Crawford Lake and the Anthropocene

History is being made in Burlington’s backyard—or really an examination of history already made. In 2023, an international panel of scientists chose Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario, as the location that best records humanity’s impact on Earth. The lake’s meromictic layers have formed a unique and immaculate record of time. This condition allows the water to preserve sediment in light and dark layers at the bottom of the lake so that the changes in climate, vegetation, and atmospheric chemistry caused by human settlement and industrialization are readily visible.

Dr. Francine McCarthy, Professor of Earth Sciences, Brock University, and Research Associate, Natural History, Plants and Climate Change at the Royal Ontario Museum, is the lead scientist at Crawford Lake’s Anthropocene Working Group. In this talk, she will share research about measuring epochs from the “Golden Spike” core samples taken at Crawford Lake and reveal how stories buried deep in the soil are being unearthed—including from the Iroquois communities who first lived around the lake, and continue to live there to this day.