Welcome To The Anthropocene!

Humanity's impacts on the Earth are not small. The efforts of all 6.5 billion of us add hundreds of thousands of metals to the atmosphere every year, lag only water as the primary mover of dirt and rock, and add so much fertilizer to fresh water that vast dead zones extend from the deltas of many major rivers, such as the Mississippi. By examining changes in the pattern of erosion and sediment deposits, global temperatures and even the acidity of the oceans, geologists in the U.K. have decided that the planet has moved from the Holocene geologic era that began nearly 12,000 years ago with climate change to one best named the " Anthropocene", or "new human" era.

By carefully digging through the geologic deposits of the past 200 years, the geologists can precisely pinpoint major manmade impacts in long-slow geologic time, such as the addition of tiny granules of plastic in sand or the residue of atomic testing.

Geologist Andrew Gale of the University of Portsmouth and his colleagues plan next to petition the International Commission on Stratigraphy to formally adopt the Anthropocene--a name coined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen--as the designation for the present epoch. "“The impact in the last 200 years is such that there is increasingly less justification for linking pre- and post-industrialized Earth within the same epoch," Gale said. Welcome to the Anthropocene!

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