Geologists conventionally refer to the time we live in as the 'Holocene' - the period covering the last thirteen thousand years or so since the end of the last Ice Age. However, it was Paul Crutzen, a winner of a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, who spectacularly coined the term 'Anthropocene' to signify the extent to which human beings are now impacting the planet's ecosystems through our global economy and population dynamics. The Anthropocene refers to a 'human-created' geological era of Earth's history in which modern civilization has altered vast parts of the natural environment to the point where the cycles that regulate climate, water resources and the ecological balance of nature have become fundamentally disturbed by human activities.
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