National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Monday, November 23, 2009

Photo: Human Activities Triggering "Global Soil Change"


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Footprints filled with muddy water sit in a rice field that has been eroded by clear-cutting.

Erosion, nutrient depletion, pollution, and other human activities are creating such dramatic changes to Earth's geologic surfaces that some experts argue we have entered a new period of geologic time: the Anthropocene age.

Photograph by Robb Kendrick/Aurora/Getty Images