Everyone has their favorite period in geologic history: The Mesozoic is popular with the ladies, Ordovician is an all-around nice dude and Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous are pretty cool if you can ever get them to stop hanging out with one another (which is like, never). Remember that one time Pleistocene came over to Precambrian's party and yakked in the sink after all those Jaegerbombs? Classic — I love that guy.
It's time to welcome a new epoch to the party: A group of geologists have proposed naming a new epoch, the Anthropocene, after humans. The period would encompass the last 200 years or so, and the geologists think the move is appropriate "because during the past 2 centuries, human activity has become the primary driver of most of the major changes in Earth's topography and climate."
Each geological epoch earns a name based on the characteristics found in the stratigraphic layers of rock found during the designated time period. The Carboniferous, for instance, is so named because of the vast deposits of coal that formed upon the compression of that periods wide-ranging swamps and bogs. The Anthropocene will similarly reflect humans' impact on that stratification — hopefully in the way we've altered the physical and chemical nature of ocean sediments, ice cores, and surface deposits rather than, say, Heidi and Spencer's pointless alteration of the pop cultural landscape.
Of course, Rosie O'Donnell's footprints might represent a dovetailing of the two.
Some clear signs of human impacts on the geological layers of the earth include massive increases in lead concentrations in soil and water, a carbon-dioxide saturated atmosphere and large amounts of sediment captured by dams. Most of these processes "far outpace" the natural forces at play.
Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester in the U.K. will lead the charge to coin the Anthropocene in the February issue of the Geological Society of America's GSA Today (which has a slammin' swimsuit issue, BTW). Geologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in State College says:
"In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human impact is clear, large, and growing," he says. "A geologist from the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new name, where and when our impacts show up."
So far, the Anthropocene has been a pretty wild ride, but the next 200 are going to be so crazy they'll have to call it the Alvarezocene. I'm just warning you, is all.
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