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Battle of the Anthropocene: allegations re-ignite row over proposed geologic epoch
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Some geologists proposed establishing a geological epoch called the Anthropocene, which would have started when humans began nuclear testing. Credit: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty
After two years, researchers are resurfacing a voting controversy over whether Earth is officially in a geological epoch called the Anthropocene.
In 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) upheld a decision to reject a proposal to establish our current era, when humans are altering the planet, as a new epoch in the rock record. Now, some scholars say that there are unpublished documents showing that the proposal’s rejection was illegitimate, and that the rationale for the decision was never adequately explained.
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“It was such a historical decision,” says Jürgen Renn, a historian of science at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. “It should be clear to the world — it should be transparent,” says Renn, who co-authored a paper, out today in the journal Earth’s Future1, laying out the accusations.
Renn and his co-authors call for the IUGS to publicly release key documents related to the vote. They also call for an independent review of the process to maintain “public trust in our capacity to understand and respond to planetary transformation”.
But researchers involved in the vote maintain that the process was fair. Adele Bertini, a geologist at the University of Florence in Italy, who co-chaired the voting subcommittee, says she is open to scrutiny of the documents if it would help support the legacy left by all the “remarkable science” that went into creating the proposal. She also points out that she co-authored a comment in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment last month giving a technical explanation for the proposal’s rejection2.
The allegations from Renn and his co-authors are the latest salvo in a bitter debate among geologists about whether the Anthropocene should be formally recognized in the stratigraphic record. Currently, the planet is in the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago with the end of the last glacial period. In 2009, a team of researchers called the Anthropocene Working Group began gathering evidence to support the idea that industrialization by humans has initiated a new epoch.
It’s final: the Anthropocene is not an epoch, despite protest over vote