One of the most thought-provoking concepts in science in recent times has been that we are moving out of the current, relatively stable Holocene geological period to a new human-dominated period called the Anthropocene, a term coined in 2000 by the late Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen. Almost 20 years later, a panel of international geologists and scientists voted to designate the Anthropocene a new geological epoch to mark the profound ways in which humans have altered the planet.