Researchers collecting a sediment core sample from Crawford Lake, Canada
Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images
A long-standing effort to formally place the Anthropocene on the geologic timescale came to a surprising end this year. In March, a panel of academics rejected the proposal to define a new epoch by 12 to 4 votes. Yet for the team behind the proposal, work on defining the term – which highlights rapid, human-induced changes to Earth – continues.
As it stands, the Holocene, which began about 11,700 years ago, remains the current epoch. It broadly covers a period of planetary stability during…
