The Anthropocene as a geological time period is used increasingly and its formalisation is being explored. This was presented discussed at the 35th IGC congres in Cape Town, where Dr. Kim Cohen participated in the relevant sessions and business meetings, organised throught the IUGS ICS commission (as administrator of the ICS international chronostratigraphic chart), its Quaternary subcommission (as a voting member), and its Anthropocene working group (not a member).
The workgroup announced that they were now done exploring and ready to proceed to a definition proposal, aiming at a Global Stratigraphic Section and Point (GSSP) in a characteristic sequence showing earth system change, in a bed dating to c. 1950 CE, for a number of reasons. They foresee a time path now of several years to identify the best location to do this and produce the proposal (which requires extensive documentation and argumentation), that is in line with similar GSSP proposals for older geological periods.
The working group tries to treat the Anthropocene as just any other geological period in their process seeking to make the Anthropocene 'officially recognised' and 'formally defined'. This is difficult, because in this very youngest time period, geology is not the only earth scientific dicipline producing data, measurements etc. human observations and history producing direct data are also in play and they are more exact and precise than geological reconstruction approaches. This is a conservative approach, appreciated in geological communities.
An alternative way of recognising and formalising would be to ask the ICS for exceptions on how to deal with definitions in very youngest geological time (in the presenece of observing humans), and even better, to file a proposal on how to do that. As it is the communities that work with that data at time scales of centuries (Historic) to millennia (Holocene) that introduced the term and would benefit from formalisation in the first place, it is not strange to consider that. In the business meeting I have made a comment in that line.
It is interesting to observe, how when using very young natural records (stratigraphy) and connecting these with written ones (history) - the 'burden of proof' switches sides. In youngest periods when one finds a young event bed or polution spike, the geologist has to proof by what known event it was produced (is this Tsjernobyl 1986 of Fukushime 2011 fall out? is this Krakatoa or Pinatubu ash?), but not that a accident or volcano eruption happened in the first place. That a volcano eruption had occured was already proven, that it is also locally recorded in sediments is added to that. If a volcanic bed is found in a deep time formation of rock, the geologists has to proof it is a volcanic bed of certain provenance and age. That bed then is proof that the volcano eruption happened. One could say that this is what makes Physical Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences (disciplines dealing with youngest time) a bit different from Geology although both make use of sedimentary records / stratigraphy and of dating techiques. We have described this in our text book 'De vorming van het land (7th revised edition, Stouthamer, Cohen & Hoek 2015: H10). Such thinking about the 'burden of proof' also affects the discussions on the Anthropocene.
[Summary by KMC of telephone interviews given to BNN Nieuwsradio (1 sept 2016); Volkskrant and KIJK (half Oct 2016)]