All told, invasive predators have contributed to at least 87 bird, 45 mammal, and ten reptile extinctions, which amounts to more than half of all known extinctions in these groups.
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There have been five mass extinctions in the planet's history.
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Such population crashes can, of course, lead to inevitable extinctions.
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People confronted droughts, floods, extinctions, and collapses of entire civilizations.
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Four of the five mass extinctions did cross the threshold.
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Extinctions indicate that we are making the earth less habitable.
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Bristle worms and their polychaete brothers have survived five mass extinctions.
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It is not just that today's biotopians are averse to extinctions.
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Agriculture would collapse as ecosystems crumble and mass extinctions pile up.
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Size didn't really matter in previous extinctions caused by environmental catastrophes.
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Over time, the planet undergoes widespread desertification and suffers mass extinctions.
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More debatable is the degree to which extinctions are genuinely catastrophic.
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Inertia on the issue of cats will lead to further extinctions.
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More important, we don't know how many extinctions humanity could survive.
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" After synthesizing a vast body of literature and reviewing almost 20 global mass extinctions over the past half billion years — including the most extreme ones, the so-called Big Five — the authors concluded that "large scale volcanism is the main driver of mass extinctions" and that "most extinctions are associated with global warming and proximal killers such as marine anoxia.
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Still, mass extinctions are important pages in the book of Earth's history.
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The earth as we know it has already experienced five big extinctions.
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These local extinctions can have big consequences for the local food chain.
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Hawaii hit hardest in modern-day plant extinctions, The Star Adviser reports.
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This can lead to local extinctions, as species vanish from certain areas.
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The ocean turned jacuzzi-hot near the equator and experienced mass extinctions worldwide.
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This warming period lasted about 200,000 years and led to global mass extinctions.
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But man-made ecological damage doesn't always come in the form of extinctions.
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Nor is there much evidence that forest fragmentation has led to many extinctions.
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Dr. Rolf Schmidt is a paleontologist and expert in mass extinctions at Museums Victoria.
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"The large number of extinctions invasive predators have contributed to was shocking," Doherty said.
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But they do not look like the cascading ecosystem collapses seen in mass extinctions.
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So insect extinctions could have a major impact on our food production and supply.
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Basically, each of these mass extinctions is like, you totally wipe the slate clean.
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Go deeper: Earth faces mass extinctions High-tech reproduction methods could save endangered rhino
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We don't even have proof that such a reversal would lead to mass extinctions, either.
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There is no reason, of course, why all mass extinctions should have the same cause.
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These same changes, to reiterate, have been associated with all previous mass extinctions on Earth.
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Just before the extinctions, volcanoes in what is now Siberia erupted on a tremendous scale.
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In fact, there are a shocking 1,458 pending extinctions that almost nobody is talking about.
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But of course we don't know how many extinctions climate change is going to cause.
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Now, Vu and Oliver manually scour reports from the biology community for any confirmed extinctions.
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As their habitats become fragmented by deforestation and development, these oversized weasels face local extinctions.
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Some think this could signal an impending flip, which could herald mass extinctions and power outages.
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Research on past extinctions provides data on how ecosystems change in response to severe climate change.
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People who study our round planet accept the fact that there were five major mass extinctions.
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Warming is projected to cause worsening droughts, sea level rises, floods, heatwaves and extinctions of wildlife.
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Palaeontologists have identified five horrendous "mass extinctions" in the past 500m years of the Earth's history.
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We tend to study extinctions to understand just how much we have disrupted the planet's ecosystems.
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Can you point to smoking gun evidence that cats are the definite culprit in these extinctions?
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But the planet has seen mass extinctions of species and significant alterations to the climate before.
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Such a place, she reasoned, could sustain life, but just barely; mass extinctions would be common.
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For the first time, extinctions on the mainland are outpacing those on islands, the study says.
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There have been few recorded extinctions on the islands since humans settled them in the 1800s.
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"Future ecosystem disruptions are likely to exceed the relatively limited extinctions observed at the PETM," he said.
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"Most people in the United States don't realize how close to extinctions these plants are," Mehrhoff says.
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Biologists often think of biodiversity loss in terms of extinctions, especially of top-of-the-pile predators.
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As for the acceptability of extinctions, Dr Possingham adds, sadly, that they are already "very much acceptable".
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Today's extinctions are happening 100 to 1000 times faster than the expected, natural rate of die-offs.
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These fish are resilient, but this report underscores that we must act now to prevent further extinctions.
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Island Conservation is a nonprofit that does nothing but prevent extinctions on islands by removing invasive species.
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Trilobites Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions — the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago.
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And they dug into the fossil record to see which sea creatures died out in past extinctions.
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To date, Bd has been blamed for at least 200 population crashes or extinctions on five continents.
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Over the past 22100 million years or so, there have been five mass extinctions on our planet.
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Known as Waimanu, the oldest known penguins lived just a few million years after the mass extinctions.
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However, he argues that understanding more about past extinctions will help scientists to better protect endangered species.
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It has survived mass extinctions before, but there's mounting skepticism it can thrive in the current climate.
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Despite crop relatives' resilience, deforestation and urban development are cutting into wild plant species' habitats, causing extinctions.
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Because of recent extinctions, there are certainly fewer large, or megafaunal, species alive today, Dr. MacPhee said.
