No. The Anthropocene is not a formally recognized geological epoch. In 2024, after fifteen years of deliberation, the Anthropocene Working Group's proposal was voted down by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, and that rejection was later formally confirmed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences. The Holocene remains the current official epoch. But the story of how that decision was reached — and why it took so long — reveals the remarkable rigor behind how humanity names chapters of Earth's deep history.
The Anthropocene: A Concept in Geological Debate
The term "Anthropocene" has escaped the lecture hall entirely. It now appears in scientific journals, public media, the social sciences, and even legal scholarship. Yet its popularity is precisely what makes its formal status confusing: a word can be everywhere and still be, geologically speaking, nowhere.
Scientists still debate whether the Anthropocene is meaningfully different from the Holocene, and the term has not been formally adopted by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the international organization that names and defines epochs. As National Geographic's educational resource puts it, the primary question the IUGS must answer before declaring the Anthropocene an epoch is whether humans have changed the Earth system to the point that the change is reflected in the rock strata. For those who answer yes, a second, equally contested question follows: when did it begin?
Defining Earth's Timeline: The Formal Geological Process
Declaring a new epoch is not a matter of consensus among commentators. Proposals for a new unit of the geological time scale must be submitted to the International Commission on Stratigraphy for approval and to the International Union of Geological Sciences for ratification. The ICS is the body that oversees how we talk about the history of Earth, and it holds the power to decide on and name geological epochs.
The scientific heart of the process is the search for what geologists call a "golden spike" — a Global Standard Stratotype Section and Point, a physical marker in the rock record that would demarcate the Holocene from the Anthropocene. According to the Natural History Museum in London, this marker must be so significant that it would be detectable in rock layers thousands and even millions of years into the future. That is the bar: not whether humans have transformed the planet, but whether the transformation will read clearly in stone, far ahead.
