What the Anthropocene’s critics overlook – and why it really should be a new geological epoch

By Simon Turner, Senior Research Fellow in Geography, UCL
Colin Waters, Honorary Professor, Department of Geology, University of Leicester
Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester
Martin J. Head, Professor of Earth Sciences, Brock University

Geologists on an international subcommission recently voted down a proposal to formally recognise that we have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch representing the time when massive, unrelenting human impacts began to overwhelm the Earth’s regulatory systems.

A new epoch needs a start date. The geologists were therefore asked to vote on a proposal to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene using a sharp increase in plutonium traces found in sediment at the bottom of an unusually…

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