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Animals and plants introduced to new areas can harm local species — sometimes causing extinctions — and substantial economic damage.
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The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions.
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Think "extraordinarily" hot Arctic temperatures, rapidly melting glaciers, unprecedented extinctions, and month-after-month of broken climate records.
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"Australia has had the worst track record of any country in the world for species extinctions," she said.
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"Importantly ... these are declines, they are not yet extinctions," said Professor Ken Norris, Director of Science at ZSL.
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The interviews detail nightmarish scenarios: stifling heat, relentless storms and mass extinctions are soon to arrive, we're told.
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Even then, you could see the ravages visited upon the natural world, and I was conscious of extinctions.
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Yeah, but you know, we've been through five mass extinctions before the one that we're living in now.
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The headline-grabbing threats of mass extinctions and deaths may motivate action, he says, but at what cost?
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While many studies have shown that extinctions are more common in fragmented environments, others haven't documented much effect.
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Their ancestral line has survived mass extinctions with ease, most notably the catastrophe that took down the dinosaurs.
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So far, several extinctions have been linked to global warming, such as certain frog species in Central America.
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They will live through an era of rising seas, heat waves, droughts, floods and extinctions that are without precedent.
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The only group of invasive predators that's done more harm is rodents, which are linked to 75 species extinctions.
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The blue-blooded, side-walking arthropods have been around for 200 million years, surviving the last five mass extinctions.
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But it is nothing like the near uninhabitability that characterised large parts of the planet during past mass extinctions.
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From accelerating species extinctions to escalating forest fires, "it will be considerably worse", she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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Over the past 450 million years, these relatives of scorpions and spiders (not crabs) passed through five mass extinctions.
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The event changed the entire environment of Earth, causing some mass extinctions and turning Antarctica into lush tropical region.
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Faster, perhaps, than even during the five mass extinctions of Earth history, including the one that killed the dinosaurs.
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The genera in bold below are the only ones still alive today (the rest were wiped out by extinctions):
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They're the primary cause of island extinctions, since many rare species are only found on one island or archipelago.
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The mass extinctions marked the end of the Mesozoic Era and the beginning of the Cenozoic, which continues today.
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Even the Earth's five fearsome mass extinctions became opportunities for the biosphere's creativity, driving new rounds of evolutionary experiments.
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For years, scientists have debated whether these eruptions caused extinctions limited to that region, or on a global scale.
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They're not necessarily the kinds of marks that you want to be remembered by: extinctions, climate change, ocean acidification.
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But the establishment of a national park, and the efforts of scientists, mean that extinctions are now a rarity.
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The Martu now consume more western food, some only hunt on weekends and invasive species and extinctions still happen.
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"During the great extinctions of the dinosaurs in the Pleistocene, amphibians made it through with no appreciable effect," Mendelson says.
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It's thought that BD is the main culprit behind the 200 frog species extinctions seen in the past several decades.
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Many extinctions do not have to add up to a certified mass extinction in order to be a parlous loss.
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Australia has one of the world's highest rates of mammal extinctions—29 have been recorded over more than two centuries.
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Three-quarters of the world's crops are pollinated by insects, so extinctions could have a major impact on food production.
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Of course, most extinctions will be of as-yet-untallied species whose disappearance will largely be evident through statistical extrapolation.
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Feature A new genetic engineering technology could help eliminate malaria and stave off extinctions — if humanity decides to unleash it.
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Doing so, they found, would create more than 500,000 acres of continuous forest and slow the predicted rate of extinctions.
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Since Cuvier's time, paleontologists and geologists have identified with confidence five major mass extinctions — the Big Five, they call them.
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Although the field provides essential protection from the sun's powerful radiation, fossil records reveal no mass extinctions during past reversals.
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Essentially, it's a record of everything that's happened on Earth up to this point, from mass extinctions to the industrial revolution.
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" "Let's all join together to be part of shepherding the change and help stop unnecessary extinctions of our wildlife for greed.
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It's no secret that our high demand for meat and other animal products is a leading driver of wildlife extinctions today.
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Look, think of the chytrid fungus, the amphibians' apocalypse that has already caused 90 extinctions, with hundreds more on the way.
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This creates a deadly combination that the researchers say could have led to mass extinctions and the end of the dinosaurs.
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We can say with absolute certainty—no hypotheticals needed—that temperature increases lead to species extinctions and abandonment of human settlements.
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"Extinctions took out other animals, but the saiga persisted through modern time," says Kock, one of the authors of the study.
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Ecologists keep warning that many, many more extinctions could soon follow if we don't act quickly to protect what wildlife remains.
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Losing habitats with high concentrations of biodiversity could lead to the extinctions of fascinating species we don't even know exist yet.
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Over the years, modernization has become legislative code for disingenuous efforts to weaken ESA protections, ultimately likely leading to more extinctions.
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The question scientists are debating now: Should society devote its limited resources to reversing past wrongs, or on preventing future extinctions?
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THE ENDS OF THE WORLD: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen.
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But that can't account for the entire decline, and it doesn't come close to excusing humans' roles in causing outright extinctions.
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A seeming paradox of mass extinctions is that scientists rarely find the remains of any of the billions of animals that died.
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That kind of vast spread means that local extinctions are irrelevant: there will always be somebody from elsewhere picking up the torch.
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Maybe it will harm our technology, but not us—there isn't firm evidence linking these field reversals to mass extinctions, for example.
