A Century of Bad Choices Will Haunt Earth for 100,000 Years
Humanity’s climate impact is hard to wrap your head around. Calling this era the Anthropocene is a useful way to capture it.
Who knows what’s next?
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
One of the many things to appreciate about our home planet is that buried in its layers of rock is a kind of time machine. These strata tell us so much about our tumultuous history of glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid impacts, as well as the plants and animals that lived, evolved and died over eons.
There’s no doubt that future geologists or archaeologists will find a lot to interest them in the layer being laid down right now — weird materials from plastic to plutonium and dramatic changes in the nature of fossilized plants and animals. And yet recently, a group of scientists rejected a proposal to give our current epoch a new name: the Anthropocene, derived from the Greek word for human.