Pyrocene

name

name ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    The period of the Holocene/Anthropocene in which climate change causes more frequent and intense wildfires. uncountable

    "Those images of fire on fire are the raw footage of a planetary phase change, what might end up as a geologic era we could call the Pyrocene. They will continue until, as Shakespeare put it, they “consume the thing that feeds their fury.”"

Example

More examples

"Those images of fire on fire are the raw footage of a planetary phase change, what might end up as a geologic era we could call the Pyrocene. They will continue until, as Shakespeare put it, they “consume the thing that feeds their fury.”"

Etymology

From pyro- + -cene, coined by American academic Stephen J. Pyne in 2016.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.