Climate stage· The columns of time
Holocene
11.7 ka → Today
The warm stage we are in. Eleven thousand seven hundred years of unusual stability, and every farm, city and state that has ever existed fits inside it.
What the evidence shows
A golden spike fixes its floor: a precise level in a Greenland ice core, dated to 11,700 years before the year 2000, where the chemistry records the end of the Younger Dryas cold snap. In 2018 the International Union of Geological Sciences formally divided the epoch into three ages, each with its own reference point, and those are the three narrow bands drawn beneath this one. What makes the Holocene remarkable is not its warmth but its steadiness: the hundred thousand years before it lurched, this one has not, and that is very probably why farming took hold when it did and not before.
Bounds and conventions
One of the very few boundaries on this timeline that were decided deliberately, written down, and voted on. That does not make it a natural threshold: the warming it marks took decades and looked different in each hemisphere. It makes it an agreed one, which for a shared chronology is worth a great deal.
Base at the NGRIP2 core GSSP, 11,700 years b2k.
Sources
- Walker, M., Head, M. J., Berkelhammer, M., et al. (2018). Formal ratification of the subdivision of the Holocene Series/Epoch: two new GSSPs and three new stages/subseries. Episodes 41(4), 213–223.
- Lisiecki, L. E., Raymo, M. E. (2005). A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ18O records. Paleoceanography 20, PA1003.