Geologists and paleontologists have long defined the geological time scale primarily based on major disruptions to life on Earth. Eras, periods, and epochs, particularly their boundaries, were ...

It’s just as well conditions like this are not common, or 18th-century geologists might have never made sense of Earth's ...

At the same time, even Ellis acknowledges that the concept of an Anthropocene is useful for scientists, though he argues if it should not be formalized as a geological epoch.

Currently, we’re in the Holocene epoch of the geological time scale, which started about 11,700 years ago.