The Rejected Epoch: Classification, Jurisdiction, and the Meanings of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract In March 2024, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy rejected the proposal for an Anthropocene Series/Epoch beginning in 1952. Yet the decision did not settle the meaning of “Anthropocene.” We reconstruct how an Earth-system diagnosis became a stratigraphic proposal through the identification of a candidate geological interval, marker selection and correlation, taxonomic assignment, and institutional adjudication. These operations did not map neatly onto the questions the proposal had to answer: whether a boundary-centered framework was appropriate, where its boundary should lie, what transformation it should represent, and what rank the unit warranted. An array of mid-twentieth-century stratigraphic signals documented a rapid departure from Holocene Earth-system baselines, with many changes persisting on geological timescales. This evidential achievement did not automatically determine framework, representation, or rank: a classificatory gap remained. Rejection also exposed a jurisdictional gap, since authority over the formal time scale did not confer equivalent authority over the term’s wider scientific uses. Stoppani’s nineteenth-century Anthropozoic provides a historical partial analogue through which alternative principl es of geological periodization become visible. The case explains how evidence of planetary transformation can coexist with disagreement over its classification and semantic authority.