The Anthropocene defines Earth's most recent geologic time
period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on
overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic,
hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now
altered by humans. The word combines the root "anthropo",
meaning "human" with the root "-cene", the standard suffix for
"epoch" in geologic time. The Anthropocene is distinguished as a
new period either after or within the Holocene, the current
epoch, which began approximately 10,000 years ago (about 8000
BC) with the end of the last glacial period. Origins of the term
Anthropocene is a new term, proposed in 2000 by Nobel Prize
winning scientist Paul Crutzen. A similar term, Anthrocene, was
coined by Andrew Revkin in his 1992 book Global Warming:
Understanding the Forecast, but was not adopted by scientists.
Crutzen noted that the term originated in 2000 at "a conference
where someone said something about the Holocene. I suddenly
thought this was wrong. The world has chan