Earth’s history: Should this phase be called the Anthropocene era?
One of the many things to appreciate about our home planet is that buried in its layers of rock is a kind of time machine. These strata tell us about our tumultuous history of glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid impacts, as well as the plants and animals that lived, evolved and died over aeons. There’s no doubt that future scientists will find much to study in the layer being laid down right now— weird materials from plastic to plutonium and dramatic changes in the nature of fossilized plants and animals.
And yet, a group of scientists rejected a proposal to give this epoch a new name: the Anthropocene, derived from the Greek word for human. That’s too bad. It’s a fitting name but seems to have been dismissed over technicalities.
The approach of dividing deep time into segments began before we knew how old our planet was. Geologists in the late 1700s and early 1800s saw layers of rock with different materials and fossils. These sometimes changed at abrupt boundaries.
They began to consider that the Earth might be millions of years old, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that researchers established that our planet’s age is around 4.5 billion years. By the early 1800s, we had time frames. The biggest units were aeons, within which were eras, periods and epochs.
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