Sunday, June 12, 2011

Are We Heading To A Mass Extension?


The bad news is that our dear planet might be heading towards a mass extinction, where at least 75% of the life on earth will be gone.
The good news is the chances of it happening are pretty low for at least three more centuries.
Scientists writing in the journal Nature are suggesting that we might be on the brink of a massive extinction, the kind of which has only been seen only five times in 540 million years.
“If you look only at the critically endangered mammals–those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations & assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm,” said Anthony Barnosky, an integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley.
Who is responsible for this? Possibly we.
“A modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities,” H. Richard Lane of the National Science Foundation said.
According to Barnosky, if the species that are now considered critically endangered, endangered & vulnerable actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in three to twenty-two centuries.
However, this is not a very solid thing and according to the researchers we still have enough time to rescue these species. For this we're gonna have to deal with threats of storms, destruction of habitat, disease and global warming.
Last time such thing ever happened was 65 million years ago when that meteor fell into whats now Yucatan, causing the massive die-off.
Arctic polar bears are often symbolized as species facing threats because of their icy habitat that is melting fast.

3 comments:

  1. Very sad, but also very true. If we don't take the necessary steps, it is quite possible we could set biodiversity back so far it would take at least 10 million tears to recover.

    http://knowledgeiswonderful.blogspot.com/

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  2. We the so called human beings have become the destroyers of worlds we have become death! As quoted by Oppenhaimer.The genocidal rape of the natural world.We bag and tag everything and we have gone astrey due to our greed!

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  3. To add this all can be still prevented IF! We change our selfish attitude HELL#look at how we treat our own bodies! Just because we live only once THAT!does not mean that we have to destroy everything and no leave our earth as we found it when born . WE ARE ALL IGNORAMUS MAXIMUS SO WE NEED TO ADD UP AND KICK IN TO SAVE EARTH.THATS IT I SAID MY PART AM AT PEACE.GOOD LUCK!

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