Researchers collect sediment core samples from Crawford Lake, Canada
Bonnie Jo Mount/Washington Post via Getty Images
Years of efforts to officially place the Anthropocene on a geological time scale came to a surprising end this year. In March, a committee of scholars rejected the proposal to define a new era by a vote of 12 to 4. But the team behind the proposal is still working to define the term, which emphasizes the rapid human-induced changes to the planet.
As it stands, the Holocene epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago, remains the current era. This broadly covers the period during which the planet is stable…
