- Geologists have recently classified the last 4,200 years as being a distinct age in the story of our planet and have named it as the Meghalayan age.
- We currently live in what is called the Holocene Epoch, which reflects everything that has happened over the past 11,700 years – since a dramatic warming kicked us out of the last ice age.
- But the Holocene itself can be subdivided, according to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS).It is the official keeper of geologic time and it proposed three stages be introduced to denote the epoch’s upper, middle and lower phases.
- These all record major climate events.
- The Meghalayan, the youngest stage, runs from 4,200 years ago to the present.
- It began with a destructive drought, whose effects lasted two centuries, and severely disrupted civilisations in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze River Valley.
- It was likely triggered by shifts in ocean and atmospheric circulation.
- The Meghalayan Age is unique among the many intervals of the geologic timescale in that its beginning coincides with a global cultural event produced by a global climatic event.
- The middle phase of the Holocene will be referred to as the Northgrippian, and runs from 8,300 years ago up to the start of the Meghalayan.
- The onset for this age was an abrupt cooling, attributed to vast volumes of freshwater from melting glaciers in Canada running into the North Atlantic and disrupting ocean currents.
The oldest phase of the Holocene – the exit from the ice age – will be known as the Greenlandian.
