It is a possibility. It is not the reality yet.
Our earth had witnessed five mass extinctions earlier, including the great mass extinction in Cenozoic Era, wiping out the colossal dinosaurs. With the advent of us, the humans, it was thought that such extinctions are now history, but think again.
Thanks to our own self-centered activities, the sixth mass extinction may be around the corner and it will be like nothing in Earth’s history, says a new study.
We, the seven billion humans are doing their darnedest to trigger at this very moment will be unprecedented. “There is no past event that looks biologically like what’s happening today,” lead study author Jonathan Payne, of Stanford University, told Gizmodo. Unlike the past, Payne said, “processes like warming and ocean acidification are not the dominant cause of threat in the modern ocean.”
Instead, the dominant threat is people. It’s the nets, harpoons, and trawlers that are systematically emptying the oceans of fish and other marine life forms. Whereas the mass extinctions of the past tended to target organisms in certain environments, the sixth mass extinction is poised to hit the biggest animals the hardest as earlier, body size didn’t matter that much. Instead, it was an organism’s habitat that dictated its fate. Animals that lived in the Open Ocean, or pelagic zone, went extinct at a higher rate than benthic creatures living on the seafloor.
And, this study isn’t all inclusive as it excluded corals, which are currently in the midst of a catastrophic, global die-off. As habitat for roughly a quarter of all marine species, the loss of coral reefs due to global warming and ocean acidification would be a major blow to the health of the oceans overall.
“This study largely does not address the impact we are having on ocean ecosystems through global climate change,” Mark Eakin, a biological oceanographer with NOAA who was not involved with the study told Gizmodo. “Our increases in atmospheric CO2 will add to the impacts found by the authors to broaden our species’ destructive reach.”
Even considering the omissions, the pattern the authors uncovered implies that the trajectory of the sixth mass extinction could be unique. The loss of large animals tends to cause what ecologists call a “tropic cascade,” basically, a ripple effect down the food chain and they also play an outsized role in global nutrient cycling and we would face a tremendous loss of nutrition.
And, if it happens, that will be indeed a very sad event for we, the people!