How humans are changing the world
Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams from the University of Leicester Department of Geology led the production of the studies into the Anthropocene — a new geological epoch distinguished by the change that man has wrought upon the earth.
Dr Zalasiewicz said: "At the beginning of this millennium, the Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested that we are now living in a new geological interval of time that is dominated by human activities. He termed this the Anthropocene. Since then, the Anthropocene has increasingly been used both by scientists and by the public as in indication of the scale of human change to planet Earth.