ARE WE LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

A name can tell you a lot about a person. Take your last name, for example. Does it come from a certain language, a place where your ancestors were born, a traditional family occupation? How about your first name? What does it say about you? If you could change it, would you? What would you change it to, and why?

Geologic time has names, too, big names, kind of hard to remember ones—names for eons, eras, periods, and epochs. According to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) the professional organization that oversees any changes to the Geologic Time Scale (more formally known as the International Chronostratigraphic Chart),