Earth’s Crisis of Habitability and Geosciences

The current crisis of the Earth's habitability must be understood in the overall context of the Earth's history, known mainly from the information preserved in rocks and referred to in the Geologic Time Scale. Understanding of this crisis is closely linked to the attempt to formalize it as a new unit of the Geologic Time Scale named the Anthropocene. This chapter summarizes the empirical evidence for the crisis of habitability as indicated by environmental parameters and as preserved in the geological record. Criticisms of the formalization of the habitability crisis in the Geologic Time Scale and of the proposal of the Anthropocene are reviewed. Beyond technical problems intrinsic to the organization of the Geologic Time Scale, the main problem of the Anthropocene is epistemological.