WHEN ALIENS LOOK back on the first decades of the twenty-­first century, they might be surprised that we humans busied ourselves debating geological time while the planet cooked. Ten years after the 2000 meeting in which the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen blurted out, ‘We’re in the…the…the Anthropocene!’, a working group was formed by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) that, despite being called the Anthropocene Working Group, tasked itself with bestowing a name upon our present. There were two things to ascertain: whether we were indeed part of a new geological epoch and, if we were, what initiated its onset.

In 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group submitted that the Great Acceleration of the 1950s – in which fossil-­fuel use, consumption and population increased radically – was the spike that produced our contemporary era, claiming this was most visible in the sediments of Crawford Lake, Canada. But in 2024, the SQS voted resoundingly against the submission: four in favour, twelve against and three abstentions. The working group recognised that ‘their proposal has been decisively rejected’ – but reminded readers that ‘the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used…it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-­environment interactions’.