21st March 2022: (3:10 pm to 4:10 pm IST)
Topic: The Anthropocene as a potential unit of the geological time scale: an update on Progress. (Co-authors: Colin Waters, Simon Turner, Martin Head and Anthropocene Working Group Members) (30 minutes)

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester, having started his career at the British Geological Survey. He is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, and chairs the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. A field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, particular fields of study include fossils (particularly graptolites) and mudrocks of Early Palaeozoic age, and Quaternary deposits, including the Anthropocene. He is a co-editor of three compilations on the Anthropocene: The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time? (Royal Society, 2011); A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene (Geological Society of London, 2014) and The Anthropocene as a geological time unit: a guide to the scientific evidence and current debate (Cambridge University Press, 2019). For a wider public, he is the author of The Earth After Us (Oxford University Press 2008), The Planet in a Pebble (OUP, 2010), Rocks: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2016) and Geology: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2018); and, together with Mark Williams he has written The Goldilocks Planet: An Earth History of Climate Change (OUP, 2012), Ocean Worlds: the story of seas on Earth and other planets (OUP, 2014) and Skeletons: A frame for life (OUP, 2018). He also led the first English translation of Buffon’s 1778 Les Époques de la Nature, arguably the first science-based Earth history ever written (The Epochs of Nature, Chicago University Press, 2018).