This is the Guardian.

My name's Nicola Davison.

My article is called the Anthropocene epoch.

Have we entered a new phase of planetary history?

I was trying to think of some of the most urgent problems facing humanity.

The climate crisis seemed one of the most urgent.

There was a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,

species on the planet were either being annihilated

or spread around in strange and unusual ways.

Rippers were really polluted, sea levels were rising,

ice sheets were melting, etc.

It seemed quite bad.

And I realised I didn't have much of a sense of how bad things really were.

And so that led me to geology.

And it turns out that there was a group of geologists

who were preoccupied with the exact same question,

whether or not we were in a kind of new phase of planetary history.

And that group is the Anthropocene working group.

They've been working on a proposal to change the geologic timescale

to literally write a new chapter of planetary history.

The timescale works as the backbone of geology

and it plots our 4.3 billion years of earth history

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