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Human impact on the world has been so comprehensive that it has ushered in a new geological epoch, which scientists have called the Anthropocene era.

The Earth is still officially in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,750 years ago with climate changes that marked the end of the last ice age but geologists now suggest that a successor to the Holocene has started because of the changes wrought since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, of the University of Leicester, led calls for the change after identifying a range of profound impacts. Among the biggest that they highlighted were global temperatures, a transformation in erosion and sedimentation patterns, ocean acidification, changes to the carbon cycle and global temperatures.

They also said that the world’s plants and animals had undergone a rapidly increased rate of extinction and had been transported around the world both deliberately and accidentally.

These changes, they said, would leave traces in layers of sediment being laid down today that would identify them long into the future, just as geological layers had indicated the dates and nature of previous eras. Dr Zalasiewicz said: “The changes amount to a significant stratigraphical signal. The strata that are now forming will carry a distinct signal comparable to those of the past.”

Geological evidence has shown that, for the first 2,000-3,000 years of the Holocene epoch, temperatures and sea levels rose, and thereafter stabilised. It is the longest interglacial period in the past 250,000 years.

Dr Zalasiewicz is chairman of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, which carried out the first geological assessment of whether the Holocene can be said to have ended. The Anthropocene was first proposed by the chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000.

In conducting a scientific assessment of whether the Holocene should make way for a new epoch, the researchers were even able to identify in the modern geological record the start of atomic testing in the 1950s.

Andrew Gale, of the University of Portsmouth, who is another member of the commission, said: “Human activity has become the number one driver of most of the major changes in Earth’s topography and climate. You can’t have 6.5 billion people living on a planet the size of ours and exploiting every possible resource without creating huge changes in the physical, chemical and biological environment which will be reflected dramatically in our geological record.

“The impact in the past 200 years is such that there is increasingly less justification for linking pre- and post-industrialised Earth within the same epoch.”

The scientists presented their research in the journal GSA Today, in which they called for the International Commission on Stratigraphy to adopt formally the Anthropocene as an addition to the Earth’s geological timescale. Reporting their findings, they concluded: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene — currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change — as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalisation by international discussion.”

Professor Richard Alley, of Pennsylvania State University in the United States, supported the idea. “In land, water, air, ice and ecosystems, the human impact is clear, large and growing. A geologist from the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new name where and when our impacts show up,” he said.

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