- Spacenews
VIVA – For now, a new study is finding large-scale biodiversity extinction. Although it is not yet similar to a mass extinction, but the earth will be heading for the sixth extinction phase.
It’s in line with the thinking of some ecologists who argue that humanity that already in the sixth mass extinction event, mainly because human-made climate change threatens billions of species.
For information, earth has experienced five mass extinctions in which about 75 percent of the planet's life was destroyed over 2.8 million years.
The Chicxulub big event is also the most famous event because it wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago or has wiped out about 76 percent of the world's species.
In a new study, scientists have predicted that this horrific event may already be in progress.
Planet Bumi.
- owall.net
A Japanese climate scientist from Tohoku University, Kunio Kaiho found in his research that there’s a roughly proportional relationship between Earth's average surface temperature and Earth's biodiversity.
He notes that species may become extinct for a number of reasons. So, to understand what a 'normal' extinction rate looks like, ecologists measure the extinction background rate.
"5 to 10 percent of species extinctions in one million years correspond to background levels," he said.
However, calculating the background to species extinctions for earlier events tends to be very complicated because fossils represent larger and more abundant species, according to David Storch, a professor in the Department of Ecology at Charles University in Prague.
Despite this difficulty, the current extinction rate was about twice as high as the normal extinction rate.
While Kaiho noted that big mass extinctions result in the loss of more than 60 percent of species, small events happen more often.