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The panel, titled "Recent Climatic Changes and Extinctions," misstates the role that human emissions of greenhouse gases play in causing global warming.
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This creative aspect to the current crisis calls into question the equation of today's depredations with the mass extinctions of the past.
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Unlike past mass extinctions, this event is driven by human actions that are dismantling and disrupting natural ecosystems and changing Earth's climate.
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The crisis took hold after a series of volcanic events and led to lower average temperatures, crop failures, hunger and mass extinctions.
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Insect biomass is declining by a staggering 2.5% a year, a rate that indicates widespread extinctions within a century, the report found.
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"Understanding past extinctions will help us to predict how vulnerable current species are, and therefore help us to protect them more effectively."
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Many experts consider 2°C of warming to be unacceptably high, increasing the risk of deadly heat waves, droughts, flooding, and extinctions.
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With the exception of the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, that is much faster than any of the other extinctions.
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Substantial investment is needed to build a global system for the conservation of threatened plants that can prevent species extinctions, the researchers wrote.
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Spivack pointed to climate change, nuclear weapons, natural disasters, and past cycles of mass extinctions as reasons to worry about preserving human civilization.
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Steen, an ecologist at Auburn University, started the annual extinction list in 2012 to establish a clear, reliable source for the planet's extinctions.
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Rising seas, mass extinctions, super droughts, increased wildfires, intense hurricanes, decreased crops and fresh water and the melting of the Arctic are expected.
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Losos, to her surprise, found that outdoor recreation was the second leading cause of species extinctions on the public lands, after water development.
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When those areas face a loss of plant and animal species, there can be similar extinctions in words, phrases, or even entire languages.
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Twin calamities marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and scientists are presenting new evidence of which drove one of Earth's great extinctions.
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Nonfiction THE ENDS OF THE WORLD Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions By Peter Brannen Illustrated.
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These picks cover the devastation of tsunamis, earthquakes and wildfires; the Spanish flu epidemic of 27.953; mass extinctions; the potential for nuclear annihilation.
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In the Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous eras burrowing animals ("prehistoric preppers", he calls them) survived the great extinctions that obliterated other fauna, including dinosaurs.
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Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments.
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But one of them, Soulseek, weathered three of file-sharing's mass extinctions, and has quietly remained one of the best sources of obscure music.
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As for Melott's hypothesis that the single supernova 2.6 million years ago led directly to extinctions, he points to a few lines of evidence.
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But other extinctions have occurred in pristine rainforests like this -- places that look healthy but the frogs are telling us there's something clearly wrong.
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As with extinctions, these declines have serious consequences for the natural systems we all depend on for clean air and water, food, and shelter.
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We know climate is changing, and maybe influencing that, but the problem is that most species extinctions are caused by multiple and interacting effects.
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Official estimates at the time put the number of extinctions at one per year; Dr. Myers thought it was closer to one per day.
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It was only when a sudden and rapid warming period caused changes in plant growth and rainfall around the world that notable extinctions occurred.
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And why haven't we, the people, acted to solve the greatest environmental challenges of our time — global climate change, habitat loss and widespread extinctions?
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In this case, the partners were looking at space exploration, but in the context of environmental changes on Earth that are leading to extinctions.
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Carbon has been fashioned by evolution into a staggering array of plants and animals, many of which are threatened by the current spasm of extinctions.
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Rising sea levels, super droughts, mass extinctions, extreme weather and the melting of the Arctic would mean life as we know it would change dramatically.
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"Preventing these extinctions requires knowing what species are at risk and where they live," Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, the study's lead author, said in a statement.
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The scientists concluded that the extinctions of these Patagonian megafauna were initiated by an environmental change, but it became an ecosystemwide change because of mankind.
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In the southern ocean many groups have decreased in size by about 90 percent and there are extinctions in the large whales of the Atlantic.
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Temperatures are rising faster today than during many of the great extinctions and upheavals of Earth history, and the consequences are going to be severe.
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MacPhee said he didn't doubt the findings were valid, but was unsure that similar extinctions across the globe could be blamed on the same causes.
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If the carbon cycle is disrupted over long timescales, extinctions follow, but only if the rate of change is faster than an ecosystem can adapt.
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"We are putting a lot of pressure on modern species, and extinctions are happening at an unprecedented rate," he told Ed Yong at the Atlantic.
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It's still an open question what will result from our continuing chemistry experiment with the planet, but the history of mass extinctions counsels extreme caution.
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"Ninety percent of bird extinctions in recent centuries have been of species on islands," said Stuart Butchart, BirdLife's chief scientist and the paper's lead author.
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To better forecast our future, they will continue to dig up fossils of the past — particularly those from one of the greatest extinctions on Earth.
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"The broader message is that we might have underestimated the number of primate extinctions caused by humans in the past," she wrote in an email.
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The planet has an unstable orbit, resulting in mass extinctions for the aliens, who now realize that Earth could be a suitable new home for them.
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Extinctions cause a lot of destruction, but they also present opportunities for new life to evolve, and so are really important to the evolution of life.
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The consequences are stark, from rising seas that could swallow island nations to deadly heatwaves, mass extinctions in the natural world and the spread of diseases.
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The team used a technique called population viability analysis, which is a statistical method of predicting if extinctions of animal groups might occur within certain timeframes.
