World on the Edge: Is something catastrophic about to happen?

The Extinction Protocol

May 2016 – SIGN OF THE TIMES – You don’t need a web-bot predictive analysis or a psychic reading to tell you that there’s an ominous chill in the air that something bad is about to happen – something large and just catastrophic enough in scope and magnitude to change life for all of us on this planet. Such an event could lead to potential nuclear exchange, a disruption of food supplies, an extreme climatic event, or a global outbreak of a pandemic disease. 

While nations are arming themselves to the teeth in preparation for a future potential conflict, Mother Nature also appears to be gearing up for an unholy rampage. Earthquake faults are stressed and long overdue for major activity, volcanoes are awakening, and supervolcanoes are inflating in alarming and record fashion. The era of peace, prosperity, and pacifism in human existence may be finally winding to an abrupt close and we may be about to enter some very troublesome times. Just look at all the warning signs and the subtle hints world leaders are dropping about the prospect of some type of apocalyptic event that appears to be camping out on our doorstep. – Alvin Conway

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Measuring the sixth mass extinction

Cosmos

The Earth teeters on the edge of a sixth mass extinction – or so a recent study published in Science Advances has claimed.

Gerardo Ceballos from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his colleagues calculated that by land clearing, hunting, introducing pests and burning fossil fuels humans have driven the extinction rate to 100 times the rate they believe it would be otherwise. And that’s a conservative estimate, they add.

But measuring extinction rates is not straightforward. The study only counted vertebrates – ignoring creatures such as the insects, spiders and crustaceans that make up 80% of the world’s animal species, not to mention plants, fungi and microbes.

No rule defines what constitutes a mass extinction. “The Earth’s history is punctuated with these extinction events, and we’ve known about them since the 1800s,” says Jessica Whiteside, a palaeobiologist at the University of Southampton in the UK. “But a ‘mass extinction’ is a loose term.

It’s generally defined as a loss of more than one major group of species, across marine and terrestrial environments, tied to a trigger like climate change.” All scientists do agree, though, that a mass extinction is an event where the extinction rate is much higher than the rate at which species die out naturally. 

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Here's More Proof Earth Is in Its 6th Mass Extinction

Comment: Nothing like being prepared...

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Live Science

Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.

Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100 years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural extinction rates, the researchers said.

Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said. [7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction] 

"Our activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the history of life on Earth," said lead researcher Gerardo Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford University.


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See also: Reality Change I: 16 Ignition Points

Earth May Be in Early Days of 6th Mass Extinction

Live Science

Earth may be in the early stages of a sixth mass extinction, an international team of scientists says.

Animals and plants are threatened. More than 320 land vertebrates have gone extinct since 1500, the researchers said. The world's remaining animals with backbones are 25 percent less abundant than in 1500— a trend also seen in invertebrate animals, such as crustaceans, worms and butterflies, the scientists reported.

The previous mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs, happened about 65 million years ago, likely from a catastrophic asteroid that collided with Earth. In contrast, the looming sixth mass extinction is linked to human activity, Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of biology at Stanford University in California, said in a statement. Dirzo is the lead author of the new review of past research on the topic, which suggests Earth is in the early days of this sixth mass extinction. 

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