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So, might you ask, what is the Anthropocene? First, the etymology. The Ancient Greek [anthropos] means "human being" while [kainos] means "new, current." The Anthropocene would thus be best defined as the new human-dominated period of the Earth's history. The term was proposed in 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen, Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on atmospheric chemistry and his research on stratospheric ozone depletion (the so-called "hole"), and by Eugene F. Stoermer in a publication (p. 17) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. But the concept itself, the idea that human activity affects the Earth to the point where it can cross a new age, is not new and dates back to the late nineteenth century. Different terms were proposed over the decades, such as Anthropozoic (Stoppani, 1873), Noosphere (de Chardin, 1922; Vernadsky, 1936), Eremozoic (Wilson, 1992), and Anthrocene (Revkin, 1992). It seems that the success of the term chosen by Crutzen and Stoermer is due to the luck of having been made at the appropriate time, when humankind became more than ever aware of the extent of its impact on global environment. It should be noted that Edward O. Wilson (who suggested Eremozoic, "the age of loneliness") popularized the terms "biodiversity" and "biophilia." Technically, the Anthropocene is the most recent period of the Quaternary, succeding to the Holocene. The Quaternary is a period of the Earth's history characterized by numerous and cyclical glaciations, starting 2,588,000 years ago (2.588 Ma). The Quaternary is divided into three epochs: the Pleistocene, the Holocene, and now the Anthropocene.

"The Orangeburg Scarp, a band of hard, crusty sediment teeming with tiny plankton fossils that runs from Florida to Virginia, marks an ancient shoreline where waves eroded bedrock 3 million years ago. That period, the middle Pliocene, saw carbon dioxide levels and temperatures that many scientists say could recur by 2100. The question is: Could those conditions also result in Pliocene-epoch sea levels within the next 10 to 20 centuries, sea levels that may have been as much as 35 meters higher than they are today? The answer, say climate scientists, may lie 17,000 kilometers away in East Antarctica. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world's largest, a formation up to 4 km thick and 11 million km2 in area that covers three-quarters of the southernmost continent. Its glaciers were thought to sit mostly above sea level, protecting them from the type of ocean-induced losses that are affecting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But studies of ancient sea levels that focus on the Orangeburg Scarp and other sites challenge that long-held assumption. Not everybody believes the records from Orangeburg. But combined with several other new lines of evidence, they support the idea that parts of East Antarctica could indeed be more prone to melting than expected. "

The Zuni Indians thought a red moon brought water. Seventeenth-century English farmers believed in a "dripping moon," which supplied rain depending on whether its crescent was tilted up or down. Now scientists have found evidence for another adage: Rain follows the full and new phases of the moon. Most studies on the weather and moon phases appeared in the 1960s and seemed to lend credence to lunar folklore. Researchers detected more peaks in rainfall in the days after the full and new moons, for example. Recently, three researchers decided to revive the issue when they stumbled across a link between moon phases and stream runoff while working on another project. They will soon publish in Geophysical Research Letters one of the most comprehensive studies yet, with more than a century of data from across the continental United States.