Our Planet May Be Facing The 6th Mass Extinction

The damaging behavior we indulged ourselves in seems to hold a very harmful row of consequences, as the Earth may be facing the 6^th mass extinction. Humans could be the first affected, as the study conducted by three leading US universities reveals.

Researchers at Stanford, Princeton University and The California Berkeley University declared that during the last century we had 400 species of vertebrates disappearing, and the result is an extinction rate 114 times higher than normal. Our planet may be facing the 6^th mass extinction at a very rapid pace.

All the findings are correlated with human population size and growth, consequently increasing consumption and economic inequity. Humans are greedy and all our thirst for consumption and accumulation now translates into a potential disaster that can have us all erased from the face of the Earth. This is no piece of novelty, as nature triggers the alarm signal once in a while, with weather conditions worsening, ecosystem disappearing, volcanoes erupting, tsunamis wreaking havoc and earthquakes destroying entire populated areas.

Scientists say that in spite of the worrying findings, there is still a thin thread of hope we can all cling to. A sixth mass extinction could be avoided by employing serious and sustained conservation efforts. And this means that from this very moment, the situation requires greatly intensified efforts to conserve the threatened species and to raise pressures on their populations. Habitat loss must be greatly avoided, along with overexploitation for economic gain and climate change. All toxic gas emissions must be reduced and sustained efforts to find alternative sources for energy must be performed.

However, it seems that this window of opportunity is rapidly closing, as humans delay action and everything goes exactly the same in the realm of our life environment.

UN decisions on an international treaty set to regulate toxic gas emissions are delayed until this December, when a Paris meeting will decide on the future of our climate conditions. Rapid movement in industries, deforestation and water pollution are only a small number of factors that continue to contribute to the rapid degradation of Earth.

The authors of the study declare that the price of disappearance of species, mostly the vertebrates, has reached no less than 114 times faster than normal. The probability of saving the variety of animal species, natural habitats and ecosystems is getting pretty small.

By now the earth has faced 5 recognizable mass extinctions, with the last one wiping out the dinosaurs 66 million years in the past. A large number of specialists, researchers and environmentalists all over the world declare that we are seriously getting into the sixth mass extinction phase.

If the present progress of extinction continues, the increasing number of species disappearing could have a giant impact on human inhabitants, with a minimal of three generations. If the environmental degradation process continues as it did by now, and maybe even faster, as everything keeps on moving at a very rapid pace, life would take hundreds of thousands of years to recuperate, with human species being threatened to disappear early on in the process.

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