Scientists Won’t Classify Anthropocene as ‘Epoch’ Yet
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The Anthropocene is classified as a geological “event” at this point—as are mass extinctions and rapid expansions of biodiversity.
March 5, 2024
The idea underpinning scientists’ push to recognize the current time period as a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene dates back more than 100 years, but on Tuesday, a committee of experts voted down the proposal to officially declare a new age defined by human beings’ impact on the Earth.
The panel, organized by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), was tasked with weighing whether the Holocene—the epoch that began at the close of the last ice age, more than 11,000 years ago—has ended, and if so, when precisely the Anthropocene began.
Another group, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), had previously posed that an Anthropocene—an epoch during which “the scale and character of human activities have become so great as to compete with natural geological and geophysical forces,” as British geologist Robert Lionel Sherlock argued in 1922—began in the mid-20th century.
Around that period, the U.S. and other countries began testing nuclear weapons while fossil fuel production began ramping up significantly, intensifying planetary heating, ocean acidification, and other climate impacts.
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