literally, I mean, there were rivers that caught on fire in Burnford for days.
00:10:20
Speaker
Yeah. What's it called? The Koya Hoga? Yeah. Yeah. There were, you know, huge dead zones. And now there are dead zones again. I mean, they have come back for different reasons than back in the 60s. But yeah.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yes, there were success stories with remediation. The Lake Erie of today is much less obviously polluted than the Lake Erie of the sixties and seventies, but there are still significant issues. And the people of Toledo know that very well because their water supply was, municipal water supply was like they had to turn it off. They had to stop taking water from Lake Erie for several days.
00:11:03
Speaker
most of the harmful algal bloom a few years ago. A few years ago, yeah. It's kind of easy to take for granted all of the work and benefits we get from the Great Lakes system, isn't
Inspirations and Influences
00:11:18
Speaker
it? Yeah. And just kind of on that, I read in one of your interviews that Rachel Carson was an inspiration for you when you were younger. Yeah. Yeah, very much because
00:11:30
Speaker
You know, she was a biologist who recognized the holistic ecosystem and how easy it was to disrupt it. And for human activities, even well-meaning activities like DDT to, you know, prevent insects from spreading and causing issues.
00:11:57
Speaker
had ramifications that were not obvious to the engineers, the chemical engineers who invented DDT, you know, so that there are unknown, unimagined consequences of actions that are initially well-meaning. And it takes an awful lot of effort to convince
00:12:18
Speaker
the system to recognize that the short-term benefits don't really outweigh the long-term consequences to the ecosystem. So, you know, thinner eggs and birds and raptors and so on in the silent spring, right? So, to me, it's similar when we think of the Anthropocene because more and more people
00:12:43
Speaker
in the community, not just scientists, are becoming convinced that this really is a different planet than the one their grandparents or great grandparents inhabited. And there are powerful systems that are built around essentially a 19th to 20th century concept of progress. And it's that myth of unending growth that
00:13:13
Speaker
our, not only our economies are built on, but our concept of what we can achieve in our lives and what our children can achieve depends on. It's that quote unquote, the American dream. And it's simply not possible. If you calculate the cost of that dream of never ending growth, there is a finite point that there, it is a fixed planet with fixed limited resources.
00:13:42
Speaker
And we are approaching the point where that is going to be hit. The thing about Anthropocene is that it's very much intertwined. So what the Anthropocene Working Group was asked to do, it was asked to look at the geologic record, the sediments of our planet, to see if there was truth, reality, to the statement that we're no longer living in the Holocene.
00:14:10
Speaker
That was what Paul Crudson insisted from his studies of the atmosphere and that the system was fundamentally different than it had been for 12,000 years and therefore we should call it something different. We should view it differently and deal with it differently because it was different. Yeah, there's so much there and I think
00:14:32
Speaker
It's really interesting for the non-geologists, the power of the concept of the Anthropocene and putting that in part of the geologic time scale that covers the history of Earth, the history of life, that long-term thinking. That long-term thinking is part of what's missing, right? And to think about time going forwards and backwards in that time scale, I think has been really powerful for a lot of people.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah, and there are people who are resistant to the idea that we can possibly be in a different geologic interval of time. I compare it to when the asteroid struck the planet and caused that mass extinction of dinosaurs and a whole bunch of other things. They didn't all die on the same moment that the asteroid hit, right? It took, you know, who knows? It took decades at least, let's say.
00:15:29
Speaker
But if there had been geoscientists, stratigraphers living at that time and lived through that cataclysmic event, how long would it take them to say, yeah, like that moment that the asteroid hit, you know, before and after, those are fundamentally different things. Let's call it the end of the Mesozoic era and call it the beginning of the Cenozoic era because it's really very different. And when you look at the sixth
00:15:59
Speaker
great mass extinction. It's not that different from the mass extinction that separated the Cenozoic from the Mesozoic. And there are so many other changes to the Earth system that are fundamental. Yeah, you look at the data, you look at the number of things that have become extinct, you look at the way the systems like the atmosphere, the oceans, you know, the biosphere, all of the different Earth systems interact.
00:16:26
Speaker
And you think, my goodness, this is more different than any time, not only in the last 12,000 years, but probably in the last 3 million years. So how much data do you need before you agree that let's just call it what it is because the danger of not calling it a different name, not accepting that anthropos
00:16:54
Speaker
humans were the driving force. Danger is that we remain complacent. We remain on the same path. And that's the danger because, you know, like they say, you know, the first step to getting over an issue is naming it.
