THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END
Haven’t you heard this statement time and again from scientists and researchers who believe earth might see an end as a planet and life would become extinct? Well, they aren’t wrong.
A group of biologists at Stanford University have argued that life would become extinct, but not as a result of earth’s exploding or planets colliding, rather as a result of a sixth mass extinction.
NBC News reported that the scientists’ analysis, published in the Science Advances journal, follows up on more than a decade’s worth of warnings about a rapid loss of global biodiversity. Many experts say the loss has risen to the scale seen during five previous global extinction events — the most recent of which occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs died.
This video documents the analysis from experts.
According to researchers, the extinction rate since 1900 has been eight to 100 times higher than the expected background rate.
The researchers noted that amphibians, which account for 7,300 of the species documented by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), have been particularly hard-hit.
“Only 34 extinctions have been documented with a high level of certainty since 1500, yet [more than] 100 species have likely disappeared since 1980,” they said.”The particularly high losses in the last several decades accentuate the increasing severity of the modern extinction crisis,” they reported.