While humans have gained the power to alter the global environment, work within certain scientific disciplines since the Second World War has made it possible to assess the impacts of exponential growth on planetary processes and measure environmental change across vast timespans. Scientific advances, coupled with political initiatives, have in a sense rendered the Earth a governable object, while also expanding the horizons of environmental history. Erik Isberg, a PhD candidate in the SPHERE project, joins the podcast to explain how the work of scientists such as glaciologists working with ice cores, and the rise of the integrative field of Earth System Science, underpinned the emergence of global environmental governance, and enabled the writing of human-Earth histories on geological timescales.