The BBC’s Frozen Planet series has been breathtaking. Never before have we seen such a masterly crafted medley of mesmerizing footage of our polar regions. The events captured were remarkable, the stories told were gripping and the time-lapses were literally out of this world. The BBC Natural History Unit: we salute you!

I was taken by this weeks Economist cover story: Welcome to the Anthropocene. It's a new term that is being banded around by scientists to refer to the current epoch in the Earth's history which is primarily shaped by the heavy hand of humans, contrasting against the relatively stable Holocene epoch – in which we officially live - which only began 10, 000 years ago. What particularly struck me was an example that they opened with, 'a single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 30 billion tonnes of earth – twice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the world in a year'. BOOM! Environmental scientists tend to refer to minute percentage increases and distant timescales, not a whopping 30 billion tonnes of rock! I suppose it's the tangibility of the Anthropocene concept that really gets me, it emphasises the digging, scraping, damming, stripping, polluting reality of the situation. Just imagine the architect that digs up our the remnants of civilisation in 100,000 years: characterising us by a strange fondness of concrete, tarmac and obscure fridge mountains; the modern day Stonehenge perhaps?!