An Epoch in the making

By Roland Pease
BBC Radio Science Unit

We may be witnessing a transformation of the Earth as profound as the end of the age of the dinosaurs, and entering a geological period as distinctive as the Jurassic - and the reason is that we are causing it.

Writing in the house journal of the Geological Society of America, GSA Today, Britain's leading stratigraphers (experts in marking geological time) say it is already possible to identify a host of geological indicators that will be recognisable millions of years into the future as marking the start of a new epoch - the Anthropocene.

Geologists have long divided the Earth's history into distinct epochs, periods and eras - with names as familiar as the Triassic or the Carboniferous.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7223663.stm