Researchers must consider human impacts on entire Earth systems and not get trapped in discipline-specific definitions, says Clive Hamilton. Do we live in the Anthropocene? Officially, not yet — ...

The scientist Paul Crutzen grew tired of the Holocene 24 years ago. The geologic epoch had reigned for 11,700 years, ever since the sprawling ice sheets covering North America and Europe began melting ...

FROM rapid climate change to biodiversity loss, the Anthropocene marks our times as an age of human-caused planetary disruption. A working group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy now ...

Are we really living in the Anthropocene, the geological time marked by the global impact of human activity? And if so, when did it begin? These are questions that the Anthropocene Working Group is ...

Scientists conduct sampling at Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, in April 2023. Last summer, a working group chose the lake as a representative location for the influence of human activity on the ...

Erle C. Ellis is a former member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. He is a member of the American Association of Geographers. On March 4, 2024, the ...

When exactly did human beings begin influencing nature on a planetary scale? The answer is not clear-cut. Was it when people started farming in early history? The moment our pollution first bled into ...

Scientists are one step closer to defining a new chapter in geology, one in which humans have become the dominant driver of Earth’s climate and environment. Out of 12 locations around the world, ...

Alejandro Cearreta receives funding for his research on the Anthropocene from the projects Harea-Grupo de Geología Litoral (Basque Government, IT1616-22) and ...

Wolfgang Lucht is an Earth-system scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1864, palaeontologist Édouard Lartet made a stunning discovery ...