Earth's sixth mass extinction may have already arrived
seen in a half a billion years doesn’t mean to say that they aren’t significant,” he said. “Even though the magnitude is fairly low, present rates are higher than during most past mass extinctions.”
“The modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities,” said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. “Its continued progression, as this paper shows, could result in unforeseen – and irreversible – negative consequences to the environment and to humanity.”
The study originated in a graduate seminar Barnosky organized in 2009 to bring biologists and paleontologists together in an attempt to compare the extinction rate seen in the fossil record with today’s extinction record. These are “like comparing apples and oranges,” Barnosky said. For one thing, the fossil record goes back 3.5 billion years, while the historical record goes back only a few thousand years. In addition, the fossil record has many holes, making it is impossible to count every species that evolved and subsequently disappeared, which probably amounts to 99 percent of all species that have ever existed. A different set of data problems complicates counting modern extinctions.
Dating of the fossil record also is not very precise, Marshall said.
“If we find a mass extinction, we have great difficulty determining whether it was a bad weekend or it occurred over a decade or 10,000 years,” he said. “But without the fossil record, we really have no scale to measure the significance of the impact we are having.”
To get around this limitation, Marshall said, “This paper, instead of calculating a single death rate, estimates the range of plausible rates for the mass extinctions from the fossil record and then compares these rates to where we are now.”
Barnosky’s team chose mammals as a starting point because they are well studied today and are well represented in the fossil record going back some 65 million years. Biologists estimate that within the past 500 years, at least 80 mammal species have gone extinct out of a starting total of 5,570 species.
The team’s estimate for the average extinction rate for mammals is less than two extinctions every million years, far lower than the current extinction rate for mammals.
“It looks like modern extinction rates resemble mass extinction rates, even after setting a high bar for defining ‘mass extinction,’” Barnosky said.
After looking at the list of threatened species maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the team concluded that if all mammals now listed as “critically endangered,” “endangered” and “threatened” go extinct, whether that takes several hundred years or 1,000 years, Earth will be in a true mass extinction.
“Obviously there are caveats,” Barnosky said. “What we know is based on observations from just a very few twigs plucked from the enormous number of branches that make up the tree of life.”
He urges similar studies of groups other than mammals in order to confirm the findings, as well as action to combat the loss of animal and plant species.
“Our findings highlight how essential it is to save critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable species,” Barnosky added. “With them, Earth’s biodiversity remains in pretty good shape compared to the long-term biodiversity baseline. If most of them die, even if their disappearance is stretched out over the next 1,000 years, the sixth mass extinction will have arrived.”
—Read more in Anthony D. Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?” Nature 471, 51–57 (03 March 2011) doi:10.1038/nature09678
