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Earth Science

Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has 'Probably Started' (vice.com) 128

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Over the past 450 million years, life on Earth has been devastated by at least five mass extinctions, which are typically defined as catastrophes that wipe out more than 75 percent of species in a short amount of time. Many scientists have proposed that we are entering a Sixth Mass Extinction, this time driven by human activity, though debates still rage over the validity and consequences of this claim. From a report: Now, a team led by Robert Cowie, research professor at the University of Hawaii's Pacific Biosciences Research Center, argues that "the Sixth Mass Extinction has begun on land and in freshwater seems increasingly likely," according to a recent article published in Biological Reviews. "We consider that the Sixth Mass Extinction has probably started and present arguments to counter those who would deny this," said the team, which also included biologists Philippe Bouchet and Benoît Fontaine of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France, in the article.

"Denying it is simply flying in the face of the mountain of data that is rapidly accumulating, and there is no longer room for skepticism, wondering whether it really is happening," added the authors. Cowie and his colleagues refer to a multitude of studies cataloging the extinction of species across clades, but the article is primarily built around their research into mollusks, an invertebrate family that includes snails, clams, and slugs. This focus counteracts the disproportionate attention that vertebrates, such as birds and mammals, receive in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, among other conservation efforts.
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Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has 'Probably Started' More

Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has 'Probably Started'

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  • Ya think? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nucrash ( 549705 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @03:49PM (#62188947)

    Considering how many species are already starting to be critically endangered, we have likely been in the 6th extinction for more than a century now. Some conservation programs have slowed various species from dying off, but ultimately we are already on the path of destruction and too few people are trying to stop it.

    • There may not be a lot of Pandas around but there's a shitload of Possums. Mollusks are going extinct? Tell that to the zebra mussel.

      • Dinosaurs are going extinct? Tell that to the mouse plague!!!1!

        My dude this isn't a good argument. Yes there are species doing well. I suspect you'll find that for most extinctions. In the long term big extinctions clear the field for new species.But there are also lucky species that are put into a position where they can ride it out and find themselves in a situation where the can really go large with all their competition relegated to the paleontological memory hole.

        The problem is, that might not include

    • Humans aren't going extinct. Think about it this way, for every human walking around, we displace (kill and destroy) a certain amount of biomass. The way our economy and how we consume is setup allows us to export that destruction to the poor countries who supply the rich countries with everything.
      • Not enough Westerners realise that the only reason they don't live in a polluted mess is because pretty much everything they buy is made thousands of miles away, often including food. Just because a household does a bit of recycling does not absolve them from blame! Buying unnecessary crap is killing the planet!

    • Given the age of the other five extinctions, exactly what proof do we have that they were NOT caused by other species reaching industrial level technology?

      • We probably haven't found any bones or other artifacts that show such a creature(s) existed to build an industrial level society.

        I've wondered about this though. I mean, are we sure a million years ago there wasn't any intelligent lifeforms running doing stuff like we are or similar? The way the world reclaims itself over the eons is quite amazing.

        We occasionally find dinosaur bones and date those back to 65 million years (wow, that's a long time) so I don't see why some kind of smart creatures couldn't of

        • Re:Ya think? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by flink ( 18449 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @06:49PM (#62189595)

          Well if there was an intelligent species around millions of years ago, we know they didn't reach our level of industrialization because there was oil, coal, and easy to reach surface metals still available for us. If we fall it's gonna be real hard for those that follow to climb back up.

        • Actually, we're sure a million years ago, there WERE intelligent life forms much like we are (5 difference species of hominids that we have fossil records for at that time). It's 5 million years back or more that we have issues with, and who knows if our reconstruction of physiology from mere bone remnants is accurate?

          • who knows if our reconstruction of physiology from mere bone remnants is accurate?

            Once you've got enough bone to say "mammal" (versus "fish" or "squid"), you've got the physiology to an accurate enough level to know where you are on the intelligence front. If we knew which aspects of gorilla, chimpanzee and human physiology contributed to their different levels of intelligence, then knowing what part of the mammalian tree a bone is from might be useful. But you'd still have to deal with the problem that it'

            • We already know intelligent tool using isn't limited to mammals.

              • Vertebrates?

                (Thinks, ... I can't think of an invertebrate tool user.)

                Not that "vertebrate" is in any sense "higher" than "invertebrate" ; both are equally derived from the "Ur-metazoan".

                • There are invertebrate tool users, most are octopus or squid (well, if nature gives you 8 hands, you might have a tentacle up on everybody else when it comes to creating and using tools).

