From the late 1930s until 1970, low-grade brown coal was extracted at Søby in mainland Denmark. This activity carried out largely by manual labour massively transformed, if not destroyed, the surrounding landscape. The need for Danish brown coal extraction was spurred by increasing domestic demand, but even more so by the onset of World War II when supply lines from Britain were severed. Denmark needed a fossil energy source of its own, however poor the quality of the coal. The Søby mine thus writes itself into a much wider narrative of global connections and changing patterns of production and consumption. Indeed, the very event – World War II – gave rise to what the scientific judges of the Anthropocene Working Group see as the most likely stratigraphic ‘Golden Spike’ marking the beginning of the Anthropocene: the atomic bomb explosions in the middle of the 20th century.