00:17:16
Speaker
But for the geologic intervals or eras at epochs, what kinds of events traditionally define those? Is it always kind of a mass extinction or swinging temperature? I know, is it that life looks totally different in those periods? Well, all those things, exactly.
00:17:35
Speaker
Extinction events, major changes in climate, those are the things. So the Holocene that we're still officially living in until the geologists put a line on the timescale is itself defined by climate change. It's defined by warming at the end of the, quote unquote, last ice age. And it is subdivided into three different ages. And those three different ages are subdivided according or on the basis of
00:18:06
Speaker
Rather subtle changes in climate, much more subtle than the ones that we've experienced since the mid 20th century. Do you remember when you first heard about the concept of the Anthropocene? Is it something that always resonated with you?
Defining the Anthropocene
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, I actually do remember because I was reading in my mailbox, there came an issue of GSA Today, which is the Geological Society of America's monthly publication. And on the cover, title of the article was, Are We Living in the Anthropocene?
00:18:42
Speaker
And so I, I flipped through it and I actually scanned it and used it as a slide in my lecture in my first year of course that year, because it seemed very relevant to me that people, geoscientists were looking at this issue. It didn't occur to me that 10 years later, I would be invited to be part of that working group. And that four years after that, that I would be proposing Crawford Lake and its varved sediments as the golden spike.
00:19:10
Speaker
golden spike is a little brass plaque that they put on sediments that have a line that show exactly where one interval of time starts. And yes, what's the story of you getting involved in the research?
00:19:32
Speaker
Well, I'd been familiar with Crawford Lake since I did my Masters in Toronto in 1984. I first saw the lake with my supervisor, who had a long history of working on the lake. And after I got my faculty position at Brock, I did do some research with some of my students on the lake.
00:19:54
Speaker
And it was my colleague, Martin Head, who works five doors up the hall for me, who was a member of the, it was the vice chair of the sub-commission on quaternary stratigraphy, who was aware of Crawford Lake and its annual tree ring like record. And when he came back from a meeting of the Anthropocene working group in 2018,
00:20:19
Speaker
he told me that they had reached the conclusion that the time was now to look for a golden spike, to actually define the Anthropocene as a formal interval of geologic time, the epoch. And on the flight home from wherever it was he was, I think it was Norway, it occurred to him that one of the places that might have a chance of
00:20:42
Speaker
being a really good record was Crawford Lake because of its layered sediments, but also because of its location, protected yet readily accessible with an interesting history of pre-Anthropocene human impact, as well as a potentially strong record of human impact that caused this shift in the planet. And no one had up until Martin invited me to
00:21:12
Speaker
spearhead this effort. No one had actually looked in detail at the 20th century to see if there was this record of that great acceleration. So yeah, so that's how I became involved. Martin stopped by my office, told me that the Anthropocene Working Group was ready to work on this and was I willing to do the hard work that it would take to put a team together and do the analysis. So I said yes, and here we are.
00:21:38
Speaker
I mean, it's very exciting for me to talk about Crawford Lake. I told you this earlier and I'm so excited for this conversation. Crawford Lake is in Milton, Ontario, which is my hometown and it's a place I spent a lot of time at hiking around that lake and going to the Halton Conservation Areas on the escarpment. And I guess I always experienced it. As a plant person, I was looking more at the
00:22:04
Speaker
Those forests are really home for me with the white cedar and the mixed sugar maple and looking at the little forest understory. So thinking about the lake was really not something I had really thought about. I knew it was very deep from the interpretation. I knew there was this story about, I don't think that sign is still up there anymore, about horses falling through the ice. And it was kind of eerie when you read about it.
00:22:29
Speaker
Um, but I guess for, can you, can you describe Crawford Lake and what makes it really unique from, from your research perspective?
Crawford Lake's Significance
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah. So, well, as you, as you say, it's, it's in a really unique area in that it's on the Niagara escarpment, which is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
00:22:48
Speaker
It's got a beautiful forest right around the lake itself. The forest is relatively sparse because the soil is very, very thin. When the indigenous people first started farming the land on the hill above the lake, they without knowing it affected the lake and the concentration or both the concentration, the number of algae we see increased dramatically.
