The Great Acceleration
Almost every measure of human activity turns sharply upward around 1950.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 70 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Plotted from 1750, graphs of population, GDP, water use, fertiliser, dam construction, transport, telecommunications, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, ocean acidification, fisheries and tropical forest loss all show the same shape: a knee around 1950 followed by near-vertical rise. The synchrony across social and earth-system indicators is the central evidence for proposing the Anthropocene, and for dating it to the mid-twentieth century.