Which era are we currently living in

Species go extinct every year, but historically the average rate of extinction has been very slow with a few exceptions. The fossil record reveals five uniquely large mass extinction events during which significant events such as asteroid strikes and volcanic eruptions caused widespread extinctions over relatively short periods of time.

Some scientists think we might have entered our sixth mass extinction event driven largely by human activity. Our planet is dependent on an interconnected system. If we lose one species, how does that impact the whole system? What if we lose hundreds? Help your students understand the gravity of extinction with these classroom resources.

It's a new name for a new geologic epoch-one defined by our own massive impact on the planet. That mark will endure in the geologic record long after our cities have crumbled. Looking at some of its life forms, how long they lived, and when they died helps provide some scale of Earth's long existence. This cartographic tapestry is woven from a geologic map and a shaded relief image. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students.

Skip to content. Image mushroom cloud Atomic bomb tests like this one at Bikini Atoll in not only reassured military personnel that the bomb worked, but also created a powerful new symbol of the destructive power of the human specis: the mushroom cloud.

The International Commission on Nomenclature, the forerunner of the present-day ICS, was established during a congress in Bologna in with the mandate of creating an international language of geology, one that was to be enshrined in the timescale. The task of interpreting and classifying 4. Meanwhile, well-studied units are revised as new evidence unsettles old assumptions.

In , the Quaternary period was unceremoniously jettisoned and the preceding period, the Neogene, extended to cover its 1. The move came as a surprise to many Quaternary geologists, who mounted an aggressive campaign to redeem their period.

Eventually, in , the ICS brought the Quaternary back and moved its boundary down by , years to the beginning of an ice age, a point considered more geologically significant. Modifying the geological timescale is a bit like trying to pass a constitutional amendment, with rounds of proposal and scrutiny overseen by the ICS.

From the subcommission, the proposal advances to the voting members of the ICS composed of the chairs of the subcommissions, plus the chair, vice-chair and general-secretary of the ICS. Whether or not a new proposal successfully passes through all these rounds comes down to the quality of evidence that the working group can amass, as well as the individual predilections of the or-so seasoned geologists who constitute the senior committees.

This did not bode well for Zalasiewicz as he began to put together the Anthropocene working group. In fundamental ways, the idea of the Anthropocene is unlike anything geologists have considered before. Z alasiewicz grew up in the foothills of the Pennines in a house that contained his parents, sister and a growing collection of rocks. When he was 12, his sister brought home a nestful of starlings, which his mother, who loved animals, nursed to health.

Soon neighbours started calling round with all manner of injured birds, and for several years Zalasiewicz shared his bedroom with a little owl and a kestrel. He started volunteering at the local museum in Ludlow in the summer, where he met people who were expert in the things he cared most about, such as where to find trilobites.

Yet among geologists, he is a known provocateur. It was, to some, an audacious suggestion. When I emailed David Fastovsky, the former editor of the journal Geology, who had published the paper 15 years ago, he remembered it well. Over the years, Zalasiewicz has indulged in thought experiments that are, among geologists, peculiar. In , he wrote an article for New Scientist in which he imagined what mark humans might leave on the Earth long after we are extinct. His ideas became a book, published 10 years later, called The Earth After Us.

After he was appointed chair of the Anthropocene working group, Zalasiewicz needed to assemble his team. The diagrams were back-of-the-beer-mat things. Stratigraphic working groups are, not surprisingly, usually composed of stratigraphers. But Zalasiewicz took a different approach. Alongside traditional geologists, he brought in Earth systems scientists, who study planet-wide processes such as the carbon cycle, as well as an archeologist and an environmental historian.

Soon the group numbered It was international in character, if overwhelmingly male and white, and included experts with specialisms in paleoecology, radiocarbon isotopes and the law of the sea. If the Anthropocene was, in fact, already upon us, the group would need to prove that the Holocene — an unusually stable epoch in which temperature, sea level and carbon dioxide levels have stayed relatively constant for nearly 12 millenia — had come to an end.

They began by looking at the atmosphere. During the Holocene, the amount of CO 2 in the air, measured in parts per million ppm , was between and Data from , the most recent year recorded when the working group started out, showed levels had climbed to ppm.

Since then, it has risen to ppm. The group calculated that the last time there was this much CO 2 in the air was during the Pliocene epoch 3m years ago. Next they looked at what had happened to animals and plants. Past shifts in geological time have often been accompanied by mass extinctions, as species struggle to adapt to new environments.

Our current era is the Cenozoic, which is itself broken down into three periods. We live in the most recent period, the Quaternary, which is then broken down into two epochs: the current Holocene, and the previous Pleistocene, which ended 11, years ago. The Holocene began at the end of the last ice age, when glaciers started retreating.

In that time, humans learned how to farm, built cities, and started launching rockets into space. From a human perspective, the end of the Holocene looks very different from the beginning. But from a geological perspective, has much really changed? The new announcement , from the International Commission on Stratigraphy, is an admission that there are, in fact, significant changes in the Earth. While the broader trend of warmer temperatures and receding glaciers holds just as true today as 11, years ago, there are other changes in the geologic record.

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