From the start of this blog, my focus is at human behaviour, how it is forcing climate change and leading overall living being into crisis. This is also an urge for all of us to think and act responsibly. Some of the issues mentioned before are quite behavioural, soft and appealing. Whereas some issues might be quite new and different to you. Here in this post today, I will discuss some papers that has mentioned about upcoming Great Extinction, Palaeoclimatologist has describes about the five mass extinctions in different phases of earth climate change. Now different studies are arguing that sixth mass extinction has now started.
Dinosaurs went extinction before about 65 million year ago during Cretaceous. Now the Holocene seems to be the worst scenario after than on biodiversity loss. We have already loss 338 + 279 (extinction at wild) species of vertebrates since 1500AD (IUCN red list). Ceballos, et al. (2015) uses lower than conservative for mass extinction rate estimates. 2E/MSY i.e. 2 mammal extinctions per 10,000 species per 100 years. IUCN extinction list was considered for analysis. Although the estimate was based on half of conservative rate, using which should increase the extinction period, the result showed that the extinction rate was 100 times more than than the background rate for mass extinction. Based on this estimates of extinctions, the species that went extinction in 20th centuries would have lived for another few thousand of year. This could be a hint to Sixth Great Mass extinction.
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| Adopted from: Ceballos et al. 2015 |
Similarly another paper by Barnosky et al. (2011) has used palaeontological information coupled with IUCN red list to access the extinction of vertebrate in recent and historical mass extinction. Holocene extinction has been analysed by using short period of time and matched with historic extinction in millennia. The paper suggest the rate of current time extinction is higher than it was during previous mass extinction, indicating Holocene mass extinction has started,
Leakey and Lewin (1996) estimates that 30 thousand species get extinct each year because of human activities. Wake et al. (2008) has also observed a very critical status with amphibian, which could by now entered the mass extinction phase.
The sixth mass extinction are forced by Human activities and there are none to blame upon. Both of the paper focus on effective conservation effort that could help reducing the extinction rate.
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| Source: Coreaybradshaw |
