Anthropocene

The Anthropocene was a rejected proposal for a geological epoch following the Holocene... The proposal located potential stratigraphic markers to the mid-20th century.[11][10][12] This time period coincides with the start of the Great Acceleration, a post-World War II time period during which global population growth, pollution and exploitation of natural resources have all increased at a dramatic rate.[13] The Atomic Age also started around the mid-20th century, when the risks of nuclear wars, nuclear terrorism and nuclear accidents increased... In March 2024, after 15 years of deliberation, the Anthropocene Epoch proposal of the AWG was voted down by a wide margin by the SQS, owing largely to its shallow sedimentary record and extremely recent proposed start date.[16][17] The ICS and the IUGS later formally confirmed, by a near unanimous vote, the rejection of the AWG's Anthropocene Epoch proposal for inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale.[4][5][6] The IUGS statement on the rejection concluded: "Despite its rejection as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale, Anthropocene will nevertheless continue to be used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system."... An early concept for the Anthropocene was the Noosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky, who in 1938 wrote of "scientific thought as a geological force".[18] Scientists in the Soviet Union appear to have used the term Anthropocene as early as the 1960s to refer to the Quaternary, the most recent geological period.[19] Ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer subsequently used Anthropocene with a different sense in the 1980s[20][21] and the term was widely popularised in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen,[3][22] who regards the influence of human behavior on Earth's atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene