The next mass extinction of animals may begin as early as 2100, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the waters of the Earth's oceans exceeds a critical point and temperatures on the planet begin to rise sharply, according to a geophysicist who published an article in the journal Science Advances.
“I am not saying that the disaster will happen literally tomorrow. We just showed that the carbon cycle in nature will become unstable in the near future, and its behavior will be impossible to predict if we continue to saturate the atmosphere and water with carbon dioxide. In the past, such periods of instability have led to mass extinctions,”said Daniel Rothman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).
Scientists have identified the five largest mass extinctions of species in the history of life on Earth. The most significant is considered the "great" Permian extinction, when more than 95% of all living beings inhabiting the planet disappeared, including bizarre beast-lizards, close relatives of mammalian ancestors, and a number of marine animals.
Two years ago, ecologists announced that now a new, sixth mass extinction of animals is taking place on Earth. According to their calculations, in the epochs preceding the Anthropocene - the century of man, about two species of mammals disappeared every hundred years for every ten thousand species of animals that existed at that time. In the XX and XXI centuries, this figure has grown 114 times.
Rothman believes that the next major extinction of animals, similar in strength to five previous events of this kind, could begin very soon, at the beginning of the next century. He came to a similar conclusion after analyzing how conditions on Earth changed shortly before the beginning of the Permian extinction and its four "younger brothers".
The main common feature of all these events, as the geophysicist noted, was that the onset of each mass extinction was accompanied by dramatic changes in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and in the way the exchange of carbon took place between the biosphere and inanimate nature. Traces of these changes, as the scientist notes, can be easily seen in how the ratio of carbon isotopes in the rocks of those times changed.
This consideration forced Rothman to analyze the remaining 30 cases of abrupt changes in the fraction of carbon isotopes, well known to all geologists, and compare them with how the appearance of the Earth's flora and fauna changed during these episodes of time.
It turned out that all such fluctuations in the fractions of carbon-12 and carbon-13 were accompanied by extinctions and abrupt rearrangements of ecosystems, if these fluctuations in the concentration of carbon isotopes were large enough and followed a simple mathematical formula that Rothman deduced by analyzing the data he had collected …
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Using this formula, the scientist tested whether the Earth is threatened with mass extinction today. It turned out that such a crisis could begin very soon, already in 2100, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the ocean reaches a critical level, and this will happen even if the Paris and Kyoto agreements on climate are implemented. Upon reaching it, the Earth's ecosystems will no longer be able to “digest” all carbon dioxide and “store” its excess on the ocean floor, as a result of which the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will begin to grow sharply.
As the geologist emphasizes, this does not mean that many animals will immediately disappear from the face of the Earth - the extinction process can drag on for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, during which the rate of extinction of species will increase by several orders of magnitude. Therefore, humanity still has time to stop its advance, or at least reduce its scale.