Spring, summer, fall, winter—and now: trash season.
A new study suggests Earth is developing entirely new seasons, built not by planetary tilt or natural rhythms but by human activity. They’re showing up on the calendar whether we like it or not.
In Southeast Asia, there’s now a predictable few weeks each year when the sky turns into a smoke-filled haze. That’s not weather—it’s a man-made “haze season,” caused by large-scale burning of vegetation to clear land. In Bali, the ocean coughs up tons of plastic every November through March. Locals and environmental groups call it “trash season.”
The study, published in Anthropocene Review, argues these aren’t one-offs. They’re new, repeatable, human-built blocks of time.
And while we’re gaining a few bleak additions to the calendar, we’re also losing seasons that used to anchor ecosystems and traditions. Breeding seasons for seabirds in northern England have collapsed. Alpine winters are getting so warm and unreliable that ski seasons are melting off the map.
The researchers coined some new terms for what’s happening. “Syncopated seasons” describe places where things are still technically on beat, just in weird and unpredictable ways. Think: heat waves where there should be rain, or snowstorms in April. “Arrhythmic seasons” are even worse—no rhythm at all. Springs come too early. Summers won’t end. Winters barely exist.
It’s not just about the weather being weird. These timing malfunctions screw with everything. Animal migrations fall apart. Farming cycles collapse. Communities that rely on seasonal flows, like the ones living along Thailand’s Mekong River, are stuck watching their food and water systems fall out of sync.
And while governments have tried to patch things up with stopgap measures, like air filters during haze season, those fixes don’t touch the root problem. “By recognizing this new season,” the authors write, “societies might normalize the recurrence of haze and isolate anyone who demands the government and businesses deal with deforestation and burning.”
So basically, we’re not just messing with the climate. We’re rewriting time. And unless we start listening to people who’ve been tracking nature’s rhythms for generations—like Indigenous communities who measure time by stars, harvests, and tides—we’re probably going to keep making things worse.
There used to be four seasons. Now we have melting ones, burning ones, polluted ones, and plastic ones. Lovely.
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