Earth enters a new epoch due to man-made changes

Washington, Jan 28 (UNI) With mankind tampering the Earth's surface, the soil beneath our feet has changed so much that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earth's history and marked the start of a new.

Geologists from the University of Leicester said the Holocene epoch on the planet has ended and we have entered a new new epoch - the Anthropocene.

The geologists identified certain phenomenon such as transformed patterns of sediment erosion and deposition worldwide, disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature, major changes to the world's plants and animals as the outcome of human impact.

Earlier in 2002, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen had proposed that the Anthropocene era has started as global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development.

The scientists argued that the dominance of humans has so physically changed the earth that there is increasingly less justification for linking pre and post-industrialised Earth within the same epoch - the Holocene.

Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change for recognition of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalisation by international discussion, the geologists said.

They said their findings had enough scholarly groundwork for formal consideration of the Anthropocene epoch by the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

UNI XC SLD DS1416