Sentences with phrase «changes led to extinction»

Past climate changes led to extinction of many species, population migrations, and pronounced changes in the land surface and ocean circulation.

Great auks, flightless birds resembling penguins, were prolific in the icy waters of the northern Atlantic until human hunters, egg collectors, and climate change led to their extinction.

Not exact matches

Instability will lead to global conflict, and that in turn may lead to what in a 2007 essay he referred to as» secular apocalypse» — total extinction of the human race through either thermonuclear war, biological contagion, unchecked climate change, or an array of competing Armageddon scenarios.

The planets» innumerable living species are not fixed but are subject to slow evolutionary change, leading sometimes to the emergence of new species and sometimes to their extinction.

This massive environmental change is believed to have created population bottlenecks in the various species that existed at the time; this in turn accelerated differentiation of the isolated human populations, eventually leading to the extinction of all the other human species except for the branch that became modern humans.

For most species the temperature change was too sudden for them to adapt, leading to mass extinctions.

By analyzing the fossils of thousands of ancient crustaceans, a team of scientists led by NMNH paleontologist Gene Hunt has found that devoting a lot of energy to the competition for mates may compromise species» resilience to change and increase their risk of extinction.

Soot is a strong, light - absorbing aerosol that caused global climate changes that triggered the mass extinction of dinosaurs, ammonites, and other animals, and led to the macroevolution of mammals and the appearance of humans.

Predictions that climate change alone could lead to the extinction of more than one - fifth of plant and animal species before the end of the century have often come under fire, and not just from climate - change deniers.

Sinervo led a landmark study published in 2010 documenting the widespread extinction of lizard populations around the world due to climate change.

«This shift to earlier weaning age in the time leading up to woolly mammoth extinction provides compelling evidence of hunting pressure and adds to a growing body of life - history data that are inconsistent with the idea that climate changes drove the extinctions of many large ice - age mammals,» said Cherney, who is conducting the work for his doctoral dissertation in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Some species, however, may not be able to keep pace with future changes potentially leading to new regional ecosystems as novel climate patterns emerge, possibly leading to extinctions if some climates disappear entirely.

Climate Change: The Last Great Global Warming (p 56) The levels of carbon dioxide release and current speed of warming across the globe could lead to extinctions on a scale worse than previously thought, an article in this month's Scientific American suggests.

Abstract: Models investigating the effects of climate change and human - led land - use change on biodiversity have arrived at alarming conclusions, with the worst case scenarios suggesting extinction rates at such a level as to constitute a sixth mass extinction event in the earth's history.

«Predation by foxes and feral cats is the key driver of extinctions, so we need to change what we've previously done and look at if the dingo can help,» said Dr Thomas Newsome of the University of Sydney, the report's lead author.

Here are some desperately depressing numbers to consider: 40,000 elephants and over 1,200 rhinos were killed by poachers in 2014 — a rate that will lead both animals to extinction within 10 years if things don't change.

It actually talks about â $ œcommitment to extinctionâ $ ™, that is the commencement of a process by 2050, that would lead to extinction, and the 37 % figure relates to the maximal climate change scenario, rather than the minimal scenario as you misleadingly suggest.

The scientific ecologist is quite attuned to evolutionary changes leading to new species or extinctions.

Some researchers have theorized that the environmental changes that led to the formation of new biotic communities at the end of the Pleistocene resulted in the extinction of many of the Pleistocene faunal forms.

The authors look closely at claims climate change will injure coral and other forms of marine life, possibly leading to some species extinctions.

Climate change leads to species extinctions and exponentially so: the loss of biodiversity is set to accelerate under continuation of global average temperature rise.

The phenomenon appears to offer a natural solution to climate change, which experts fear could lead to a rise in sea level, flooding, and extinction of species.

This new report, according to the New York Times, will assert that expected warming in this century will lead to wide - spread melting of land ice, extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinctions.

The discrepancy between theory and reality has led some biologists to call for a change in the way conservationists describe the extinction process to the public, and in the way that scientists study it.

That may be too rapid a change for many species to keep up with their environment, leading to extinctions.

An international team of scientists, including Peter Schultz of Brown University, suggests that a comet or meteorite exploded over the planet roughly 12,900 years ago, causing the abrupt climate changes that led to the extinction of the wooly mammoth and other giant prehistoric beasts.

But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land - use change; a pole - to - pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources [6,7], including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas [8]; and resource wars [9].

Climate change has already led to local extinctions in half of species surveyed in a new study — and global temperatures are only set to rise.

Other leading theories to causes of mass extinctions include: global climate change, changes in sea level, chemical poisoning of the atmosphere and / or oceans, variation in solar radiation, and extreme volcanic activity.

And both the «Global Imprint» lead author and Parmesan co-authored a paper contradicting scientific consensus, arguing «Species» extinctions have already been linked to recent climate change; the golden toad is iconic.»

Meteor impact is just one of a number of theories that led to extinction of the dinosaurs, including cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, rapid climate change, or multiple huge tsunamis.

Now, an MIT professor has analyzed the changes that took place in the carbon cycle leading up to these events and found that the end of this century could mark the tipping point for a sixth mass extinction event.

However, those past climate changes were considerably slower and less intense than what species are expected to experience over the next 30 to 80 years, projections which lead to forecasts of significant future extinctions (Moritz and Agudo, 2013).

At current emissions trends, average pH of the oceans would drop from about 8.1 (current levels) to at least 7.9 in about 100 years (NRC, 2011a).22 A similar change occurred over the 200,000 years leading up to the end - Permian mass extinction, which resulted in loss of an estimated ~ 90 percent or more of known species (Chen and Benton, 2012; Knoll et al., 2007).

«There's broad consensus that rapid climate change in the Arctic is hurting polar bears right now and the U.S. government needs to take aggressive action to pull this majestic species back from the brink of extinction,» said Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute and author of the petition that led to Endangered Species Act listing for the bear in 2008.

Well, the Andes» sudden growth would have required the ambient wildlife to adapt to the pressure / elevation change through natural selection — potentially leading to some species extinctions — and may have resulted in the introduction of new species.

The new study, funded by NASA and led by Dr. Richard Pearson of UCL Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research and formerly of the American Museum of Natural History, and by Dr. Resit Akçakaya of Stony Brook University in New York, identified factors that predispose species to high extinction risk due to climate change.