Crawford Lake

The Golden Spike

A quiet lake in Ontario is making a lot of noise.

Sediments from the bottom of a small lake in Ontario are revealing a remarkable record of our impact on the planet.

Just outside Toronto, Ontario lies a significant site offering a unique, comprehensive 1,000-year record of human impacts - local, regional, and global: Crawford Lake near Milton, Ontario. 

The lake has intrigued scientists for decades, and research on sediments at the bottom of the lake has identified it as having the best record of humanity's impact on the planet. This led to the lake's selection as the "golden spike" (definitive marker showing where one epoch ends and another begins) candidate for a proposed new epoch on the geologic time scale - the Anthropocene.

Learn about the effects on the land and waters when Indigenous communities started growing food in the 13th Century, the impacts of 19th Century European settlement, the nuclear age, and more. Through the study of the lake's unique varved sediments - thin, alternating layers of calcite and organic sediment marking each year - similar to tree rings - scientists have been able to chronicle nearly a thousand years of human-caused and natural environmental changes up to the present day.

Showcasing Indigenous belongings and settler objects, examples of local and introduced plants, historical documentation, related artworks, core samples, and more, Crawford Lake: The Golden Spike offers an engaging, compelling look at the record of human life on Earth. The exhibition illustrates how everything from early agriculture to modern nuclear weapons testing has left its mark on this unassuming Canadian lake - and on the Earth at large - encouraging us to consider what record our activities and the decisions we make today will be left behind for future generations to uncover.