                  There are even a couple of avian tool using species.

                  And yes, there are insectoid tool users.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals [wikipedia.org]

                  • Yeah, I just couldn't think of any off the top of my head. I've seen the videos of octopii (octopodes ?) scuttling around carrying half-coconut shells and the like. Just a temporary brain fade.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ahodgson ( 74077 )

        Evidence of open pit mines could survive hundreds of millions of years in some places.

        Some nuclear decay products.

        The bare fact that fossil fuel deposits from hundreds of millions of years ago are intact.

        • Open pit mines weather and degrade within a few decades of ending mining as is. Fossil fuel deposits aren't intact, that's how biological matter becomes oil, other wise it would be full of ferns and stuff. There is a supposedly "natural nuclear reactor" in Oklo, Gabon that I suppose might have once been something though.

          • There is a supposedly "natural nuclear reactor" in Oklo, Gabon that I suppose might have once been something though.

            Something other than a water-moderated natural nuclear reactor operating when the concentration of U-235 in natural uranium was about 8 times what it is today. (Actually, as I recall from reading the reports when I was working in Gabon, 3 or 4 natural reactors within a kilometre or so of each other, operating at different times in an irregular episodic manner. Unfortunately I didn't get time o

            • How about an actual water cooled reactor, a few million years further from unnatural enrichment, with all of the concrete and iron parts degraded to almost nothing (or actual nothing) by mere weathering?

              • As a geologist, I do like to think that what you consider "degraded to almost nothing" would be to me, approximately "screamingly obvious". But I grant you, the uranium mine at Oklo was well into production (i.e., after the phases of "discovery", "delimitation", "mapping", and putting into production) before the weird isotopic composition was noticed.

                But since the exploration geologists didn't have "concrete and iron" parts, however degraded, to cue them, I'm not going to piss on their graves.

                I do hear t

                • Anybody who has watched a Model T shell dumped in a creek back in the 1940s degrade over the next 80 years, or has ever watched what happens after a dam breach, knows that neither iron nor concrete are immune to the effects of wind and water once they stop being maintained. Not over a century, certainly not over several million years.

                  There would be nothing left to notice- at all. We'd have no way to spot an earlier industrial civilization at our stage; all their works, all their empty promises, would be j

                  • There would be nothing left to notice-

                    The mineralogy of concretes is quite obscure, but relatively stable. It would also have a distinctly weirdly uniform mineralogy and geochemistry, uniform across watersheds because the concrete from one processing plant (with one set of sources of mudrock and limestone) tends not to get moved too far from that source plant. Moving hundreds of thousands of tonnes of stuff costs money, and people tend to use the nearest sources.

                    The signs might be subtle, but I do like to

        • An awful lot of hydrocarbon deposits in production today were only "cooked" and emplaced in the last 20-odd million years.

          Yes there are older ones - there are metamorphosed sediments from the Archean, over 3 billion years old, which contain chemical traces of kerogen (the ill-defined material that releases hydrocarbons when you "cook" it at several hundred centigrade and 3-4km depth. But they're volumetrically unimportant.

          There was (probably) an oilfield of a few billion barrels (say, a North Sea or so) i

      • We have a lot of evidence that the last extinction before the present one was due to a cosmic body hitting Earth.

        A problem with the way this question is posed is that it is demanding evidence ("proof" in fact) for something that is postulated to not have happened. How does one "prove" that there was no industrial driven extinction? What would the proof be?

        There are several indicators that strongly suggest no prior industrial civilization on Earth, based on what the current one is doing.

        We are carving rectan

        • We have a lot of evidence that the last extinction before the present one was due to a cosmic body hitting Earth.

          Last but one - for major extinctions. For lesser extinctions, last but 4 or 5. There was a substantial mass extinction about 55.3 million years ago, probably related to the destabilisation of seabed methane clathrates in the north proto-Atlantic leading to drastic, rapid global warming. I spent about 10 years drilling holes in the North Sea, looking for oil and gas in the interbedded sandstones (

    • Fossil Record (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @07:08PM (#62189653) Journal

      Considering how many species are already starting to be critically endangered, we have likely been in the 6th extinction for more than a century now.

      I agree that on the face of it it does look very likely. However, I would be careful comparing past mass extinctions based on the fossil record to the current decline in species based on actual biological specimens. Given the patchy nature of the fossil record is it possible that events like this - where one species becomes dominant and reduces the diversity of species - has happened in the past without it being classed as a mass extinction?

