'Anthropocene' – A new geologic time?

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'Anthropocene' – A new geologic time?

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According to geologic scale, currently we are living in the Holocene epoch, which began roughly 12,000 years ago after the last glacial period.

But now scientists believe that human activities have changed the Earth in such a way that we have enterted into a new human generated time scale – the Anthropocene. Greek word 'anthropo' means 'human' and 'cene' means 'new' (in geologic time scale, 'cene' is the standard suffix for 'epoch').

Nobel Prize-winning Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized the term through a publication in Global Change Newsletter on May 2000.

But the International Union of Geological Sciences has not yet officially approved the term 'Anthropocene'.


Suggested Reading:

The „Anthropocene“ by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer
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