this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Fossils on Fossils (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Okay so even though I read all this last night, I somehow missed the "2000 - (-2000) years" thus making the current geological age around 4000 years, and technically Pompeii would not count in the strictest definition. That said, had it happened 4,000 years ago, absolutely nothing would have changed. All the stuff would still be carbonized.

~~Also from Wikipedia in the (geological age) article: An age is the smallest hierarchical geochronologic unit. It is equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage.[14][13] There are 96 formal and five informal ages.[2] The current age is the Meghalayan.~~

~~So again the answer is "yes it counts" but my personal take is "it feels weird to consider 4,000-10,000 ago multiple different geologic ages"~~

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Reading through Geologic time scale, it defines an age as equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage, which it says are normally millions of years. But you're right, interestingly the current Meghalayan age only started 4,200 years ago.

It seems all the recent ages are only a few thousand years each (until 2018 the last 10,000 or so were one age, but this was split in three in 2018).

After all that reading I still didn't really understand how they decided that this was a new age.

But anyway, I agree there isn't going to be any difference between 2,000 and 4,000 years so we might as well consider Pompeii fossilised even if not strictly true under the definition. I'm just surprised we consider anything within human history to be a previous geological age, but it seems we do.