Anthroposphere, Holocene and Anthropocene Reflect the Progressive Increase in Human Impacts Over Geological Time

The term holocènes, meaning “entirely recent”, was introduced by zoologist/ paleontologist Paul Gervais in 1850 for deposits representing historical time and prospectively also the Pleistocene. It used the “-cene” suffix established by Charles Lyell in 1833 for formal subdivisions of the Cenozoic, and effectively replaced Lyell’s “Recent” for the phase of Earth history “tenanted by man”. In 2008, the Holocene was officially defined as an epoch/series to represent the past 11,700 years: the present interglacial characterised by a relatively stable climate that allowed settled, hierarchical societies to emerge and become dominant. Its initial and later close association with humans separates it from earlier interglacials of the Pleistocene. The Anthropocene was introduced by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 as a new epoch, terminating the Holocene, and reflecting the transformative and still-growing impacts of industrialized human societies on the Earth System. Crutzen initially proposed the Industrial Revolution in Europe as a convenient inception, but in 2015 he agreed with a mid-20th century onset aligned with that of the Great Acceleration (when human impacts on the Earth System rapidly became overwhelming) and its extensive expression within the geological record. The Anthropocene was formally proposed as a new epoch in 2023 with a prospective GSSP in a freeze core from Crawford Lake, Ontario, Canada, dating to the year 1952 CE. However, the term Anthropocene has also been applied more broadly to other human-related concepts across various timescales. These concepts have their own validity, but labelling them with the same term invites confusion. The term anthroposphere was introduced in 1902 by Russian geographer/anthropologist Dmitry N. Anuchin for “the stages and forms of culture of [Earth’s] most perfected organic product: humankind”. It has since come to mean the sum total of all human lives, actions and products having capacity to affect the Earth System state. Hence, we propose using the anthroposphere as a broad term to embrace all concepts that denote significant anthropogenic impact, including the Anthropocene epoch, but freeing that term for its original purpose: as a precisely defined interval of geological time that is nonetheless relevant to, and applicable across, a wide range of disciplines.