The 'Anthropocene' as Environmental Meme and/or Geological Epoch Paul Voosen, who's one of my favorite science journalists these days, has written a fine piece examining the scientific and societal debate over the Anthropocene, the proposed term for this era in which human decisions (or indecision) will leave a durable mark in planetary systems and even in the planet's stratified rock.* (The video above explores the Anthropocene as environmental meme.) Here's an excerpt from Voosen's piece and a link to the rest: Humans are altering the face of the world, no doubt. But the world has had many faces over its eons. And so the question is set: Is humanity's touch mere makeup, or does it cut to the bone of deep time, in a pattern consistent with geology's demands? It's not a problem to be resolved in an Internet minute, said Jan Zalasiewicz, a University of Leicester geologist who is leading a small band of academics considering whether to formally propose the Anthropocene as an epoch. "All of these discussions about any unit in geology take an age, almost literally," he said. By nature, stratigraphy is a conservative profession, resisting proposals even from its own eminences, let alone offhand remarks from climate scientists. Notoriously, the field wrangled for 60 years over the Quaternary, the geological period that enwraps the Holocene. Debates about the boundaries often turn political and bitter, and last forever, said Michael Ellis, head of climate change science at the British Geological Survey. "Geologists have gone to their death beds arguing about these boundaries," Ellis said. The world is not waiting for the geologists to decide, of course. Run a Web search for the Anthropocene and 520,000 results pop up. This year, more than 200 academic papers have used the term, many of them outside geology -- or the hard sciences. It made the cover of The Economist and National Geographic. The publishing giant Elsevier will soon launch a journal on the Anthropocene. It is a phenomenon. Read the rest here.