Publications and News

Anthropocene, AWG and the INQUA Congress 2027 – call for abstracts 15 Feb 2026

The INQUA Congress, held once every 4 years, is an extremely important venue for all Quaternarists to share their research and ideas. The next INQUA session is in Lucknow, India, January 28 to February 3, 2027. See: https://www.inquaindia2027.in/

An entire theme is devoted to the Anthropocene, and we have a special session on:

The Anthropocene epoch: geology, the Earth system, and relevance to society (Conveners: Martin J. Head, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Simon Turner)

The Anthropocene epoch, while rejected as an official unit of the geological time scale in 2024, remains a widely used concept and descriptor of Earth’s geological history from the mid-20th century to the present day and beyond, with planetary functions increasingly departing from Holocene norms. Quaternary science must account for this recent, unprecedented and planetary-scale change to remain relevant to wider society. Accumulated fossil-fuel-derived carbon dioxide in the oceans and atmosphere has already ensured that a changed planetary state will continue for hundreds of millennia, and its novel geological signature is indelible, with the biosphere irreversibly altered. But the Anthropocene epoch is more than this, representing a new way to engage with the humanities, social and educational sciences, law, politics and many other branches of enquiry and policy-making. We invite presentations on all aspects of the Anthropocene epoch, and on its transition from the Holocene.“

Please consider submitting an abstract to this special session. The deadline is 15 February, 2026