He continued. “The point is, if you were a geologist a few million years from now, you would have no difficulty identifying all kinds of characteristics [happening in our time] that are different from what happened before. Geologists in the future will recognize this as a time of major change.”

Finney has a special loathing for this idea. “Well, we’re not making a timescale for people a million years from now,” he told me. “I hear that argument from scientists, and I have to shake my head. The IUGS is not making a unit for someone to come back to in a million years.”

He also defended the Holocene as an unusually short epoch. Geological units get shorter as they approach the modern era, he told me, because scholars have more information about recent events. “As you get to the present, you have better resolution,” he said.

Zalasiewicz said he would not start the Anthropocene too early in time, as it would be too work-intensive for the field to rename such a vast swath of time. “The early-Anthropocene idea would crosscut against the Holocene as it’s seen by Holocene workers,” he said. If other academics didn’t like this, they could create their own timescales and start the Anthropocene Epoch where they choose. “We have no jurisdiction over the word Anthropocene,” he said.

Ruddiman, the University of Virginia professor who first argued for a very early Anthropocene, now makes an even broader case. He’s not sure it makes sense to formally define the Anthropocene at all. In a paper published this week, he objects to designating the Anthropocene as starting in the 1950s—and then he objects to delineating the Anthropocene, or indeed any new geological epoch, by name. “Keep the use of the term informal,” he told me. “Don’t make it rigid. Keep it informal so people can say the early-agricultural Anthropocene, or the industrial-era Anthropocene.”

The problem with naming a new epoch, he told me, is that no one cares.

“I’m going to take some serious crap for this article,” he said. “It’s going to insult some old-school geologists, but doing these formal definitions just isn’t the way that practicing geologists do things. The community just doesn’t care about these definitions.”

He predicted that no one would use these new Holocene subdivisions. Recently, he researched how many geology textbooks refer to the subdivisions within the Pleistocene, the 2.8-million-year epoch that preceded the Holocene. According to the ICS, the Pleistocene is split into four ages. But he found that only one textbook even alluded to them.

“This is the age of geochemical dating,” he said. Geologists have stopped looking to the ICS to place each rock sample into the rock sequence. Instead, field geologists use laboratory techniques to get a precise year or century of origin for each rock sample. “The community just doesn’t care about these definitions,” he said.

Take the Meghalayan, for instance, our new home in time. Geologists and climate scientists already call the mega-drought that initiated the Meghalayan the “4.2-kiloyear event,” he said. They won’t change their ways because it happens to have a new, ICS-approved name.

“I’m not going to remember what they named it,” he said. I’m never going to use the name, and I’m guessing most scientists will not. To me? It’s silly.”

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