Earth's Sixth Great Mass Extinction Event is Upon Us


Great Vocab Didn't Save The Thesaurus From Extinction

"We are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event."

That line belongs in a sci-fi movie, but it was actually said by Gerardo Ceballos to the BBC, now a scientist at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. "If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on," he added.


Species extinction over the past centuries

Ceballos and colleagues from Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, have just published a paper that showed the current extinction rate of vertebrates is more than 100 times greater than normal. Since 1900, there are more than 400 vertebrate species that went extinct.

The study laid the blame on modern human activities, including deforestation, introduction of invasive species, pollution, and, you guessed it, climate change.

"There are examples of species all over the world that are essentially the walking dead," added Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. As species disappear, so goes their benefits to the ecosystem such as crop pollination by honeybees and water purifications in the wetlands. At the current rate of loss, we could lose biodiversity within just three generations. "We are sawing off the limb that we are sitting on," added Ehrlich.


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I agree with the confusion regarding that bar graph. Fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals are all vertebrates. So why is there another bar counting them again? Funny that a kangaroo (also a mammal) is used for representation for all vertebrates. Could have been just about anything I suppose.
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Extinction is the name of the game. It has always been. But the rate of extinction, according to the study, is greatly increased in the past century - and that may not bode well to us humans as we rely on a lot of these species to survive (the pollinator bee, for one).
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There is quite a bit wrong with this analysis. Not saying the environment is not in trouble, but with 2 million species existing today, merely losing a few is not the issue.
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There is something very weird about that bar chart, as it looks like it is double counting things. The top five categories, especially if fish includes the multiple classes of fish, cover all of the vertebrates as is, and it does look like the dark blue box does match the same size as the others combine in every bar. A stacked bar graph inherently shows trends in the total of the groups, and doesn't need a cumulative group to do so...
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