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"This means that sooner or later human activity will introduce pathogens to Antarctic fauna that could cause mass deaths and even local extinctions," González-Solís said.
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But since the end of the Ice Age, when humans started affecting species, there's been no evidence of any human-driven ape extinctions, according to Hansford.
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Previous studies have suggested that mass extinctions may occur with regularity, and some researchers have linked this perceived periodicity to pulses of comet or asteroid strikes.
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But temperatures are rising faster today than during many of the great extinctions and upheavals of Earth history, and the consequences are going to be severe.
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Farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining, along with global warming, are speeding up extinctions and devastating ecosystems "at an unprecedented pace," an exhaustive U.N. study concluded.
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Even our current path is generally thought by scientists to present catastrophic possibilities, including sea-level rise, increases in extreme weather, species extinctions and agricultural disruptions.
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Just take a second to think about what's at stake: We're talking super droughts, scarier storms, sinking islands, flooded cities and mass extinctions in the animal world.
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Whereas the mass extinctions of the past tended to target organisms in certain environments, the sixth mass extinction is poised to hit the biggest animals the hardest.
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This is as far as the research predicts, but we can imagine what might happen next: Species die off in mass extinctions, and, maybe, we die too.
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Some scientists have even suggested that repeated encounters with nearby "death stars" are responsible for the cycle of mass extinctions on Earth, though the theory is controversial.
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Josh Fox concludes his anti-fracking "Gasland" trilogy by trying to find hope amid the worst consequences of climate change: stifling heat, relentless storms and mass extinctions.
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The next generation after us will live through much more severe consequences, stemming from increased carbon emissions, ocean acidity, and mass extinctions, all accelerated by human influence.
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In this way, the bits of information we encounter in her paintings evoke a collective urgency in the face of various impending extinctions, culminating with human beings.
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Multiple extinctions of birds in Hawaii are predicted as the mosquito-borne avipoxvirus spreads into mountain forests where it was once too cold for mosquitoes to live.
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Rather than extinctions, the paper looks at how populations are doing: the disappearance of entire populations, and the decrease of the number of individuals within a population.
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Interestingly, it's a conclusion that jibes well with similar, but unrelated, research, in which scientists claim that humans weren't responsible for many megafaunal extinctions of the Ice Age.
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What Pinksy and his team found were local extinctions, meaning over half of the 108 sea creatures they studied left their native homes and moved to cooler waters.
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Notably, Australia too has suffered extinctions of endemic marsupials (like giant wombats and immense, flat-faced kangaroos) suspiciously close to the timing of first contact with placental invaders.
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The existence of a previously unknown gibbon that lived just 2,200 years ago suggests that throughout history, humans may have caused even more ape extinctions than we thought.
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The report also warned that if extinctions come to pass, it could threaten the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of food crops that depend on these creatures.
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" "It saddens me that in the 21st century, with all our knowledge and power, we are hearing more and more stories of possible extinctions due to people's choice.
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Dog lovers have no right to be smug, either: woof-woof is also making a killing out there, contributing to nearly a dozen extinctions as an invasive predator.
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It was, Keitt said, not just a question of good stewardship but our moral imperative to do everything in our power to stop these extinctions and protect biodiversity.
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Each of those notches on the global thermometer, when unpacked across this vast planet of ours, has far-reaching impacts on ice melt, drought, heat waves, and extinctions.
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The report, a summary of which was released on Monday, emphasizes humanity's devastating impact on the natural world, which is accelerating extinctions at an unprecedented rate in human history.
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The last few hundred years have borne witness to mass extinctions that occur much quicker than the so-called natural "background rate" of one to five species per year.
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The accord seeks to limit rising temperatures that have been linked to increasing economic damage from desertification, extinctions of animals and plants, heat waves, floods and rising sea levels.
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With ongoing extinctions, climate change and the resulting shifts in habitat, there is an urgent need for humans to make space, share space and get along with other species.
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See, for instance, this 2012 essay by Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier, which argues that ethical arguments alone haven't been able to stem the rising tide of deforestation and extinctions.
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These campaigns, the new study points out, are full of false information, such as the suggestion that gardening causes toxoplasmosis and that bird extinctions are only a threat on islands.
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It should come as little surprise, therefore, that these animals, which emerged 350 million years ago during the Cambrian Era, have managed to survive no less than five mass extinctions.
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"Models predict concerning declines, and even local extinctions by 2100, for Pacific populations of blue and fin whales and Atlantic and Indian Ocean fin and humpback whales," the team reported.
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In 1968, the astronomers K.D. Terry and W.H. Tucker suggested that mass extinctions might have been caused by nearby exploding stars, and the hypothesis has been reanimated several times since.
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While many species were able to tolerate a moderate increase in maximum temperatures, 50% of the species had local extinctions if maximum temperatures increased by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius.
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The greatest known global warming and mass extinctions occurred 2023 million years ago when basaltic lava covered an area of Siberia equivalent to 87 percent of the contiguous United States.
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Her classmate, 9-year-old Iris Adderley, said she was worried about the quickening pace of extinctions in nature, and the risks of sea level rise, including flooding in Britain.
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Scientists: Doomsday asteroid whacked Earth The research, published in the journal of Nature Communications on Thursday, is giving scientists more insight into one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet.
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In the last half billion years, Earth has undergone what's known as the Big Five extinctions, triggered, among other things, by volcanoes, an intense ice age, and a cataclysmic asteroid collision.
