ABSTRACT
Most people, unless they accept a literal reading of ancient scriptures, think the Earth is around 4,570 million years old, and geologists divide its history into a series of eras, periods and epochs. In 2000, Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen proposed that people should consider the current epoch, the Holocene, to be at an end, and recognise that a new one, the Anthropocene, has begun. The Holocene started at the end of the most recent ice age when the glaciers began to retreat. In the Holocene, as the ice retreated, the soil re-emerged and forests spread, only to shrink again with human demand for timber and land. In the summer of 2016, the International Geological Congress was told by Colin Waters, the secretary of its Anthropocene Working Group, that the group thought that the time had come to accept that the shift to the Antropocene had taken place, and that this should be formally recognised.
