How to See a Mass Extinction If It's Right in Front of You
New Haven, Conn. - A Yale-led study urges scientists to move their focus from species extinction to species rarity in order to recognize, and avoid, a mass extinction in the modern world.
Writing in the journal Nature the week of Dec. 16, Yale's Pincelli Hull and colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution argue that modern extinction rates may be a poor measure of whether we're in the midst of a mass extinction event today -- something many scientists suspect may be happening. Instead, Hull and her co-authors contend, the best way to see a mass extinction in real time is by studying changes in species and ecosystems.
Earth has experienced more than a dozen mass extinction events, when the great diversity of life on Earth disappeared and was replaced by a flora or fauna often entirely unlike what had come before. The largest of these events (the most recent, which wiped out the dinosaurs, was 66 million years ago) have collectively become known as the "Five Mass Extinctions." In recent years, Hull says, some have argued that Earth is entering a sixth mass extinction event. It also was the topic of Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Sixth Extinction."
"I am an extinction scientist. In my research I dissect past extinctions to work out what occurred and why. The idea of being able to pin down whether we are in a sixth mass extinction, based on extinction rates measured today, was absolutely astounding to me," said Hull, who is lead author of the study and an assistant professor of geology and geophysics. "It implied a deep mechanistic and predictive understanding of how mass extinctions unfold that I wasn't sure we actually had."
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