ARE WE LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE?

A name can tell you a lot about a person. Take your last name, for example. Does it come from a certain language, a place where your ancestors were born, a traditional family occupation? How about your first name? What does it say about you? If you could change it, would you? What would you change it to, and why?

Geologic time has names, too, big names, kind of hard to remember ones—names for eons, eras, periods, and epochs. According to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) the professional organization that oversees any changes to the Geologic Time Scale (more formally known as the International Chronostratigraphic Chart), we are in the Phanerozoic Eon, the Cenozoic Era, the Quaternary Period, and the Holocene Epoch.

But when it comes to the Holocene, the geologic epoch that began 11,700 years ago, not everyone agrees with the name. Many geologists and scholars think it’s time for a change.

Another Idea

The proposed name for our current geologic epoch is the Anthropocene. This term suggests that we humans should name this slice of time after ourselves. Although the name has only recently gained traction, the word itself is not new. Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning Dutch atmospheric chemist, first used the term in 2000. Crutzen later discovered that ecologist Eugene Stoermer had previously coined “Anthropocene.” But a 2002 paper by Crutzen in the prestigious scientific journal Nature brought attention to the concept.

Why the Proposed Change?

The geologic scale is so much larger than humans and the pinprick of time in which our species has occupied the planet. At first glance it might seem improbable, then, and maybe humancentric, to name a geologic epoch after ourselves. Geologic names, after all, have to do with major changes in the lithosphere (the outer part of the Earth, consisting of the crust and upper mantle), the atmosphere (the air we breathe), and the biosphere (the living part of the Earth). Some geologists argue that the very idea of placing human activity on a geologic scale is wrong.