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.
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