The word “Anthropocene” has gained cultural resonance in recent years, as it’s become clearer that humans have made an indelible and destructive impact on our planet. But it’s also a term with a specific technical meaning: an epoch, or geologic unit of time, named for humans.
Should humans get their own geologic era?
The debate over the Anthropocene epoch, explained.
Laura Bult Laura Bult is a video journalist covering climate, the environment, agriculture and urbanism, among other things. She’d love to hear from you: laura.bult@voxmedia.com.
In 2009, a group of scientists first started investigating whether the Anthropocene should be formally recognized as part of the way we record geologic time. They did this by way of a discreet process laid out by a global body of geologists called the International Commission on Stratigraphy. This video explains what happened next: how a team of scientists looked for the evidence to make their case, and what it means to consider humanity’s impact as part of the Earth’s 4.6 billion-year history.
We don’t mention this in the video, but Phil Gibbard and Erle Ellis co-authored a paper proposing the Anthropocene as a geological “event” rather than an epoch:
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