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Are people changing geologic time?

For some 4.5 billion years, natural forces such as volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and earthquakes have shaped the Earth.

Now, however, human activity is rewriting geologic history, according to scientists in the February issue of GSA Today, produced by the Geological Society of America.

They blame the industrial revolution for a new geologic epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene. Stresses to the planet's atmosphere, oceans, life forms, and very surface are dramatic enough to end the Holocene epoch, the geologists say. That period began about 12,000 years ago as the last Ice Age melted and the planet warmed enough … Read more