Humans; The Possible Sixth Extinction of the Universe
If you are ask to define extinction, using words like disappear, vanish, or death of an an entire specie are correct definition. Extinction is the dying out or termination of a specie from the surface of the earth and we have seen a lot of species go into extinction.
We know that some animals like the dinosaur doesn't exist again, like the last one of it isn't in existence anymore but we didn't refer to it as extinction until in the 1790's when Georges Cuvier showed that fossils that were found weren't from living species are we thought, rather they were from species that did not exist again in what was referred to as lost species. Over time, other scientist started to explain extinction and shared more light on it.
Scientists like Charles Lyell began to explain that earth's process such as evolution and extinction occurs slowly that we are unable to see them happen even when they are happening before our eyes and we held on to those ideas until in the 1980's when Geologist Walter Alvarez shook the belief when he noticed the sudden disappearance of tiny fossils between two rocks that dated back to about 66 million years ago just the time of dinosaurs. He was able to analyze the boundary and found high amount of iridium which isn't normally much on earth crust. He then proposed that an asteroid collided with earth at that point, destroying and wiping out 75% of earths plants and animals, and since Iridium is so high in asteroids, that's the reason for the asteroid presence in the rock.
Scientist didn't take this serious because it sounded funny but when the Chicxulub Crater was discovered in 1991 which dated back to 6 million years ago, there was a different thought to the seriousness of the finding. It was then agreed that everything alive is a descendant of the survival if the event known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene MASS extinction which is the most recent extinction event.
Based on records, we have experienced 5 extinction event on earth which has wiped out about 98% of earth's living creatures. This extinction events are Cretaceous Paleongene (66 million years ago), Triassic Jurassic (200 million years ago), End Permian (250 million years ago which is the greatest of all), Late Devonian (350 million years), and Ordovician Silurian (450 million years ago). End Permian wiped out about 96% of earths inhabitants, and is regarded as the mother of mass extinction.
Why the 5 extinctions were caused by non-living things, it looks like we humans are going to be the cause of the 6th extinction as there is a possibility of a mammalian specie to go into extinction every 700 years, and 1 amphibian specie every 1000 years with the disappearing rate increasing seriously. 13000 years ago after the recent big freeze on earth, a lot of animals like the Smilidon, Megatherium, and the Wooly Mammoth disappeared thanks to climate and it was at this point that humans were hunting really hard.
Farming and Industrial revolution changed the entire scale of things. No living being has altered earth like us and scientist has referred to this period as the Anthropocene period. With the increase in human population and the course of survival, we have created a lot of problems including climate change and habitat destruction. Our activities affect land organisms when we displace them from their habitat, it also affects ocean animals as the atmospheric CO2 has been in its highest in the last 800 thousand years causing the ocean to be acidic and if this acidity continues to increase causing the acidity to reach 7.8, the about 1/3 of the Ocean species could go into extinction.
Our activities are affecting so many animal species, some that we do not know about yet and while we are saving the bear, tiger, and Gorilla, we should remember to save the small organisms from extinction as a result of our activities because it would affect us ourselves because we are not also safe because we are all bound together in this universe.
Read More
https://www.fastcompany.com/3036469/half-the-planets-wildlife-has-died-off-in-the-last-40-years
https://www.iucnredlist.org/
http://static.squarespace.com/static/51b078a6e4b0e8d244dd9620/t/538797c3e4b07a163543ea0f/1401395139381/Pimm+et+al.+2014.pdf
https://www.uv.mx/personal/tcarmona/files/2010/08/Science-2014-Dirzo-401-6-2.pdf
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-is-the-sixth-mass-extinction-and-what-can-we-do-about-it
https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Ecology/Environmental_Science_(Ha_and_Schleiger
https://gmatclub.com/forum/in-the-mid-1970-s-walter-alvarez-a-geologist-was-studying-earth-s-195442.html
https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/dinosaurs-ancient-fossils/extinction/mass-extinction
https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/KT-boundary/1-Chicxulub%20crater%20-%20Wikipedia,%20the%20free%20encyclopedia.pdf
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