American experts from Stanford University have described how would the course of the next, the sixth mass extinction of species on Earth.
September 6, 2017 | Rama Antonios
Add your articleAmerican experts from Stanford University have described how would the course of the next, the sixth mass extinction of species on Earth.
The study is published in the journal ‘Science’, while the demonstration video is available on the website of the university .
Larger marine animals will be at increased risk of extinction , and humans are to blame, the Stanford study suggests.
In today’s oceans, the largest marine animals are more likely to die than smaller creatures. It is a pattern that is unprecedented in the history of life on Earth, and that is probably driven by human fishing, according to Jonathan Payne, a paleontologist at the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Energy and Environment at Stanford.
“This probably will be because people fishing larger species for consumption first,” explained.
The analysis carried out by scientists have shown that increased ten times body weight of an animal, increase the risk of extinction at 13 times or more.
Over the past 440 million years on Earth there have been five mass extinctions (excluding Oligocene Eocene-), and during these periods the number of species was reduced by 90%.