How long will human impacts last? - David Biello
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Imagine aliens land on the planet a million years from now and look into the geologic record. What will these curious searchers find of us? They will find what geologists, scientists, and other experts are increasingly calling the Anthropocene, or new age of mankind. The impacts that we humans make have become so pervasive, profound, and permanent that some geologists argue we merit our own epoch. That would be a new unit in the geologic time scale that stretches back more than 4.5 billion years, or ever since the Earth took shape. Modern humans may be on par with the glaciers behind various ice ages or the asteroid that doomed most of the dinosaurs. What is an epoch? Most simply, it's a unit of geologic time. There's the Pleistocen...
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Imagine aliens land on the planet a million years from now and look into the geologic record. What will these curious searchers find of us? They will find what geologists, scientists, and other experts are increasingly calling the Anthropocene, or new age of mankind. The impacts that we humans make have become so pervasive, profound, and permanent that some geologists argue we merit our own epoch. That would be a new unit in the geologic time scale that stretches back more than 4.5 billion years, or ever since the Earth took shape. Modern humans may be on par with the glaciers behind various ice ages or the asteroid that doomed most of the dinosaurs. What is an epoch? Most simply, it's a unit of geologic time. There's the Pleistocen...