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But given how asteroids have been implicated in local and global extinctions, it's interesting to consider the role that these extraterrestrial objects have played in stimulating and protecting life on Earth.
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"We are as close to scientific consensus as you ever get in terms of free-ranging cats promoting zoonotic disease, killing large numbers of wild animals, and causing island extinctions," he said.
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Our addiction to fossil fuels has pushed the planet into a "no-analog" state that's "likely to result in widespread future extinctions," an exceedingly humorless study published today in Nature Geoscience concludes.
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The idea that today's decimation is qualitatively different to the mass extinctions of yore, and that a compensating mass speciation is already under way, seems at some level to be quite encouraging.
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And a 1995 paper by the physicists John Ellis and David Schramm concluded that catastrophic supernovas could be expected every few hundred million years, in keeping with the pace of mass extinctions.
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But unlike those of iron-60 and WIMPs, the mark of muons would not remain in the fossil record, making the direct connection between muons and extinctions all but impossible to prove.
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The group launched a fresh wave of international actions on Monday, aiming to get governments to address an ecological crisis caused by climate change and accelerating extinctions of plant and animal species.
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Global average temperatures have hit record highs in each of the past three years, and warming is projected to cause worsening droughts, sea level rises, floods, heat waves and extinctions of wildlife.
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Humans share a lot of traits with the past survivors of mass extinctions—we are adaptable, we are mobile, and we are able to modify our environments to be better for us.
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Although the United States is the biggest cumulative emitter, China recently overtook it as the biggest annual emitter of gases blamed for causing heat waves, droughts, species extinctions and rising sea levels.
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Why it's needed: Studies have shown that half of all species are now experiencing "local extinctions" and that protected spaces are essential to maintain some semblance of biodiversity in the 21st century.
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More than 10 percent of Earth's vegetated surface is highly sensitive to variations in the climate, according to the report, and widespread extinctions due to climate change are expected by mid-century.
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More than 853 percent of Earth's vegetated surface is highly sensitive to variations in the climate, according to the report, and widespread extinctions due to climate change are expected by mid-century.
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"The palaeobiological record shows that climate change can cause serious local and global marine extinctions, but history need not repeat itself if humanity mitigates the effects of climate change," the team said.
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The end-Guadalupian event has been side-stepped in part because it was rapidly followed by the mother of all mass extinctions—the Permian-Triassic event, also known as the Great Dying.
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The group launched a fresh wave of international actions on Monday, aiming to get governments to address an ecological crisis caused by climate change and accelerating extinctions of plant and animal species.
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In a 2014 paper, Pimm and colleagues concluded that species are now going extinct at rates 1,000 times higher than that: There are now 100 probable extinctions per million species per year.
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Young people attending the youth climate summit were angry that decades of climate negotiations had failed to stave off climate impacts from accelerating species extinctions to superstorms, shrinking glaciers and failed harvests.
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Here he is on nature and extinctions in The New York Review of Books, and you ought to think about it this weekend when you go for a walk as you should.
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In some cases, like Hawaii, where it's essentially ground zero for species extinctions now in part because of cats, as conservation ecologists we've got to remove these threats, because these are invasive species.
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The threat of climate change, decreasing agricultural diversity, extinctions, or a single catastrophic event has given rise to the need for such a safeguard, should reintroduction of species become necessary in the future.
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Weary as we are of despairing over the mass extinctions being caused by hyperdevelopment, it's tempting to take comfort in the ability of some animals to shrug off our brutalization of the planet.
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Insect-eating birds have been shown to be less resilient to high-intensity land use than low-intensity land use, so any increase in the former could bring about further extinctions, the authors say.
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"It is quite possible that the first marine species extinctions caused by humans were species dependent on whale falls in the North Atlantic, where large whales were depleted in the early 1800," Smith said.
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Mass extinctions are no doubt catastrophic, but they are only tragic if nature is viewed as something perfect that we are destroying, rather than as a state of flux in which we are participating.
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In the past five centuries, extinctions have become less dramatic but arguably more constant: a slow drip of change as humans have spread across the globe, clearing forests, planting crops, building cities and roads.
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Shark fossils date back more than 400 million years -- that means sharks managed to outlive the dinosaurs, survive mass extinctions, and continue to serve an important role near the top of underwater food chains.
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The history of life on Earth is a history of extinctions and ecological failures, but it is also a story of formation of new forms and spread of those new forms around the world.
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Building the piece, the artists first connected "Extinction Gong" to a virtual private network (VPN) gateway over a 4G uplink, polling the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List for any extinctions.
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Based on statistical analysis and detailed searches, scientists think they've found more than 90 percent of asteroids about half a mile wide or larger, each of which would cause global extinctions if they impacted earth.
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There have been five major mass extinctions in Earth's history and the PTME was by far the most catastrophic, killing 70% of all terrestrial species and somewhere between 80% and 96% of all marine species.
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"We can't afford to sit by and watch climate change drive all the world's coral reefs to extinctions by the end of the century," Julia Baum, a reef researcher at the University of Victoria, said.
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Bennu is not large enough to wreak planetwide extinctions — the asteroid that is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was about six miles wide — but a collision would be devastating.
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That conflict is detrimental to wildlife but rarely causes extinctions is the most important message of the paper, according to Edd Hammill, an ecologist at Utah State University, who was not involved in the research.
