A new geologic age is upon us

Just imagine another little section on top in which we're wearing clothes and depleting every natural resource we can get our hands on. Yippee!

From Dot Earth:

Some earth scientists are pushing to enshrine officially a decades-old idea — that Earth is now in a biogeochemical era of our own making that should be distinguished from the Holocene, the epoch that began with the end of the last ice age.

It'll be called the Anthropocene (you know, "anthro" meaning "human" and "pocene" meaning...um, yeah).

Andrew Revkin (author of Dot Earth) on the subject (also yoinked from his blog post):

"...The challenge now is to find a way to act that will make geologists of the future look upon this age as a remarkable time, a time in which a species began to take into account the long-term impact of its actions. The alternative will be to leave a legacy of irresponsibility and neglect that will manifest itself in the fossil record as just one more mass extinction — like the record of bones and empty footprints left behind by the dinosaurs.”

I really love the description of our actions being manifested in the fossil record...I mean, I don't love that it'll be a manifestation of something kindof awful, but it's sortof a neat image/description that I definitely hadn't thought about before.