When people talk about the “Anthropocene,” they typically picture the vast impact human societies are having on the planet, from rapid declines in biodiversity to increases in Earth’s temperature by ...

Reserachers tackle the hot topic of whether to define a new 'Anthropocene' epoch as a formal unit of the geologic time scale. In the March-April issue of GSA Today, Stanley Finney (California State ...

Since “Anthropocene” was coined in 2000, it has increasingly defined our times as an age of human-caused planetary transformation. On March 4, 2024, the commission responsible for recognizing time ...

Geologists may have voted down formal recognition of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, but we still need to act to prevent ecological crisis. A view of the glaciers as polar bears, one of the ...

For almost 30 years, we geologists have been having a debate about what Geologic Epoch we find ourselves in right now. It is presently called the Holocene, but some want to add another epoch and call ...

Jurassic, Pleistocene, Precambrian. The named times in Earth’s history might inspire mental images of dinosaurs, trilobites, or other enigmatic animals unlike anything in our modern world. Labels like ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. Humanity has etched its way into Earth’s ...

The next step to improve the Geological Time Scale is to provide an astronomical calibration of the Paleogene period that covers the past 23-65.5 Myr. This will require both an extension of ...

Anthropogenic changes to the Earth's climate, land, oceans and biosphere are now so great and so rapid that the concept of a new geological epoch defined by the action of humans, the Anthropocene, is ...

Humans have altered the planet so much that we’ve created a new geological age–the Anthropocene. Millennia from now, this is how scientists will learn about what we did. Nuclear particles, changes in ...

The older you get, the faster the time goes. Our 4.57-billion-year-old planet may know the feeling. After all, some scientists are suggesting Earth has already entered a new age—several million years ...