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But other environmentalists were proponents of the project, arguing that the benefits of a clean, sustainable source of energy offset the danger to wildlife and that mass bird extinctions were less likely than commonly believed.
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Starks' previous venture was a pioneer in the climate space: AMEE (Avoidance of Mass Extinctions Engine) organized the world's environmental data and standards into an open web-service, raising $10M and selling in 2015 PredictX.
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Abandoning fossil fuels isn't just necessary for the future of the planet -- to save low-lying countries and cities, tame supercharged droughts and avoid mass extinctions -- it's also a way for this country to make money.
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Even as people marveled at the idea that an entire group of animals could unceremoniously die off, as evidenced by fossils found on the American frontier, they were accelerating contemporary extinctions on the very same land.
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"This happened not just by hunting these mammals to extinction, but by causing demographic decline of keystone species, such as very large herbivores, that led to ecosystems' collapse and a cascade of further extinctions," Bocherens added.
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Sometimes a friend will read something on the internet about how the planet has survived mass extinctions before this one, about how maybe this isn't the end, that Earth can take it, that we might survive.
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Read more about mass extinctions: Earth Is On The Cusp Of A Sixth Mass Extinction Life on Earth will look dramatically different by mid-century Forget being 'on the edge' — Earth is entering a sixth mass extinction
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Even if muon showers and iron-60 from dying stars cannot be directly linked to extinctions, their presence demonstrates a profound truth: Earth, and everything on it, is a part of the universe, not apart from it.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads However we hold each other under the attractive weight & prior extinctions, still with us, but not turning us still, we hold with an inner calm that is a closed, dying system.
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Climate change already presents a demoralizing array of challenges — melting ice sheets and species extinctions — but the ultimate severity of its impacts depends greatly on how drastically technology and societies can change over the next few decades.
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More than 22,22 scientists from 22.2 countries warn the evidence is clear: Current and future human health and wellbeing are at serious risk from climate change, deforestation, loss of access to freshwater, species extinctions, and human population growth.
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"The extinctions we face pose and even greater threat to civilization than climate change, for the simple reason they are irreversible," Peter Raven, a biologist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, told the Observer ahead of the Vatican conference.
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Right now Earth is surrounded by over 13,20153 chunks of space rock, and if one of them bumps into us, the damage could be enough to flatten cities, wipe countries off the map, or even cause global extinctions.
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Though the scientists don't go into it, such a large, rapid change in the Earth's climate should be expected to radically reshape its flora and fauna as well, most notably through a rise in the rate of extinctions.
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In 2014, Randall and Reece hypothesized that the disk might account for possible 30- to 35-million-year intervals between escalated meteor and comet activity, a statistically weak signal that some scientists have tentatively tied to periodic mass extinctions.
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"The pace of modern insect extinctions surpasses that of vertebrates by a large margin," write the authors of an alarming new review in Biological Conservation of the scientific literature on insect population declines published in the past 4003 years.
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Dr. Graham said that he and his fellow scientists were surprised that the availability of water was such a powerful limiting factor for the woolly mammoths, and that it has often been overlooked in the study of prehistoric extinctions.
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But even if it's the former, and we collapse almost as soon, in geologic time, as we got started, the record in the rocks of the extinctions we caused will remain, as eternal as the schist in Central Park.
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At least five major mass extinctions have occurred within the past 450 million years, each of which wiped out at least two-thirds of all species on the planet and left permanent marks in the geological and fossil records.
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But Nick Haddad, a conservation biologist at North Carolina State University who has studied wildlife corridors extensively but was not involved in the study, argued that corridors can slow extinctions in the short term while larger efforts get underway.
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Recently, he and a team of colleagues confronted a new question: If molecular biologists can potentially reconstruct extinct species, such as the woolly mammoth, should society devote its limited resources to reversing past wrongs, or on preventing future extinctions?
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Many countries, led by China and the European Union, have reaffirmed backing this week for the pact, meant to be the cornerstone of efforts to limit heatwaves, floods, extinctions of animal and plant species and a rise in sea levels.
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To understand this, I would start by saying that catastrophic extinctions of the magnitude unleashed by that impact change the dynamic and course of evolution in such a profound way that it would never play out as it would undisturbed.
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"If we are to avoid climate chaos, we have to do much more: business as usual means more extreme weather, species extinctions and a grim future for young people," said Mike Childs, head of research at Friends of the Earth.
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Old-school denial was on particularly stark display at a hearing we held in May in the House Natural Resources Committee on an issue that truly shouldn't be political: the risk of mass extinctions in the age of climate change.
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This week, the UN released the summary of a new report that suggested one million different species on Earth are at risk of extinction due to the actions of humans, and that humans are accelerating extinctions at an unprecedented rate.
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The dominant theme running through the I.U.C.N.'s seminars was the fact that we are bumping up against and piercing planetary boundaries — on forests, oceans, ice melt, species extinctions and temperature — from which Mother Nature will not be able to recover.
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What extinctions are happening will become more impactful than WWI, WWII or the Great Depression combined, because now we have an enormous, almost unfathomable ecological tab to reckon with, and not just the folly of an economic system run amuck.
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Governments in 2010 agreed a series of targets for protecting nature, including halting extinctions of threatened species by 2020, but scientists say they still have only a hazy idea of the pace at which animals and plants are dying out.