00:23:17
Speaker
the kinds of algae that were happy were no longer the algae that are happy in low nutrient lakes. And after the indigenous people left Crawford Lake and dozens of other satellite villages in the area in the 15th century or possibly early 16th century for reasons that remain unclear, there wasn't
00:23:41
Speaker
a return back to the conditions that had existed before the indigenous settlement. And lake itself is special because it is so deep compared to its size. So it takes you what, 10 minutes to walk around, something like that. And it is
00:24:03
Speaker
23, 24 meters deep. You really notice how deep it is when you're putting out cable to get to the bottom. It is a very, very deep lake. So it doesn't mix by wind. So the bottom is undisturbed. And that's why we get those amazing layers of sediment, those varves. So it's called a merrimictic lake. And there are half dozen merrimictic lakes in Ontario, something like that. And maybe a dozen, I don't.
00:24:33
Speaker
I haven't done a count. So they're rare, they're not super rare, but Crawford Lake is amongst all of those rare Meromictic lakes. It is almost unbelievably well suited to be the type section to define this Anthropocene. It checks off all the boxes.
00:24:59
Speaker
One more thing about Crawford that I read that you wrote that I thought was really cool was just how it even formed. Is it unique to that limestone escarpment area? Was it a cave? How did it form? Yeah.
00:25:20
Speaker
So it's a cave whose roof caved in. That's what a sinkhole is. And there are sinkholes all over Florida, for instance. And so limestone is fairly easily dissolved. It's soluble. So that's why there are a lot of caves in limestones. And when the roof caves in, you get a sinkhole. And yeah, so the way that the Crawford Lake
00:25:44
Speaker
basin formed allows the lake itself to have those unique properties that allow the sediments to accumulate and have that perfect the the the geologic record of the way the world was before that great acceleration and the way it's been since. Yes, what was so kind of really
00:26:08
Speaker
unexpected was the Anthropocene. You think about all this global change on this global level, and do you think there's going to be a really grand site or something? I don't know how the process of defining a golden spike site is complex. Do you think it would be as big as the enormity of the Anthropocene? Yeah, and then that was just so powerful to kind of
00:26:32
Speaker
pin it down to a place that you know well. Milton, too, just kind of the suburban town, it's very similar to other towns. It feels like, you know, it could be many places in southern Ontario, and I guess that's what the Anthropocene and the change looks like, how we live. And I think one of the things, too, is that, excuse me, there have been a really great film called Anthropocene. It's Burtosky, I think, who... Edward Burtinski, the aerial kind of? That's right.
00:27:02
Speaker
And the imagery is striking, but it focuses on the ugly. So it focuses on the technosphere and the ugliness of industrial output. And Crawford Lake is not like that. Crawford Lake is very pretty. It's very calm. It's very serene. So
00:27:24
Speaker
Yes, it is the best place to record that shift from Holocene to Anthropocene, but it's not striking in awe-inspiring like the Grand Canyon, and it's not striking like polluted beach with plastics. It's not what you expect the poster child for the Anthropocene to be, and yet it is by far
00:27:54
Speaker
It is an excellent site to define it. Yeah. Yeah. It becomes a microcosm for the Anthropocene, right? This story is told in different ways everywhere on this planet. Right. And it's a very inviting place to visit. So I think in terms of having people
00:28:14
Speaker
Engage with the story. It's not it's not hard to get to and it's there's all sorts of interpretive facilities So I'm hopeful that people will
00:28:25
Speaker
will come to Crawford Lake to give some careful thought to what we're doing to the planet and how we can fix it. We have to be aware, but if we get crippled by anxiety, we're not going to help either. So it's not a chicken little, the sky is falling down. It's wake up and let's do something about it.
00:28:49
Speaker
Yeah. And in respect to climate change, for example, a lot of those solutions exist and we're not waiting for technology and understanding. It's really the will to organization to implement renewables. Yeah. And there are probably solutions that we haven't thought of yet, but they have to be thought of. Yeah. And how do you even sample the sediments of the lake?
Methodologies in Research
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah. So you can sample the sediments with a quote unquote, a regular corer, but that tends to squish and compress those annual layers. So we've used primarily freeze coring. And my colleague, Tim Patterson, who I've known since we were undergraduates together at Dalhousie back in the early eighties, we have been working together on Crawford Lake because he has the expertise and all the tools.
