There is, above all, the business of being able to read correctly what the different layers of rock and sediment tell us about life on Earth. There is something almost literary about the process of understanding deep history. And yet if all civilisation were to end now, then 100m years hence, everything we have built would be compressed, in the geological record, to a layer of sediment “not much thicker than a cigarette paper”, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it. We really are that influential – and destructively so. When word of this proposal reached the Geological Society of London, and specifically its stratigraphy committee – the people who decide such matters – they thought about it for a year, and decided: yes, Anthropocene sounds about right. But Crutzen, who had won his Nobel for his work on the effects of ozone-depleting compounds (and so, in being instrumental in shrinking the holes in the ozone layer, could be said to have saved the planet), blurted out that we should actually be calling the present day the Anthropocene: the epoch influenced by humanity. This is, technically, correct: the Holocene began at the end of the last ice age. I n 2002, the Nobel-winning scientist Paul Crutzen was at a meeting where the chairman kept using the term “Holocene” to describe the present day.
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