After two years, researchers are resurfacing a voting controversy over whether Earth is officially in a geological epoch called the Anthropocene. In 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) upheld a decision to reject a proposal to establish our current era, when humans are altering the planet, as a new epoch in the rock record. Now, some scholars say that there are unpublished documents showing that the proposal’s rejection was illegitimate, and that the rationale for the decision was never adequately explained. Ditching ‘Anthropocene’: why ecologists say the term still matters “It was such a historical decision,” says Jürgen Renn, a historian of science at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. “It should be clear to the world — it should be transparent,” says Renn, who co-authored a paper, out today in the journal Earth’s Future1, laying out the accusations. Renn and his co-authors call for the IUGS to publicly release key documents related to the vote. They also call for an independent review of the process to maintain “public trust in our capacity to understand and respond to planetary transformation”. But researchers involved in the vote maintain that the process was fair. Adele Bertini, a...

Ediacaran-Early Cambrian Hormuz salt extruded in the eroded core of a whale-back anticline of the Zagros mountain of southern Iran. The folded strata belong to Cretaceous to Pliocene sequence.

On 20 March 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) and the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) approved the vote of the latter's Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) “to reject the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale” (IUGS, 2024). The term nevertheless remains in wide use across the Earth and social sciences, and a substantial body of work now argues that it is better understood as a planetary event of Earth system transformation than as a chronostratigraphic unit (Edgeworth et al., 2024). For education, this outcome is clarifying rather than deflating. It removes the temptation to treat the Anthropocene as a settled natural-scientific fact to be transmitted, and returns attention to what the term actually names for those who live in it: a condition. The Anthropocene marks a profound transformation in humanity’s relationship to the world. It designates not merely a proposed geological epoch shaped by human activity, but a new condition of existence in which the boundaries between natural processes and human agency have become increasingly permeable and often indistinguishable (Ellis, 2024). Atmospheric dynamics, climatic feedback loops, oceanic chemistry, biodiversity loss, and even the geological stratigraphy of the planet now...

Мадыгенское местонахождение ископаемой палеофауны (Мадыгенская свита) в Кыргызстане вошло в список «The Third 100 IUGS Geological Heritage Sites» — третью сотню объектов геологического наследия мирового значения Международного союза геологических наук (IUGS). Об этом сообщили в министерстве природных ресурсов, экологии и технического надзора Кыргызстана. Мадыген расположен в Баткенской области на юго-западе Кыргызстана, между Ферганской впадиной и Туркестанским хребтом. Регион известен...

Oaxaca’s signature quarry stone cantera verde, or green tuff, has been officially recognized as a “Heritage Stone” by the IUGS.