00:29:44
Speaker
to take these freeze cores and curate them so the majority of the freeze cores are curated at Carleton University in Ottawa where he works. One core is now at the Canadian Museum of Nature, it is the
00:29:58
Speaker
one we proposed at the Golden Spike and other cores at the Royal Ontario Museum. I have one core in my lab, but the vast majority of the cores are in his lab. And then the subsampling of each layer, the sediments from one given year separate from the one above and the one below, that
00:30:15
Speaker
Tedious but important work has been primarily done in his lab and sent to specialist labs around the world to analyze everything from plutonium to fly ash particles to stable isotopes so we didn't we did some of the analyses but
00:30:37
Speaker
We didn't do all of the analyses because specialists were commissioned to analyze those really key
00:30:47
Speaker
changes that the Anthropocene Working Group wanted to make sure that all of the potential Golden Spike sites had analyzed. And in the sediment, so it can be, it can be read like tree rings, like pinpointed to an exact year. How does that work? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You, we have, you know, each year is quite distinct. So if you show us a picture of the core, we can tell you the last 19, you know,
00:31:18
Speaker
And you just collect that thin layer of sediment and put it in a vial and that's 1935 or 1952 or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So in respect to the Anthropocene, what was the evidence that Crawford like recorded really specifically?
00:31:40
Speaker
Well, I think it's important that all the sites we studied recorded the same thing and all the sites recorded the same thing at the same time. That's the point of it being a new interval of time. It's not just at Crawford Lake. It's not just in the Peat Bog in Poland. The Peat Bog in Poland records the same thing as
00:32:01
Speaker
Crawford Lake as the Antarctic ice sheet, etc. So it's that massive change in the atmosphere, in the oceans, in the entire earth. So at Crawford Lake, we record those things. So amongst the evidence that we find,
00:32:19
Speaker
and these various sites are fly ash particles. So from industrial processes like steelmaking, like in Hamilton, where you have very, very high combustion of fossil fuels, like the coking coal that you need to turn iron into steel. Just kilometers away, yep. We see a sharp, sharp increase in fly ash particles in Crawford Lake in 1952. And
00:32:46
Speaker
same time that we see Ivy Mike. So that's why 1952 is the, according to us, the first year of the Anthropocene. Ivy Mike is the name given to the first H-bomb, was detonated in the Marshall Islands in 1952 on November 1st at 7.15 in the morning local time, which at Crawford Lake was 2.15 in the afternoon on the 31st of October of 1952.
00:33:12
Speaker
And that is incident that we use to mark the boundary between the Holocene and the Anthropocene. So that's just one example, but there are all sorts of products of human industry, changes in atmospheric composition, changes in water quality, all of these things changed.
00:33:35
Speaker
very, very quickly at Crawford Lake, but they also change at all of these other sites. And you were telling me last time about the particles from the nuclear tests being able to being identified to the month or to the day in the sediments of Crawford Lake?
00:33:55
Speaker
whenever nuclear explosions, above ground nuclear explosions occur, material goes up into the upper atmosphere, those mushroom clouds that you picture when you hear about a nuclear explosion. And that fallout falls out of the atmosphere and it accumulates on the surface of the planet. So within, like, let's say a year of the mushroom cloud, all of that stuff has fallen back down to planet Earth, right?
00:34:22
Speaker
So that accumulation we can test for. Plutonium-239, for instance, is a key radionuclide, something that is produced by these atomic bombs and these hydrogen bombs in particular. If you've seen Oppenheimer, hydrogen bombs are that much more powerful than the atomic bombs. And we see the fallout of radionuclides all around the world at all of the sites
Indigenous Involvement and Global Interest
00:34:50
Speaker
that we studied. But at Crawford Lake,
00:34:52
Speaker
We see not only the massive increase in radionuclides with the H-bombs starting in 1952, but we actually have a really good record of the early testings in the southwestern United States because the
00:35:10
Speaker
winds from the southwestern United States come over the Great Lakes basin. So very few other sites on the planet actually have very good records of 1945 to 1951. So the geologists looked for the geologic evidence and yeah, that's what we did. That's what we found. And it turned out that the best place that records it in the geologic record is
00:35:39
Speaker
the deep basin of Crawford Lake and those annually layered sediments that allow us to pinpoint precisely to the year when you know different things happen so that we have like tree rings we have the ability to confidently assign years to
00:35:57
Speaker
every year through the 20th century and identify when it was that the system seemed to be overwhelmed by the products of human industry. And that great acceleration of human industry, the Second World War and the post-war boom, that seems to be what tipped the balance, the tipping point of the planets
00:36:21
Speaker
ability to continue to absorb those changes and keep doing what it was doing. And now it's on a different path. Incredible. And another aspect of just the process of sampling that was very special about this was that you were working with First Nations community and that there were healing rituals performed during sampling. Is that right?