      This does not mean that we should not be doing our best to preserve species since we clearly are causing extinctions - I would just be careful of labeling it as a mass extinction given the very different nature of the evidence compared to past ones.

      • > Given the patchy nature of the fossil record

        But, assuming the "patchiness level" doesn't change fast (ie over a million years species found in fossils rise about 1% compared to real biological number), the ratio should be comparable:
        - over 100k years we saw a decline from 100 species to 20 species in fossils.
        - over 100 years we saw a decline from 1 million species to 200k species based on biological specimens.

        * made up numbers to illustrate my point.

        • That patchiness causes a different problem though. What happens if a species only has one fossilizing event? We see a fossil of it so we know it existed but then we see no more. So when did it go extinct? That's the problem with the record, the patchiness is not just in species it is in time as well. Mass extinctions which kill huge numbers of species, including many common ones for which there is a more continuous record can be easily seen.

          However, smaller declines in the number of species - say only 10

          • So, I quickly read absolute basics on how extinctions are recorded, and one of the main measures is extinction of entire taxonomic families.
            In support of your point: mostly marine fossils are mainly used to determine extinction levels. (guess why... )

            At this point I give up, and say "I don't have any archeological (statistics) training". And trust that those people know what they're talking about.
            Same as they don't tell me how to template my C++ code.

          • Surprisingly, when it comes to important money riding on geological interpretations, money gets spent on working out how reliable your interpretation is, then trying to reduce the uncertainty.

            Which is why important, money-making geological decisions are done using microfossils not macrofossils. Because in the dirt adhering to the astragalus of your dinosaur (not a random bone - a foot bone bearing one of the characters that defines "dinosaur" as opposed to "pterosaur" or "suchian") can contain hundreds or

  • Nature should reap the rewards of what it sows.

  • But the article fails to offer any solutions so it just comes off as complaining.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jemmyw ( 624065 )
      why should it set out solutions? If we report on anything without putting forth a solution is that complaining?

      • Re:That's interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @04:35PM (#62189125)

        I was once told by the head of a project that we only discuss *solutions* on teleconferences, not problems.

        A few years later they discovered all the problems they preferred not to discuss.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          Posting to undo the accidental moderation as overrated when I meant to moderate as funny but slipped with the mouse.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Ha ha, I was wondering who that anecdote manage to annoy.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
              It didn't annoy me at all. I just wasn't sure quite what sort of up vote to give it but a slight slip when trying to up vote meant an accidental down vote.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

                I got the downmod notification by e-mail, wondered who has a special attachment to toxic positivity, then read your reply and understood it was an accidental mod.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          Sounds like the influence of an executive that bought into some feel-good, self-help guru (or some fad "business process" which is pretty much the same thing). Did they give every employee a free copy of the guru's book and strongly encourage them to read it?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            I would not be surprised if some inane "leadership" nonsense played a role. I had a friend once who was a middle manager in some unholy corporation or another. They had some pop psychologist type in to do a seminar and all of a sudden my friend was diagnosing all her employees with personality disorders and plotting how to fix them.

    • But the article fails to offer any solutions so it just comes off as complaining.

      Would you consider an amateur suggestion?

      We're currently starting a renaissance of sorts by applying robotics to agriculture. I can cite several examples, but I'm sure you've heard about a lot of them.

      (OK, some examples: aeroponics (instead of hydroponics), robots similar to the Amazon stock robots that will bring in a potted plant for inspection and adjustment (pruning, weeding, picking), then take it back out to the growth floor. Increasing the length of daylight, then showing intense red light (ie - simu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gTsiros ( 205624 )

        All of this, on the surface, helps the situation.

        In long-term it only lets us dig a deeper hole.

        The problem is the combination of population and resources & pollution per person.

        The good thing is that we don't really *have* to solve the problem.

        The bad thing is that the problem is *us* and the solution isn't necessarily something of our own creation.

      • robots similar to the Amazon stock robots that will bring in a potted plant for inspection and adjustment (pruning, weeding, picking), then take it back out to the growth floor.

        Have you worked out the energetics of that, compared to "adjusting" the plant in situ, collecting any cuttings into a waste bag, and moving on to the next plant. Unless your container + plant + soil/ water weighs considerably less than the robot, that would be a lot more efficient.

        Plan B (if you're calculating your energy expenditu

    • The entire science of "mass extinction" is lacking.

      It turns out that over the past 100 years we have identified and classified millions of species of life within the animal kingdom, which is a thousand fold more than we had known about previously.

