Geological Society Of America Pushing For Replacement Of Holocene By Anthropocene

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All of recorded human history has taken place within the Holocene. But now, a distinguished group of British geologists has provocatively proposed that the Holocene is over and that we have entered a new geological era -- the Anthropocene -- in which humans have left such a distinctive footprint on the Earth's surface through carbon pollution, nuclear fallout, urbanization and other traces of our immense technological power that it should be officially recognized by international scientific bodies as "a formal epoch." "Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic signature distinct from that of the Holocene . . . encompassing novel biotic, sedimentary and geochemical change," the scientists state in February's cover story of GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America.

"These changes, although likely only in their initial phases, are sufficiently distinct and robustly established for suggestions of a Holocene-Anthropocene boundary in the recent historical past to be geologically reasonable."

The scientists say proof of humanity's impact on the environment is now so great that -- in keeping with scholarly tradition -- the International Commission on Stratigraphy and its parent agency, the International Union of Geological Sciences, should declare a new boundary between the Holocene and the Anthropocene.

"We are now living in a new time period when the human modification of the system is so great, we need some way of recognizing that," Mark Williams, a University of Leicester paleobiologist and co-author of the article, told Canwest News Service on Tuesday. He said the Anthropocene could be pegged as beginning with the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago, "when human industrial processes started to transform the planet on a colossal scale."

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http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/features/going_green/story.html?id=6c880c59-4068-49d2-80e4-e0fdb36c6fa9&k=71777

Currently, Bush and his henchmen are the prime operators.

according to Wikipedia.

Introducing a new era makes sense given how humans no longer live in harmony with nature but are consumers of nature.

from now, they would notice a distinct change happening around the time of the industrial revolution, and would probably mark that as the start of a geological era.

Of course, in geologic time, we are destroying ourselves so quickly that it may only be a blip -- a one inch layer in the strata.

With Speed and Violence, and documents its coinage by Paul Crutzen in a talk given in 2000. Pearces' book is a guided tour of current scientific thinking on global warming and gives a comprehensive overview of many of the topics that we're following on this forum. I highly recommend it, if you want to get up to speed in a hurry.