{"id":287534,"date":"2011-03-03T05:02:27","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T05:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/03\/03\/scientists-looking-at-whether-life-on-earth-is-heading-to-extinction\/"},"modified":"2011-03-03T05:02:27","modified_gmt":"2011-03-03T05:02:27","slug":"scientists-looking-at-whether-life-on-earth-is-heading-to-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/scientists-looking-at-whether-life-on-earth-is-heading-to-extinction\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists looking at whether life on earth is heading to extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You Are Here: Home<\/a> \u00bb Africa\/International<\/a> \u00bb Scientists looking at whether life on earth is heading to extinction<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t \tPage last updated at Thursday, March 3, 2011 5:05 AM \/\/ <\/span>\n\t\t\t <\/div>\n

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Life on Earth is hurtling toward extinction levels comparable with those after the dinosaur-deleting asteroid impact of 65 million years ago, propelled forward by human activities, according to scientists from UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

This week, scientists announced that if current extinction rates continue unabated, and vulnerable species disappear, Earth could lose three-quarters of its species as soon as three centuries from now.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a geological eyeblink,\u201d said Nicholas Matzke, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and author of a paper describing the doom-and-gloom scenario. \u201cOnce you lose species, you don\u2019t get them back. It takes millions of years to rebound from a mass extinction event.\u201d<\/p>\n

This means that not too far in the future, backyards might not be buzzing with bees, bombarded by seagulls or shaded by redwood trees. And while that might seem far off, species already are disappearing on a global scale. In recent history, we\u2019ve lost the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon, the Javan tiger and the Japanese sea lion, and now, maybe the eastern cougar \u2014 declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday. Amphibians, mammals, plants, fish \u2014 none are immune to going the way of the dinosaurs, courtesy of the human impact on fragile ecosystems.<\/p>\n

Such enormous losses have only occurred five times in the past half-billion years, during events known as \u201cmass extinctions.\u201d The best-known of these events occurred 65 million<\/p>\n

years ago \u2014 a \u201creally bad day,\u201d according to paleontologists \u2014 when an asteroid collided with Earth, sending fiery dust into the atmosphere and rapidly cooling the planet. These \u201cBig Five\u201d events set the extinction bar high: to reach mass-wipeout status, 75 percent of all species need to disappear within a geologically short time frame, meaning that Earth is currently on the brink of the sixth mass extinction.<\/p>\n

To determine whether current losses could equal these mass extinction rates, scientists compared recent rates with species die-offs during the Big Five, taking into account presently endangered species. They also looked at the number of species lost in recent history and found that while rates are dramatically higher than expected, the percentage of vanishing species is not elevated \u2014 yet. We already are engaged in a seemingly inexorable march toward barren landscapes and empty seas, a procession fueled by human population growth, resource consumption and climate change, according to scientists.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe good news is, we still have most of what we want to save,\u201d Berkeley paleobiologist and lead study author Anthony Barnosky said. \u201cBut things are clearly going extinct too fast today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper, published in this week\u2019s issue of Nature, resulted from a graduate seminar Barnosky organized in fall 2009. Together, he and students used fossils to compare extinction rates with more modern data, wanting to answer whether we really are seeing the sixth mass extinction. To make comparisons, scientists used information from well-preserved fossils and modern accounts of disappearing animals, focusing on our milk-bearing relatives: mammals.<\/p>\n

Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who was not involved in the study, said evidence of the sixth extinction is all around. For years, he studied the Bay Checkerspot butterfly on Stanford\u2019s campus \u2014 but then, the butterfly disappeared from the campus, more than a decade ago. And, when Ehrlich journeyed to Morocco to sample a different Checkerspot species, he found no butterflies, just \u201csheep droppings and not one blade of grass.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnywhere you go around the world,\u201d Ehrlich said, \u201cIf you\u2019re a field biologist, your sites and organisms are disappearing. \u201d<\/p>\n

One particularly vulnerable group is marine mammals, according to study author and paleobiologist Charles Marshall, who said that while predictions are dire for our swimming relatives, they haven\u2019t yet reached the point of no return.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere really is time to reverse habitat destruction or massive overexploitation of resources,\u201d Marshall said. \u201cI love sushi, but I just don\u2019t eat tuna anymore. I don\u2019t want to be part of the decline of that group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists say habitat destruction, global climate change, introducing invasive species, and population growth are contributing to losses.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose four things working in concert are kind of a perfect storm that\u2019s setting up a recipe for disaster,\u201d Barnosky said. \u201cBut people are the ones who are driving this extinction, so we can fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to prioritizing species preservation, Ehrlich suggested starting with caps on human population growth and limiting resource consumption.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could do something about it, but I don\u2019t see that we have the slightest inclination to,\u201d he said.
Source: Mercury News<\/p>\n

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