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 international scientists for years. Recently, research on its bottom sediments has identified it as having the best record of the global impact of humans on the planet, and led to its nomination as the "golden spike" (definitive marker showing where one epoch ends and another begins) for a proposed new epoch on the geologic time scale - the Anthropocene epoch.

Learn about the effects on the land when Indigenous peoples started growing food, to early European settlement, industrialization, the nuclear age, and more. Through the study of the lake's unique varved sediment - thin, annual layers of organic deposits - scientists have been able to chronicle life on our planet from the beginnings of human-caused change to the present day.

Showcasing Indigenous belongings and settler objects, examples of local and introduced plants, historical documentation, and actual lake core samples, 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 today will leave behind.