The Anthropocene: A New Earth Epoch?

National Geographic has a good piece on the concept of the "Anthropocene," the idea that human influence has pushed the earth from the Holocene period into a new epoch marked by modification of the planet through the by-products of our technology.

Here's is a quote from part of it:


The word "Anthropocene" was coined by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen about a decade ago. One day Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds, was sitting at a scientific conference. The conference chairman kept referring to the Holocene, the epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, 11,500 years ago, and that—officially, at least—continues to this day.

"'Let's stop it,'" Crutzen recalls blurting out. "'We are no longer in the Holocene. We are in the Anthropocene.'