Massive drought or myth? Scientists spar over an ancient climate event behind our new geological age

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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/massive-drought-or-myth-scientists-spar-over-ancient-climate-event-behind-our-new

Source:  By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine.

Excerpt: Last month, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the bureaucracy that governs geological time, declared we are living in a new geological age. No, it's not the Anthropocene, the much-debated proposal for a geological division defined by human impact on Earth. The new age anointed by ICS is called the Meghalayan, based on signs in the rock record of a global drought that began about 4200 years ago. It is one of three newly named subdivisions of the Holocene, the geological epoch that began 11,700 years ago with the retreat of ice age glaciers. And the name will now filter its way into textbooks....

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