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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

11,700 years ago, the Earth suffered a catastrophic climate change. As the ice age ended, sea levels rose by 120 meters, the days grew warmer, and many kinds of plant and animal life died out. But one animal began to thrive more than ever before. Homo sapiens, which had already spread to every continent except Antarctica, came up with a new survival strategy. Today, we call it farming.

Thanks in part to that innovation, humans survived to witness the dramatic transition from the Pleistocene epoch to the Holocene—it was the first such geological transition in almost 2 million years. But now geologists say we're witnessing another transition, as we move from the Holocene into an epoch called the Anthropocene [arstechnica.com]. Here's what that means.
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Getting a new geological time increment added to the official record is a long, involved process. Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, who contributed to the Science paper, told me back in 2013 that research papers are just the beginning. "It has to be considered by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and then by the International Commission on Stratigraphy itself," he said. "And then, if it gets through that, it has to be ratified by the International Union on Geological Sciences." Currently, they're about halfway through the process. This year, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is set to hear a proposal about adding the Anthropocene to geological history.

To build a case among their fellow scientists, Waters, Zalasiewicz, and their colleagues approached the Anthropocene the way they would any other epoch in geological history. They searched the Earth for signs of dramatic atmospheric changes, new kinds of rock formations, changes in plant and animal life, and perturbations in long-term chemical reactions like the carbon and nitrogen cycles. What they discovered were changes to the Earth's surface that were remarkable.

In some cases, the changes rivaled transformations caused by the rise of atmospheric oxygen 2.5 billion years ago, or the meteorite impact that killed most dinosaur species 65 million years ago. Most of these changes could be traced back to the 1950s, also known as the Great Acceleration, when the booming economy led to an explosion in city building, scientific innovation, and human population growth. In a sense, the Great Acceleration is to the Anthropocene what the end of the ice age was to the Holocene.

Original Submission