      Millions upon millions of species.

      Then we look at the fossil record, and at no point in the past do we find evidence of millions upon millions of species, not necessarily because there wasnt, but maybe because thats just the limitations of the fossilization a

      • Re:That's interesting (Score:4, Insightful)

        by EndlessNameless ( 673105 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @05:15PM (#62189275)

        If they confine their analysis to species that would leave fossils, would that satisfy you?

        I believe mollusks and vertebrates would fossilize under the right circumstances. So, does the science indicate an extinction is underway among those groups?

        The answer is yes. To the extent that we have relevant data, it suggests that a mass extinction is underway.

        We really only have two choices: Pretend we know nothing, or compare the extant data with what we already know.

        • I believe mollusks and vertebrates would fossilize under the right circumstances.

          Jellyfish will fossilize under the right circumstances (fine muddy seabed, and a microbial mat to give coherence to the surface under the forming fossil).

      • If we limit our scope to megafauna, which are the sorts of things that are likely to fossilize, then we've likely already driven them all extinct at fossil record resolution. Certainly what we do to cattle doesn't lend itself to fossilization and the aurochs they came from are long gone. If COVID22 wiped out humanity tomorrow I suppose many would recover to preindustrial populations and start getting fossilized again, but distribution and variety would be impacted dramatically by human action.

    • The solution is simple: reduce human impact on the environment.

      There have been many, many, many, MANY people saying this for decades and offering solutions and they've all been brushed off because it will cost money and reduce profits.

      This isn't complaining. It's a big "we told you so"

  • I have some library books I need to return. I don't want to run up past due charges while I'm extinct.

  • If you go back thousands of years, like 20,000 and more, it is pretty clear that humans have been hunting things to extinction for quite a long time. The megafauna were already hurting from loss of their environment as the ice age ended, but humans clearly helped quite a few of them out the door. Then there are all the species we have killed outright over the last several thousand years of recorded human history, including the passenger pigeon. It will never be known how many other species we have extermina

  • What can you do? (Score:3)

    by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @05:18PM (#62189283)
    These animals are going extinct because they have no where to live. Stop deforestation and the extinctions slow or even stop.
    Take Brazil, hopefully the people vote out slash and burn Bolsonaro.
    If he does get re-elected, the only way to stop deforestation in Brazil is reduce demand for beef. Stop eating so much meat people.
  • Come on, let's get this going!
  • The field of genetics and genetic engineering is rapidly expanding, eventually fresh samples of the reproductive tissues and complete genome sequencing of extinct species will likely be worth quite a bit of money if only one entity has the samples. Someone should be saving samples of as many diverse life forms as possible, think of the medical advancements, drugs, textiles, pets, foods, and more that could be sold. Won’t someone think of the money?

  • Survival of the fittest.
    How would you expect those dumbass pandas to survive with the intelligence and sex drive of a toddler?

  • Did we decide that like 20 years ago? (Score:3)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @07:28PM (#62189725) Homepage

    Seems clear to me that the lose of species such as the Passenger Pigeon and the Dodo marked the beginning of this extinction.

    The real question is will mankind be the last species that dies off in the 6th extinction, or will it be some other victim.

  • None of this matters. In a hundred years we will be able to resurrect all dead species, nd cuatomize them by computer.

    "We're so sure" is thus irrelevant. But sure gets you brownie points from corrupt politicians looking for another excuse to get in the way, to get paid to get back out of the way.

  • "Over the past 450 million years, life on Earth has been devastated by at least five mass extinctions, which are typically defined as catastrophes that wipe out more than 75 percent of species in a short amount of time...",

    Bear in mind that people who study things like mass extinctions usually think of time in geologic terms. To them 100,000 years is like a blink of the eye. Homo Sapiens have been walking on this Earth for only 'a short amount of time'.

  • ... When will they go extinct? :P

  • Science can be a cautious thing it seems.

    I'd simply reply - no joke! The Anthropocene Extinction :-(

  • It may sound insignificant and even a bit lazy.

    But we've had numerous reports of a rapid decline in bees and bumblebees which are essential for our agriculture and nature around us. Sweden have even imported bees from other country in order to balance out the losses, even an online television campaign "don't mow your lawn" to stop Obsessive homeowners from always keeping their lawns so clean, cutting away all trees and making it literally impossible for insects to thrive and survive.

    I took that to heart imm

  • If it's true, then we should all just throw up our hands, and enjoy what's left.

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