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 — ...

Crawford Lake is so small it takes just 10 minutes to stroll all the way around its shore. But beneath its surface, this pond in southern Ontario in Canada hides something special that is attracting ...

The duties of the Anthropocene Working Group—a thirty-nine-member branch of a subcommission of a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences—are both tedious and heady. As the group’s ...

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 ...

Since “Anthropocene” was coined in 2000, it has increasingly defined our times as an age of human-caused planetary transformation. On March 4, 2024, the commission responsible for recognizing time ...

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 ...

Peter Sutoris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the philosophy and ethics of science and technology. This article is more than 6 years old. There’s no doubt that ...

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 ...

Humankind’s bombs, plastics, chickens and more have altered the planet enough to usher in a new chapter in Earth’s geologic history. That’s the majority opinion of a group of 35 experts tasked with ...

In 1922 British geologist Robert Lionel Sherlock published a book, Man as a Geological Agent: An Account of His Action on Inanimate Nature, that put forth what is now considered to be the central ...

Welcome to the “Anthropocene” — a new epoch in our planet’s 4.5 billion year history. Thanks to the colossal changes humans have made since the mid-20th century, Earth has now entered a distinct age ...