Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction Is Our Fault

Frighteningly, animal species are vanishing at a fast rate, unprecedented since dinosaurs vanished 66 million years ago, a new study has found. This is the "sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history and one caused largely by humans" according to captialfm.

Published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, the study needs to be a serious call for humans who may be on the list of species under threat, say its authors.

"If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on," said lead author Gerardo Ceballos of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico in his study, according to theguardian.

The study brought in experts from Stanford University, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. Experts compared extinction rates from the past 100 years, and weighed it against a "background rate" of extinction in the centuries "before human activity dominated" the earth.

Scientists took "extremely conservative" figures to arrive at their analysis. They took "a background rate of extinction of two mammals per 10,000 species per 100 years - which they said was twice as high as previous widely used estimates."

The "baseline" rate of extinctions in our planet's long history is a long and tough task, as there is a lot of difficult work involved--- "excavating and locating millions of fossils from almost endless rock strata" according to theguardian. Various studies on different fossils give us different baseline rates.

Worryingly, even the Ceballos study is limited, factoring habitat loss, predation, pollution and so on, but not including global warming, or ocean acidification.

Moreover, the human species drives 25% and 40% of primary productivity on Earth. Scientist Vaclav Smil, of the University of Manitoba, says that humans now make up a third of land vertebrates, while the animals that we keep to eat - cows, pigs, sheep and so on make up two -thirds. Hence, the wild animals , comprising elephants, giraffes and tigers, are today less than 5% by mass, pushed to the edge.

How can the harmful human extinction be addressed? Anthony Barnosky, a biology professor at Berkeley spells out some steps: reduce your carbon footprint, do not buy products from animals and eat less meat. "Little by little people are understanding that we need to change," says Barnosky. "But whatever we decide to do in next 10 to 15 years will decide the future of biodiversity on Earth," according to cnn.