BEYOND THE EPOCHAL ANTHROPOCENE: EARTH SCIENCE FOR A HUMAN-TRANSFORMED PLANET

The Anthropocene has inspired decades of discussion and research aimed at better understanding the dynamics of our increasingly human-transformed planet. Recently, the decision by geologists not to define the Anthropocene as an epoch in the Geological Time Scale has left some Earth scientists and others concerned that the term remains without any formal scientific definition. This presentation explains the general scientific utility of informally defining the Anthropocene as a geological event, or more specifically, as an ongoing, complex, socially differentiated, and spatially and temporally heterogenous planet-transforming event, itself made up of manifold events, that has been unfolding across the planet since prehistoric times. Geologists, geographers, environmental scientists, archaeologists and other scholars have long collaborated in their efforts to understand the interacting material, biological, and social processes that have formed and continue to shape Earth’s surface conditions since humans first emerged as a species more than 300,000 years ago. The Anthropocene event expands this common ground for collaboration to better understand planetary changes beyond the shallow sedimentary evidence and narrow temporal confines of a formal epoch definition, to focus instead on the Anthropocene as a complex and ongoing planetary event analogous to the Great Oxidation Event and others.