Wednesday, 02 April 2025

Extinction event

An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the amount of life on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. It occurs when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation. Because the majority of diversity and biomass on Earth is microbial, and thus difficult to measure, recorded extinction events affect the easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere rather than the total diversity and abundance of life.

Extinction occurs at an uneven rate. Based on the fossil record, the background rate of extinctions on Earth is about two to five taxonomic families of marine animals every million years. Marine fossils are mostly used to measure extinction rates because of their superior fossil record and stratigraphic range compared to land organisms.

The Great Oxygenation Event was probably the first major extinction event. Since the Cambrian explosion five further major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent and debatably best-known, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which occurred approximately 66 million years ago (Ma), was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. In addition to the five major mass extinctions, there are numerous minor ones as well and the ongoing mass-extinction caused by human activity is sometimes called the sixth extinction. Mass extinctions seem to be a mainly Phanerozoic phenomenon, with extinction rates low before large complex organisms arose.

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Extinction_event

Latest News for: mass extinction

Edit

Mammals moved to land before dinosaur-killing asteroid struck 66 million years ago

Interesting Engineering 02 Apr 2025

... Chixculub asteroid impact that led to the extinction of dinosaurs. The study says that evidence for the potential development of terrestrial habits before the mass extinction is available.

Edit

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing ...

Phys Dot Org 02 Apr 2025

More mammals were living on the ...

Edit

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Science Daily 02 Apr 2025

More mammals were living on the ground several million years before the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, new research has revealed ... .

Edit

Scientist discovers ‘legless, headless wonder’ older than the dinosaurs in South Africa — and names ...

New York Post 02 Apr 2025

3 ... 3 ... University of Leicester ... 3 ... When the layers of rock first formed, a “devastating” glaciation wiped out nearly all life on Earth in one of the largest-ever mass extinction events recorded, researchers said ... ....

Edit

How survivors spanned the globe after Earth's biggest mass extinction

SpaceDaily 01 Apr 2025

... mass extinction - the most extreme event of its kind in Earth's history.

Edit

‘The ultimate circular economy’: how coral holabiots conjure magnificence from nothing

AOL 01 Apr 2025

There’s no preparing for a first encounter with a thriving coral reef ... Corals are the architects of all this splendour ... In defiance of their apparent fragility, corals have survived multiple mass extinctions during their long evolutionary past ... .

Edit

West Palm Beach attorney disbarred over 'threatening' social media posts, rules violations

The Palm Beach Post 31 Mar 2025

Polk judge receives reprimand from Florida Supreme Court . Video. Video of Polk County Judge John Flynn's reprimand before the Florida Supreme Court over 2022 campaign statements ... Just need a mass extinction event right now!” Leigh wrote in one post.

Edit

Earth’s 5 catastrophic mass extinctions, explained

Popular Science 28 Mar 2025

Our planet has gone through at least five periods of mass extinction, with the planet likely in a sixth wave of mass extinction–this one, driven by humans ... Our planet’s first known mass extinction happened about 440 million years ago.

Edit

Mysterious 444-million-year-old fossil has guts, scientists are losing mind

Interesting Engineering 28 Mar 2025

This period coincided with a major glaciation event that triggered one of Earth’s “big five” mass extinctions – the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event. .

Edit

Letter: Beware of geoengineering

Bangor Daily News 28 Mar 2025

Letters submitted by BDN readers are verified by BDN Opinion Page staff ... That said, I support the concept because if we continue to acidify our oceans we will end up with mass extinctions and destruction of the ecosystem that sustains all of life ... ....

Edit

The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Death Is Okay!

The New Republic 28 Mar 2025

... become a mass extinction event, killing more than 7 million people worldwide.

Edit

Being hated worked for Just Stop Oil

The Conversation 28 Mar 2025

As philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht describes in his book Earth Emotions, events such as climate change, mass species extinction and environmental degradation are creating a global emotional crisis, marked by a mix of grief, anxiety and powerlessness ... .

Edit

‘The nation is watching’: sewage dumps in Windermere must end, says activist

AOL 27 Mar 2025

... in some cases driving them to extinction. In 2022 a category one incident, the most serious, led to a mass fish kill in Cunsey Beck, a site of special scientific interest, which feeds into Windermere.

Edit

Tadpoles try to flee dangerous virus in their pond by growing much faster than normal, ...

Phys Dot Org 26 Mar 2025

... may be the canary in the coal mine for the nascent anthropogenic mass extinction.

Edit

‘Lego and tardigrades’: when humans finally destroy the world, what will remain?

The Guardian 26 Mar 2025

“They are the only one who ever survived five mass extinctions on Earth – talk about resilience! They also live in the most uninhabitable places, from the moon to the deepest ...

Article Search

tools

You can search using any combination of the items listed below.

Language:

Sort:

Indexed:

Search:

Duplicates:

Extinction event

Podcasts:

Mass Extinction

ALBUMS

Hymns for the Hearing Impaired, Volume 1

Latest News for: mass extinction

Mammals moved to land before dinosaur-killing asteroid struck 66 million years ago

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing ...

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Scientist discovers ‘legless, headless wonder’ older than the dinosaurs in South Africa — and names ...

How survivors spanned the globe after Earth's biggest mass extinction

‘The ultimate circular economy’: how coral holabiots conjure magnificence from nothing

West Palm Beach attorney disbarred over 'threatening' social media posts, rules violations

Earth’s 5 catastrophic mass extinctions, explained

Mysterious 444-million-year-old fossil has guts, scientists are losing mind

Letter: Beware of geoengineering

The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Death Is Okay!

Being hated worked for Just Stop Oil

‘The nation is watching’: sewage dumps in Windermere must end, says activist

Tadpoles try to flee dangerous virus in their pond by growing much faster than normal, ...

‘Lego and tardigrades’: when humans finally destroy the world, what will remain?

Article Search

EXPLORE WN.com