A question of rank...

One of the great things about a blog is being able to express your honest opinion about stuff and not be judged for it (well, maybe a little judged). Does something anger you? Does something excite you? Does something upset you? Does something frustrate you to the point that you have to vent it on the internet? On the topic of the Anthropocene, there is one aspect that has really bothered me whilst trawling the web over the course of the last 3 months. This is the misuse of the terms 'age', 'epoch', and 'era' (which I define here) in the mass media. For example, this BBC article asks 'Have humans created a new geological age?', but then continues to refer to the Anthropocene as an epoch throughout the article. Another example, in Nature refers to the Anthropocene as the new 'human age' in its title. Furthermore, an article in The Independent discusses the 'Anthropocene era of man's dominance', only to call it an epoch throughout the bulk of the news article. This constant switching between different terminology is not only confusing, as each rank of geological time is vastly different to the other in terms of length and scale, but also misleading in what the Anthropocene represents. If it is an 'era', then we have waved goodbye to our long-term friend, the Cenozoic Era of the last 65 million years. If it is an 'epoch', then the familiar Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years is over, but we remain within the Quaternary Period of the last 2.8 million years. If it is an 'age' then the Anthropocene is a new smaller unit of time within the Holocene epoch and thus a smaller subdivision of geochronological time. 

Or is it an age?! So. Much. Confusion. (Source)

When proposed in 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer) to denote this current time interval, the Anthropocene implied by name (due to ending in the suffix '-cene') that it had Epoch status (Gibbard and Walker 2013; Waters et al 2014). If the Anthropocene was meant to be of a smaller magnitude, i.e. a Stage/Age within the Holocene, the suffix would be expected to end with '-ian' based on geological standards (Waters et al 2014). Whether this is accidental or intentional, I cannot say. Gibbard and Walker (2013) make it crystal clear they do not support the formalisation of the Anthropocene as an Epoch status in the international Geological Time Scale. This is due to the belief that geological evidence does not support a change of this magnitude which would end the Holocene, already characterised by human influence on natural Earth Systems, and that the Anthropocene is too young at present with too many varying and diachronous global stratigraphic signals (Gibbard and Walker 2013).

I really want people to think about the Anthropocene. Not just its name, human facets, or environmental characteristics, but whether it really, honestly, hand-on-heart truly deserves to be of Epoch ranking. Has human impact had the same magnitude of impact on the Earth as the change between the end of the Pleistocene Last Glacial and the start of the Holocene interglacial and human influence? Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't, or maybe it will in the future. But this confusion and flitting between different terms in various popular media platforms detracts from the importance of the Anthropocene's status. The greater the rank is of the Anthropocene, the more disparate the conditions on the planet must be within the present unit of time and the prior division of equal status. Perhaps this is one of the reasons we cannot come to an honest consensus on the Anthropocene's existence and formalisation - because we cannot agree if the Anthropocene should be of Epoch status, or of a lower division. Yes, academic articles all seem to call the Anthropocene an epoch, but to me there almost feels like a lack of belief that it is an epoch, as questions continue to arise about its rank in various papers (e.g. Waters et al 2014; Gibbard and Walker 2013). Due to this confusion, journalists picking up academic papers and translating them to popular media could be mislead and thus fail to see the significance of terminology. I might be wrong, but I believe if we all (be that students, academics, journalists, radio and TV presenters, and the general public) sing from the same hymn sheet, we might be able to think more critically and seriously about other facets of the Anthropocene, of which there are many.