When did the Anthropocene begin? Scientists are closer to saying when.

The official timeline of Earth's history - from the earliest rocks to‌ dinosaurs to the rise of primates, Paleozoic to Jurassic and all points before and since - could soon to include the age of nuclear weapons, man-made climate change, and the proliferation of plastics, trash, and concrete across the planet.

En in short, the present.

Ten thousand years after our species began to form primitive agrarian societies, a panel of scientists on Saturday took a big step toward declaring 'a new geological time interval: the Anthropocene, the age of humans.

Our current geological epoch, the Holocene, began 11,700 years ago with the end of the last great ice age. The roughly three dozen academics on the panel seem poised to recommend that in fact we have spent the last few decades in an entirely new unit of time, characterized by human-induced changes on a planetary scale that are unfinished but very much in progress.

"If you were around in 1920, your attitude would have been: 'Nature is too big for humans to influence. ,',” said Colin N. Waters, geologist and chair of the Anthropocene Task Force, the group that has been deliberating on the issue since 2009. The Century The latter upended that thinking, Dr. Waters said. "It was a shock event, much like an asteroid hitting the planet."

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The working group members wrapped up the first in a series of internal votes on details on Saturday, including s when exactly they think the Anthropocene began. Once those votes are complete, which could be in the spring, the panel will submit its final proposal to three other committees of geologists whose votes will either make the Anthropocene official or reject it.

Sixty percent of each committee will need to approve the group's proposal for it to move on to the next. If he fails in any of them, the Anthropocene might not have another chance to be ratified for years. officially recognize that humanity's effects on the planet have been so extensive that they have ended the previous chapter of Earth's history. He would recognize that these effects will be noticeable in the rocks for millennia.

Human

population

2020

7.7 billion people

7

billions

6

5

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