The extinction of animals was due to the fault of man
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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The team of biologists, after studying the data on the frequency of extinction of animal and plant species, said that some species of animals or plants are already beginning to die on our planet, the sixth largest mass extinction on our planet that is caused not by natural phenomena but by human activity.
The results of their research experts published in one of the scientific journals, which is being produced so far only in the electronic version.
The scientists noted that if nothing changes in the near future, it will take another million years to restore the extinct biological diversity, while the person is also under threat of complete extinction from the planet earth.
A group of specialists from the Mexican National University was led by the famous ecologist Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University), the experts came to such conclusions after calculating the frequency of extinction of animals inhabiting our planet over the past millions of years, and relatively "quiet" periods of life were also taken into account.
Specialists drew attention to the fact that conservative estimates were specially used in the calculation - the largest frequency of extinction in peacetime, the lowest frequency of disappearance to date, so that colleagues from the scientific community could not bring charges of panic.
According to the calculations of the Erlich group, before the man appeared on the earth, every hundred years on the planet two species of animals out of ten thousand disappeared. In the twentieth century, the numbers increased more than a hundredfold.
In other words, the number of species of animals that have disappeared from the planet should disappear within ten thousand years, but not in one century.
Experts noted that over the past two centuries, the rate of extinction of animals is similar to those observed more than 60 million years ago, when sea reptiles, dinosaurs and pterosaurs began to disappear.
The team of scientists once again stressed that perhaps the calculations made by them greatly underestimate the scale of the problem that has been observed to date. Specialists tried to find the bottom line of the impact that human life on earth exerts on the ecological system of our planet and the diversity of animals.
Ehrlich himself believes that humanity still has time to influence the scale of the extinction of flora and fauna, however, the account is not for millennia, not for hundreds of years, and not even for years, every day we are increasingly approaching the point non-return. According to the ecologist, at present about 40% of amphibians are under threat of extinction and about 1/4 of mammals can disappear from our planet. In order to prevent the sixth-largest extinction of flora and fauna, a person must immediately take all measures to strengthen and expand measures to protect the diversity of animals and plants on land that are threatened with complete extinction. People should not deprive endangered species of animals of their natural habitat (stop uncontrolled deforestation, pollution of the world's oceans, rivers, etc.), take measures to improve the climate situation.