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah, so the worldview of the indigenous people is that the world around us is imbued with personhood. So what we would call inanimate objects like lakes to them, they have personhood. And when we recognized this, that they felt it was sort of an assault on the lake to be poking, prodding it, we worked with them to
00:37:14
Speaker
try to minimize the harm, maximize the healing. And so yes, that's what we did. And one of the grad students on our team, grad student at Queen's University in Kingston, is herself indigenous. She's Anishinaabe, so she was the person on our team who facilitated that process, who engaged in those practices.
00:37:41
Speaker
I guess we've spoken a little bit about this already in the conversation, but the International Union of Geologists voted down the proposal to make it official, but the idea is already widely accepted. There's no putting it back. It's doing its work out there already and your contributions of Crawford Lake and telling that story and publicly talking about the Anthropine seems surely is a really big, big part of that.
00:38:09
Speaker
Are there I guess what was that disappointing for you? How did you what's what are kind of your reflections of kind of the bureaucracy of that process or just it's been an enormous privilege to spend so much time
00:38:26
Speaker
working on the geology of Crawford Lake and the hydrology and the limnology, the things that currently live in the water column of the lake and the things that accumulate their fossil record in the sediments. So yeah, it's been an enormous privilege. And then more recently, in the last couple of years,
00:38:48
Speaker
the interest from people who aren't scientists at all, people who are artists, people who are social scientists, people who are philosophers, people who are interested in the lake for completely different reasons than I was, people whose
00:39:08
Speaker
indigenous ancestors lived around the lake. So such a variety of people with a variety of reasons to be fascinated by the same place. That has been super interesting. I have become increasingly interested in that non-geological aspect as I've been exposed to these different
00:39:33
Speaker
ways of looking at the lake, the meaning of what we have found, the potential significance of what lies beneath those waters of Crawford Lake, why it has been discussed literally around the world.
Communicating and Reflecting on Research
00:39:49
Speaker
The word Crawford Lake has been probably translated into umpteen languages in newspapers around the world at different times,
00:40:00
Speaker
And that is just incredible because you used to walk around it when you were young and it doesn't, it's not like the Grand Canyon where you think, holy smokes, you know, this is like stupendous. It's just very pretty, very calm, right? Yeah. So, and yet it is of potentially such enormous significance to everyone on the planet.
00:40:25
Speaker
And that's the biggest privilege of my academic life has been to study and then explain, discuss, promote what we found to people because the finding, the doing the science is only part of it. You have to be able to communicate and engage people. And that has been, yeah, that has been just as interesting as doing the work.
00:40:55
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely no putting Anthropocene back in the box. Yeah, the care and honor that you put into researching alike and spending so much time with it is really, really significant. I made sure that on the 31st of October, when I hit send on the proposal, that my emotional investment ended there. And I could not
00:41:25
Speaker
I could not feel, I could not allow the actions of others to dictate how I felt about what we'd accomplished. To a certain extent, I was successful in doing that, so when I heard
00:41:38
Speaker
totally unexpectedly that they were going to vote no. I was dismayed. I wasn't shocked. I was dismayed. And the reason I was dismayed was that I felt that, like you said earlier, we are in the Anthropocene. The genie's out of the bottle. It's not going back. And for a group of geologists, stratigraphers, to refuse to be relevant to what society needs, I thought that was sad. Well,
00:42:08
Speaker
them aside, it's so rare to be able to get to work on a project that is as huge and as impactful. I know you said it's been, I think, the most important work that you've been able to do. What's it kind of been like for you to lead and contribute to this work?
00:42:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's like I said, it's been an honor. It's been oddly humbling, which is interesting because, of course, I've been in the public eye a lot, but it's awe-inspiring to be able to reach so many people.
00:42:50
Speaker
to communicate such important things and have them largely listened to. And I've been invited to speak at so many places. And the most exciting one to me is the Vatican, or the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, to have an invitation to address that body. It was totally unexpected. My dad would have been so proud. But to address people who
00:43:20
Speaker
have the opportunity to reach people and influence decisions. And that to me is amazing. One of my colleagues is working with the UN. There are all sorts of ways that we're reaching people who are listening and whether the stratigraphers ever do. I can't let that affect how I feel about the work we're doing.
00:43:55
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. Francine McCarthy. Thank you for listening and thank you to Francine for sharing her work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Catherine Polz. Our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.
00:44:35
Speaker
you