IT'S official! Or as official as anything can be after an international congress in South Africa has worked on it for seven years.
The Earth has entered a new epoch - an epoch being the term man gives to a slab of tens of millions of years usually distinguished by some particular geological trait.
We are now in the Anthropocene epoch, which means the timeframe when human activity is the dominant influencer on the planet. Humankind has ushered in an epoch for itself.
This week, at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, it was announced by the working group set up in 2009 that the 11,700-year Holocene epoch is over - though there were no fireworks or singing of Auld Lang Syne. End of an era; start of an error, perhaps.
The idea of an epoch defined by human activity such as industrialisation and nuclear activity setting global systems on a different trajectory was first mooted in 2000.