By: Inas Essa
Extinction has always been a source of fear and amazement. While visiting a museum or watching a documentary about extinct species, wonder creeps into our minds and souls as we imagine how these huge creatures had ever lived on the Earth. This amazement exaggerates as we do not know exactly how this happened and what caused such events.
While on one hand different reports have drawn a link between human irresponsible behavior and greediness, and some species extinction, a new study has highlighted another major cause: bigger temperature change. So, how does it affect life on Earth?
Mass Extinction Events and Global Temperature
A new study from Tohoku University has revealed evidence that shows a strong relationship between the mass extinctions magnitude and severe global temperature fluctuations in geologic times.
The new research, which is published in the journal Biogeosciences and led by Professor Emeritus Kunio Kaiho, shows that abrupt climate change, accompanied by environmental destruction from large volcanic eruptions and meteorites, has resulted in different mass extinction events throughout the Phanerozoic Eon. This is the current geologic eon in the geologic time scale, and the one during which several animal and plant life has existed.
The research mentions that there have been few evaluations of the relationship between land temperature anomalies and terrestrial animal extinctions till the present. Moreover, there has not been enough research regarding the phenomenon of marine animals and terrestrial animals that have experienced divergent extinction rates.
The Bigger the Change, the Larger the Extinction
According to the new study, extinction rates of marine invertebrates and terrestrial tetrapods correlate with deviations in global and habitat surface fluctuating temperatures, high and low. "These findings indicate that the bigger the shifts in climate, the larger the mass extinction," Kaiho said. "They also tell us that any prospective extinction related to human activity will not be of the same proportions when the extinction magnitude changes in conjunction with global surface temperature anomaly".
These results show a ray of hope about the future. The author says that, although predicting the extent of future extinctions would be difficult due to the variation of recent causes and predictable ones, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that any forthcoming extinction will not reach past magnitudes if global surface temperature anomalies and other environmental anomalies correspondingly change.
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