09 天文和地理-2022-2023 高中高三英语阅读理解专项训练(含答案)--按主题分类【上海专用】

09 天文和地理 (C) Earth’s geologic ages—time periods defined by evidence in rock layers— typically last more than three million years. We’re barely 11,500 years into the current age, the Holocene. But a new paper argues that we’ve already entered a new one—the Anthropocene, or “new man”, age. The name isn’t brand-new. Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, a co-author of the paper, coined it in 2002 to reflect the changes since the industrial revolution. The paper, however, is part of new push to formalize the Anthropocene age. Recent human impacts have been so great that they’ll result in an obvious boundary (界限) in Earth’s rock layers, the authors say. “We are so skilled at using energy and exploiting the environment that we are now a defining force in the geological process on the surface of the Earth,” said co-author Jan Zala, a geologist with the University of Leicester in the U.K. Even so, it could take years or even decades for the International Union of Geological Sciences to formalize t