Friday, February 08, 2008

The Anthropocene Epoch

We've all made a new subdivision of Geologic Time--The Anthropocene Epoch!

“The term Anthropocene proposed and increasingly employed to denote the current interval of anthropogenic global environmental change, may be discussed on stratigraphic grounds. A case can be made for consideration as a formal epoch in that since the start of the Industrial Revolution, Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic signature distinct from that of the Holocene or of the previous Pleistocene interval.”