Quotes About Holocene

As scientists have discovered - or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified - we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene. Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers.

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before 10 or 20 thousand years ago, life hit a peak of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.

A few years ago, in an essay in Nature, the Nobel Prize–winning Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen coined a term. No longer, he wrote, should we think of ourselves as living in the Holocene. Instead, an epoch unlike any of those which preceded it had begun. This new age was defined by one creature—man—who had become so dominant that he was capable of altering the planet on a geological scale. Crutzen dubbed this age the "Anthropocene.

Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.

we have to look back over the past 100,000 years of life on Earth. For almost all of that time—as early humans trekked out of Africa and blazed a trail across continents—Earth's average temperature spiked up and down. But during just the last 12,000 years or so, it has been warmer, and far more stable too. This recent period of Earth's history is known as the Holocene.

More extraordinarily, scientists suggest that, if undisturbed, the Holocene's benevolent conditions would be likely to continue for another 50,000 years due to the unusually circular orbit that Earth is currently making of the sun

We would have to be crazy to kick ourselves out of the Holocene's sweet spot, but that is, of course, exactly what we have been doing.

Thanks to the scale of our impact, we have now left behind the Holocene and entered uncharted territory, known as the Anthropocene: the first geological epoch that is shaped by human activity.

During the Holocene, we undoubtedly altered our environment significantly, clearing land, diverting water and building great cities.

Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era.

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before ten or twenty thousand years ago, life hit a peek of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.