More apocalyptic news from the Earth watch (sorry!). While we had you looking up at the sky, fretting about global warming, equally terrible things were happening around your feet. In the current issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert offers an essay titled “The Sixth Extinction?” but the question mark vanishes like a frog going extinct when you get past the title.
Kolbert suggests we’re in the throes of one of the Earth’s occasional mass extinctions, from which natural life takes millions of years to recover. When it does recover, there’s usually a new kind of creature in charge. This may be the lame-duck period for mammals.
A subscription or registration is required to access the article. A lengthy abstract is here:
Graduate student Karen Lips observed the mysterious disappearance of large numbers of local golden frogs, in the nineteen-nineties, at several locations in Panama and Costa Rica. Whatever was killing Lips’s frogs moved east, like a wave, across Panama… Of the many species that have existed on earth, more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. (In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.) If current trends continue, by the end of this century as many as half of earth’s species will be gone.
via The New Yorker.
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