Sentences with phrase «biggest mass extinctions»

The Triassic extinction was another, one of the 5 biggest mass extinctions in the geological record.

A new reconstruction of Antarctic ocean temperatures around the time the dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago supports the idea that one of the planet's biggest mass extinctions was due to the combined effects of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact.

Perhaps even more impressive, the biggest mass extinction event of all, at the end of the Palaeozoic (245 million years ago), appears to have had a major catastrophic component, as indicated in Paul Wignall's article («The day the world nearly died», New Scientist, 25 January 1992).

It is in the shadows of these ancient mountains that Dr Pia Viglietti, a post-doctoral fellow at the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) at Wits University, found the secrets of one of the biggest mass extinction events that Earth has ever seen.

The biggest mass extinction, or Great Dying, was triggered by a volcanic eruption in Siberia 250 million years ago.

Speaking more generally, food webs probably do get restructured during some of the big mass extinctions, but whether that's due to (or causes) cascading extinctions isn't at all clear.»

It is also faster than during 4 of earth's biggest mass extinction events during the last 300 hundred million years — faster than even the great Permian mass extinction event where 95 % of life on earth vanished 250 million years ago.

The biggest mass extinction on this planets was the Permian - Triassic extinction about 251 million years ago.

Death by acid was the key killer in Earth's biggest mass extinction, some 251 million years ago.

Not exact matches

The ancestors of this red - eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) may have gotten their big break thanks to the same mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Earth has seen its share of catastrophes, the worst being the «big five» mass extinctions scientists traditionally talk about.

There is a lot of indication that suspiciously points a finger to us; us being Homo sapiens, because their extinction seems to coincide with the arrival of human beings on land mass after landmass, and then after a while back, there is this question from it: «Well, if human beings wiped out all the animals on this landmass and, why do we still have big animals in Africa?»

«The big question is: Given that we're working on a mass extinction right now, which flavor will it be?»

«Ancient ecosystem response to «big five» mass extinction: Ingenious modeling shows that the stability of ancient ecosystems depended on species with important, big - picture roles in food web.»

Huge regions with epic volcanic explosions are now blamed for four of Earth's «big 5» mass extinctions

The biggest surprise, the researchers note, is that some families of beetles, once they appeared, have never gone away — even surviving mass extinctions such as those that claimed the dinosaurs and many other species 66 million years ago.

But we are not doomed to cause a sixth mass extinction, at least not yet, despite consuming our way through the world's remaining big wild animals.

Killer carbon burp A big belch of carbon may be to blame for the mass extinction that swept the planet around 200 million years ago.

They were small — the largest was no bigger than a badger — and paleontologists used to think that mammal evolution only took off once a mass extinction wiped all the non-avian dinosaurs off the planet.

His «we do not know of a time with permanent ice at the poles and CO2 above 1000pmmv» (except, of course, prior to the big thaw in snowball Earth), and the present rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 being c. 10x greater than previous mass extinctions as far as we know (albeit the total mass being less) are deeply worrying.

When changes were big and rapid (as they are today), the consequences for life on Earth were often dire — in some cases causing mass extinctions.

It could, he believed, be akin to — if not bigger than — the Permian - Triassic mass extinction 250 million years ago and the Cretaceous - Tertiary extinction that cleared out the dinosaurs and led to the Age of Mammals — and us.

Basically, there is a lot still to be learned, and the downside potential from a big sustained warming is real, but hard to nail down, said David Jablonski, a specialist in mass extinctions at the University of Chicago.

Well, crawling out of the ocean probably took millions or billions of attempts... and there were a couple mass extinctions on the way... But this is still right at the top or is the biggest.

Not only is our mass extinction event faster than ever before, it will also be the biggest one in all 4 billion years of earth's history.

Unlike the end - Cretaceous, the PETM was not a big extinction event but it generated enough environmental disruption to cause a high turnover of land animals, the evolution of ever smaller animals (the «Lilliput effect»), and a mass extinction of tiny shell - making creatures that live on the sea bed (benthic foraminifera).

These are human responses to big existential threats to the biosphere and ultimately Homo sapiens itself, including global warming, natural resource depletion, the 6th mass extinction and the destruction of marine ecosystems.

This is a big story, and it could probably be made into at least as visually interesting a documentary as Carroll's speculative «mass extinction.»

Only one of the past «Big Five» mass extinctions (the dinosaur extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous) is thought to have occurred as rapidly as would be the case if currently observed extinctions rates were to continue at their present high rate (Alvarez et al., 1980; Barnosky et al., 2011; Robertson et al., 2004; Schulte et al., 2010), but the minimal span of time over which past mass extinctions actually took place is impossible to determine, because geological dating typically has error bars of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

While the biggest volcanic eruptions — including large igneous provinces like the Siberian Traps — are known to be linked to climate upheaval and even mass extinctions, emerging work shows that under the right conditions, smaller eruptions or series of eruptions can also affect climate.

However, the Big Five occurred over periods of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, so Barnosky and colleagues also attempted to determine how long it might take us to reach mass extinction levels (75 % of species extinct).

These previous mass extinction events (also known as the «Big Five») are hypothesised to have been caused by combinations of key events such as unusual climate change, changes in atmospheric composition, and abnormally high stress on the ecosystem (except in the case of the Cretaceous, which was caused by an asteroid impact and subsequent effects).

Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history, researchers warn in a new, big - picture report