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Earth's recovery from mass extinction could take millions of years
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/april/mass-extinction.htmlEarth’s recovery from mass extinction could take millions of years
8 April 2019
How long will it take our biosphere to recover from the current climate crisis? It’s a question that makes for a sobering examination of Earth’s ongoing destruction.
It’s to the past, specifically the fossils of a tiny species that went out with the dinosaurs, that scientists have turned for the answer.
Recovering from mass extinction has a “speed limit”, they reveal, with gradual patterns of ecosystem redevelopment and speciation. Just as the planet we now occupy is vastly different to the one known by dinosaurs, the future ecosystem will be even further removed due to negative anthropogenic effects.
Palaebiologists from the University of Bristol and University of Texas studied the recovery rate of planktic foraminifera dating back to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. This period provides a unique analogue for our current times as it’s the only major event in Earth’s history that happened faster than modern climate change.
Their study shows that global recovery from this extinction, which killed the dinosaurs and left a gaping hole in the biosphere, took around ten million years as new innovations had to first appear, then finer differences or specializations could be evolved.
…
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0835-08 April 2019
How long will it take our biosphere to recover from the current climate crisis? It’s a question that makes for a sobering examination of Earth’s ongoing destruction.
It’s to the past, specifically the fossils of a tiny species that went out with the dinosaurs, that scientists have turned for the answer.
Recovering from mass extinction has a “speed limit”, they reveal, with gradual patterns of ecosystem redevelopment and speciation. Just as the planet we now occupy is vastly different to the one known by dinosaurs, the future ecosystem will be even further removed due to negative anthropogenic effects.
Palaebiologists from the University of Bristol and University of Texas studied the recovery rate of planktic foraminifera dating back to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. This period provides a unique analogue for our current times as it’s the only major event in Earth’s history that happened faster than modern climate change.
Their study shows that global recovery from this extinction, which killed the dinosaurs and left a gaping hole in the biosphere, took around ten million years as new innovations had to first appear, then finer differences or specializations could be evolved.
…
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