For the last 11,000-years-plus the world has been in the same geological time period, but if a growing contingent of scientists and other experts has their way, mankind could usher in an entirely new epoch soon, the foundation of which is based entirely off of mankind's impact on the planet.

The newly proposed epoch, known as the Anthropocene, was unofficially used by scientists starting around 2000 to describe, as the New York Times' Andrew Revkin calls it, "a geological age of our own making." Specifically, scientists wanted to denote the time period when the human population exploded and started leaving an environmental footprint on the Earth.

Up until now, former geological time periods were based off of -- as the name might indicate -- Earth's geological (or rock) record, The Guardian notes. For instance, our current epoch, the Holocene, represents the shift from the last ice age into an interglacial period marked by warmer temperatures, starting roughly 12,000 years ago.

But a growing contingent of climate experts, archeologists, historians and other experts started to adopt Anthropocene based on an increasingly robust amount of scientific evidence of mankind's impact on the Earth since the first industrial revolution started more than 200 years ago.

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Oceans are warming and becoming more acidic; glacial ice is melting; the average surface temperatures is rising; and extreme precipitation events and heat waves are becoming more prevalent, just to name a few. And as the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) recently noted in their latest report, mankind's contribution to, and amplification of, those changes to Earth's climate is unequivocal.

Beyond the climate, there are other indicators of mankind's impact on the Earth, like radionuclides from atomic bombs, increased levels of hydrocarbons from the burning of fossil fuels and lead contamination from petroleum, The Guardian reports.

But still, Anthropocene remains unofficial until the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) -- yes, there's a actually a committee that decides these things -- makes a final ruling on the matter. That decision won't come until 2016 at the very earliest.

First, a group of 30 experts, known as the Anthropocene Working Group, must convene and debate the merits of an Anthropocene epoch, then draft and submit a proposal to the ICS for consideration. Those meetings started Thursday in Berlin, Germany, The Telegraph notes.

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It's important to note that some scientists aren't fond of the term and believe that the Holocene epoch should remain in place.

“I’m not in favor of this being defined formally as a division of geological time," Phil Gibbard, a geologist at Cambridge told The Guardian. "I think it’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. We are living in an interglacial period and there’s no question we’re still within that period, and it’s called the holocene.”

Still, Andrew Revkin, a member of the working group, said in a New York Times editorial that after the group's first meeting on Thursday there seemed to be a consensus in favor of adopting the Anthropocene epoch, and that the most contentious issues actually dealt with defining the specific parameters of the epoch, and not the merits of its existence.

That opinion seems to fall in line with another member of the working group, Mike Ellis, the head of climate change at the British Geological Survey.

“The principal process of change on the planet is us, so the name of our epoch should reflect that. It’s as simple as that," Ellis told The Guardian.

“It acknowledges that humans and the human process is as much a natural process as any other natural process that we are used to thinking about, such as volcanoes and earthquakes. The things we do and the things we make; the rules and legislation we come up with to control the way we live, they are a natural process and it emerges out of this thing called the Earth.”

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Muir Glacier and Inlet (1895)

In the photo above, the west shoreline of Muir Inlet in Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve is shown as it appeared in 1895. Notice the lack of vegetation on the slopes of the mountains, and the glacier that stands more than 300 feet high. See the glacier as it looked in 2005 on the next page. (USGS/Bruce Molnia)