Aral Sea, 1989 / Changing Planet.org

Aral Sea, 2008 / Changing Planet.org

Wired Scienceoutlined six ways in which humans are already geoengineering the Earth, arguing that the world has moved from the Holocene to Anthropocene era. “From diverting a third of Earth’s available fresh water to planting and grazing two-fifths of its land surface, humankind has fiddled with the knobs of the Holocene, that 10,000-year period of climate stability that birthed civilization. The consequences of our interventions into Earth’s geophysical processes are yet to be determined, but scientists say they’re so fundamental that the Holocene no longer exists. We now live in the Anthropocene, a geological age of mankind’s making.”

According to Wired Science, there are six forms of human-caused geoengineering already having an impact worldwide. We’ve further expanded their discussion of these impacts:

Carbon Dioxide Emissions 

The human activity most widely viewed as changing the planet is the burning of fossil…