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These potential extinctions, according to a new report from the United Nations, are all breeds of agricultural animals: cattle, goats, pigs, chickens, and so on, the kinds of livestock that humans rely upon for food and labor around the world.
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The rate of climate change "is too fast for many species to adapt, which is likely to result in widespread future extinctions in marine and terrestrial environments that will substantially exceed" any episode in the Cenozoic Era, going back 66 million years.
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In the "Big Five" mass extinctions whole chunks of the planet became deadly to most of their inhabitants as severe shifts in sea level, climate and ocean chemistry (along with, in one case, an asteroid impact) caused ecosystems to topple like dominoes.
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"In the past 30 years or so, we've seen really dramatic, really rapid extinctions for frog populations all over the world," says Steven Whitfield, a conservation ecologist at Zoo Miami who joined Pijanowski and me on the visit to Costa Rica this summer.
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They were able to date 71 of those samples, and then looked into whether the extinctions of those species were associated with other known events — ice ages or warming periods, for example — in the annals of either climate change or human existence.
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At last year's United Nations climate summit meeting in Paris, countries agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, a point beyond which the widespread drought, flooding and extinctions of species are expected to kick in.
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You might forget that no cameras were present when the first sea creatures crawled onto land, and that the great extinctions and climactic upheavals of earth's past — to say nothing of the aftermath of the big bang — were not captured on video.
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Though humans have been implicated in the extinctions of many megafauna species, like woolly mammoths and giant sloths, Kosintsev and his colleagues think our ancestors kept their distance from this rhino and that climate change was likely the main factor in its demise.
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When they were nearly wiped out in the northern Pacific, their prey, sea urchins, ballooned in number and decimated kelp forests, turning a rich environment into a barren one and also possibly contributing to numerical extinctions, notably of the Steller's sea cow.
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Paleontologists tell us of five major extinctions, the last of which was brought to a head, in theory, by a mischievous asteroid that did in the dinosaurs and coated the world in a thin layer of iridium-rich sediment 66 million years ago.
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To achieve the more ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a benchmark that would prevent countless extinctions and limit destructive sea-level rise, carbon emissions would need to be slashed by 7.6 percent every year for the next decade.
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"Understanding past extinctions events -- their causes, and eventual climatic and biotic recoveries -- is crucial therefore when trying to wrap our heads around the many possible outcomes of our current trajectory towards disastrous climate change, ecosystem destruction, and potential mass extinction," Schoene said.
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"It was in that time that you get this wave of extinctions," said Doug Bird, an author of the study and an anthropologist at Penn State University who has been working with the Martu to better understand how they care for their land.
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Owing to a dearth of fossils, paleontologists have struggled to understand the origins of the modern European bison, one of just a few large land mammals to survive the late Pleistocene extinctions at the end of the last Ice Age some 2000,220 years ago.
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"He was just so curious and full of awe and wonder of this planet and this rich abundance of life, and I've had to accept that he's not going to experience that" as species extinctions accelerate in the face of climate change, Burkhardt said.
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BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A flagship report on the state of nature, backed by about 130 countries, warned on Monday that the rate of extinctions of plant and animal species was accelerating and would likely cause serious damage to human wellbeing around the world.
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Around the same time as talk of Planet Nine heated up, astronomer Daniel Whitmire published a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that resurrects the old idea of an unseen planet or small mass star that causes periodic extinctions on Earth.
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That's the hypothesis presented in a new paper published in Astrobiology, which links evidence of a supernova that occurred 2.6 million years ago with simultaneous extinctions of many marine megafauna species on Earth—including the epic Meg, which measured some 60 feet in length.
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Even if the most ambitious goal of the Paris agreement is met and the world's temperature doesn't rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (a scenario that's highly unlikely), almost all warm-water coral reefs are projected to suffer widespread extinctions, the IPCC report concluded.
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With January going in the record books as the warmest January in 141 years and statistical analysis done by NOAA scientists predicting 2020 to be one of the five warmest years on record, the researchers believe there will be more local extinctions across the globe.
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"The result is truly extraordinary and a stark contrast to the turbulent history of replacements, large-scale admixtures and extinctions that is seen in modern human history," said a statement from Kay Prüfer, study supervisor and group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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They can't imagine the things we fear: the shift from rule of law to rule by vindictive authoritarians; mass deportations and internment camps for suspected aliens; sea rise and extinctions as climate regulations are gutted; voting rights and employment protections eroded; harassment and violence from white supremacists.
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Scientists may have solved the mystery behind one of the five mass extinctions in Earth's history – a time 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period when a meteor struck the Earth and wiped out dinosaurs and nearly every living creature on the planet.
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This is a rate of carbon release probably 10 times faster than anything scientists can find in the geological record for the past 23 million years, including cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that are linked with several of the mass extinctions of life that have occurred during that time.
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The handwritten titles on the book spines provide clues to the anonymous artist's interests, from Hilma af Klint, Ad Reinhardt, and Ritual Art of India, to Storm Surge, Adam Sobel's book about Hurricane Sandy, and The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert's chilling study of human-induced mass extinctions.
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Dr. Voyles and other frog researchers found that many of the dead frogs were covered with the same aggressive skin fungus, known as Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd. As Bd spread from forest to forest, and continent to continent, researchers feared that amphibians might suffer mass extinctions.
