The official timeline of Earth’s history —from the Paleozoic to the Jurassic and all points before and since — could soon include the age of nuclear weapons, human-caused climate change and the proliferation of plastics, garbage, and concrete across the planet. Our current geologic epoch, the Holocene, began 11,700 years ago with the end of the last big ice age. If you were in 1920, you would have thought that nature was too big for humans to influence. The past century has changed that thinking. It has been like an asteroid hitting the planet. A panel of experts has spent more than a decade deliberating on how, and whether, to mark a momentous new epoch in geologic time: our own. Ten thousand years after our species began forming primitive agrarian societies, a panel of scientists on Saturday took a big step toward declaring a new interval of geologic time: the Anthropocene, the age of humans.
By Raymond Zhong. New York Times. December 17, 2022.
