by P. Voosen, Mar 5, 2024 in AAASScience

For now, we’re still in the Holocene.

Science has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene—our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age—and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity’s influence on the planet became overwhelming. The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning—though not unexpected—rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade.

“The decision is definitive,” says Philip Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge who is on the panel and serves as secretary-general of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the body that governs the geologic timescale. “There are no outstanding issues to be resolved. Case closed.”

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