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Both Megachirella's appearance in the middle Triassic and the later remains of rhynchocephalian fossils make a strong case that the earliest squamates emerged toward the end of the Permian, a period 270 million years ago that was abruptly shattered by one of the worst known mass extinctions.
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This mass die-off is "in the same category with the other major mass extinctions," according to a new paper in the journal Historical Biology that outlined the findings of several studies into the end-Guadalupian, and countered recent research that downplays the severity of the event.
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In 2000, the scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer traced the start of this new era to the latter part of the 18th century, noting the ravages that have come since: a human population explosion, species extinctions, greenhouse gases and all the grim rest.
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The most commonly given definition of a mass extinction, that is one of the big five mass extinctions that have taken place in the last half-billion years, has been when 75 percent or more of species that have existed up to that time become extinct.
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Whether or not a supervolcano has driven humans to the brink of extinction before, such massive volcanic eruptions — which release toxic gases and cool the planet by filling the upper atmosphere with sunlight-deflecting compounds — are suspected to have triggered several other mass extinctions in the fossil record.
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"Using iconic movie monsters (who were often the by-products of corporate greed and human egotism manipulating nature to spawn our own annihilation) [we] present the consequences of pollution, climate change, genetic engineering, for profit destruction of animal habitats, and species' extinctions," Laura Dumm tells The Creators Project.
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Conceptual image of an unoccupied ship designed to generate clouds and reflect sunlight away from Earth (Image: Stephen Salter)To prevent the many environmental calamities wrought by climate change—from rising sea levels and megadroughts through to superstorms and mass extinctions—we'll begrudgingly have to start geoengineering the planet.
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Earth will heat up by end of this century, studies say Extinctions and super droughts are on the horizon for planet Earth, according to two new studies that show temperature is likely to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of this century.
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To slow what could become the world's sixth mass extinction — caused by humans, instead of an asteroid strike or natural climate shift, like previous mass extinctions — more than 100 developing and developed nations will have to quickly get on board to address climate change, according to the report.
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Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatán Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth.
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"I think we're going to get quite a number of extinctions within next 50 years if things go on the way they are," said Anthony B. Rylands, a senior research scientist at Conservation International and a co-author of the new study, which was published in Science Advances.
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Kiss by kiss I walk across your scarred landscape,your border walls, your dam, your reservations,until our little extinctions transform into peak oiland push through the narrow pipelines of our veins,until we bloom wide, like water hyacinth, until we areand we are more than a fracture in geologic time.
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The tragedy of mass extinctions and an ice-less Antarctica makes all the plans my partner and I have seem like what they are: the kind of delusional bougie dreams that are a by-product of the self-obsessed culture that got us into this mess in the first place.
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While American Museum of Natural History mammal specialist Ross MacPhee told LiveScience that this new study was "a really substantial improvement in conceiving how these extinctions occurred," he saw some limits in the methods used to analyze the rate of climate change, such as a limited number of ice core samples.
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The greatest generation rebuilt the world economy from the ashes of World War II. But this explosive growth came at extreme cost: fertile bottomlands buried in strip malls and suburban sprawl, accelerated deforestation, extinctions of native species, smoggy air and poisoned waters, and not least putting carbon combustion on overdrive.
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There is no question that the world faces a global climate crisis and we need to demand action, but shaming people to stop them from flying could very well have the immediate reverse effect of accelerating extinctions and ushering in the rapid loss of many of the world's last remaining wild areas.
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"Given that primate range regions overlap extensively with a large, and rapidly growing, human population characterized by high levels of poverty, global attention is needed immediately to reverse the looming risk of primate extinctions and to attend to local human needs in sustainable ways, " wrote the study's authors, who hail from nearly 30 international institutions.
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After all, we know that Earth has already taken several punches to the face in the past, sparking mass extinctions in some cases, and that we are no doubt currently on collision courses with asteroids that would be happy to relieve our planet of its overburdensome life at some unspecified point in the future.
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Their ancestors evolved some 350 million years ago, and they have persisted through three global mass extinctions, including the Permian extinction 251 million years ago, which is known among scientists as the Great Dying because of the number of species lost: an estimated 80 to 5003 percent in the oceans and 70 percent on land.
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Losing this ice, the study explained, would be the warming equivalent of an extra 25 years of emissions at current rates, pushing us more quickly past the threshold of warming that scientists say could lead to catastrophic damage, from more intense heat waves and coastal flooding to extinctions of species and threats to food supplies.
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You talk about how if you take a really big-picture view, the history of life on this planet is a series of massive extinctions followed by exuberant reflowerings of life, and that the types and numbers of species on Earth, as well as where certain species live, have changed continuously and dramatically over time.
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The question is not whether two degrees of warming is riskier than 1.5 degrees (of course it is), or whether we are using, as some claim, more than one earth's worth of resources per year (of course not), or how many extinctions per year are sustainable without a collapse of human societies (why allow any at all?).
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Since proposing the model in 703, Randall and her collaborators have argued that a dark disk might explain gamma rays coming from the galactic center, the planar distribution of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way, and even periodic upticks of comet impacts and mass extinctions on Earth, discussed in Randall's 2015 popular-science book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs.
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Ever since he realized, while he was doing fieldwork in the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia, that there were ever fewer native mammals to observe — precipitating what some have called the second wave of extinctions, after the initial impact of the First Fleet's arrival — Woinarski has published a series of research papers looking at the effects of cats on wildlife.
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