Here is a synthesized summary (2500 characters) focusing on the extinction of the woolly mammoth, drawn from the extracted material:

**Woolly Mammoth Extinction: Causes and Insights**

The extinction of the woolly mammoth involved a combination of rapidly changing environmental conditions and significant human influence, providing a critical lesson about the interplay between climate, ecology, and anthropogenic impact on prehistoric ecosystems.

Environmental Change and Climate:**
- Woolly mammoths were highly adapted to cold, Ice Age environments, subsisting on tough, hardy plants found in snowy, open grasslands across the Northern Hemisphere.

As the last Ice Age ended, global temperatures rose rapidly.

- Melting snows gave way to marshier tundra ecosystems, leading to a shift in dominant vegetation.

Hardy grassland plants were replaced with marsh plants, which, according to available evidence, were not suitable as primary food sources for mammoths, or at least did not offer sufficient nutrients.

- The warming climate also caused a contraction in the mammoths’ range.

Mammoths required vast territories for seasonal migrations and foraging.

As suitable habitats dwindled and became fragmented, mammoth populations became isolated and more vulnerable to extinction.

Human Activities:**
- The disappearance of mammoths coincided with the expansion of early human populations into their habitats.

This added a significant new pressure.

- Early humans were effective hunters.

Archaeological evidence suggests that as human hunting intensified, it further reduced mammoth populations already weakened by habitat loss.

- Overhunting likely accelerated their decline, preventing surviving populations from recovering.

Synergistic Effects:**
- The combined effects of climate change and human hunting created a situation where mammoths could not adapt quickly enough.

The shifting vegetation and loss of grazing lands reduced their numbers, while human predation hastened their extinction.

- Fragmented, small populations were also likely more susceptible to genetic drift and inbreeding, further reducing their viability.

Broader Implications:**
- The study of mammoth extinction adds to the growing body of evidence that current rates of species extinction are much higher than the historical norm, echoing warnings of a looming “sixth mass extinction” event driven by rapid climate change and human activity.

- The mammoth’s fate underscores the vulnerability of even highly successful, well-adapted species to sudden environmental shifts and the profound, sometimes inadvertent, impacts humans can have on ecosystems.

In conclusion, the extinction of the woolly mammoth demonstrates how complex interactions between environmental change and human activity can drive species to extinction.

This history offers important lessons for conservation and the management of current biodiversity crises.

**Summary: The Extinction of the Mammoth – Causes and Insights**

The extinction of the woolly mammoth is a complex event that reflects the interplay between environmental changes and early human activity.

Scientific consensus, as reported in journals such as Nature, points to climate change as a major driver in their disappearance.

As the last Ice Age ended, global temperatures rose, resulting in dramatic changes to mammoth habitats—open steppe-tundra landscapes transformed into forests or wetlands, reducing the area where mammoths could find suitable food.

The inability of such large animals to rapidly adapt to these changing landscapes and dwindling food supply was a crucial factor in their extinction.

DNA analysis of ancient species, including mammoths and other megafauna like cave lions, supports this view, showing that many large mammals suffered declines and disappeared after the Ice Age.

The rapid change in climate outpaced the ability of these species to adapt, acting as the "last nail in the coffin" for the mammoth, which could not survive in diminished and altered habitats.

The role of humans in mammoth extinction has been debated.

While early theories emphasized overhunting by prehistoric humans as the primary cause, recent studies suggest that while human hunting contributed, it was likely not the principal driver.

Instead, it is more probable that human activity acted as an additional stressor on already vulnerable populations, compounding the impacts of climatic and environmental changes.

Like many large animals, mammoths would have been sensitive to both direct human predation and indirect effects such as habitat disturbance.

This case underscores the broader lessons about species extinctions: major climatic shifts often create stressful conditions for wildlife, and even limited human impacts can tip struggling populations into extinction.

It highlights the importance of understanding the balance of ecological forces and the cumulative effects of human activity—issues still highly relevant to current biodiversity and conservation debates.

The mammoth’s disappearance, alongside other Ice Age megafaunal extinctions, reminds us that large-scale changes (climate, habitat, and human presence) can dramatically reshape ecosystems, sometimes irreversibly.

**Summary: Causes of Woolly Mammoth Extinction—Environmental and Human Factors**

During the last Ice Age (2.6 million–11,700 years ago), Earth was home to a great diversity of large animals, or “megafauna,” including the woolly mammoth.

The extinction of these giant mammals, especially the mammoth, has been a subject of debate among scientists, with two main factors often discussed: environmental/climate changes and human activities, especially hunting.

**Environmental/Climate Factors:**
- At the end of the last Ice Age, the climate underwent major warming.

Earth transitioned from cold, glacial conditions to the warmer, more stable climate we know today.

- This warming led to changes in vegetation.

As ice sheets retreated, the cold, dry mammoth steppe—once rich in grasses and herbs—was replaced by forests and wetlands unsuitable for large grazers like mammoths.

- Increased temperatures also affected water, oxygen availability, and the overall productivity of ecosystems, further stressing large mammals.

- Past extinction events have been linked to rapid changes in the carbon cycle, causing environmental disruptions similar to but generally slower than those induced by humans today.

**Human Impacts:**
- The arrival of humans marked a turning point: humans hunted mammoths for meat, hides, and bones, contributing to their decline.

- Human-induced fires became a prominent environmental factor, altering landscapes, reducing suitable habitat, and further increasing stress on megafaunal populations.

- Overhunting, often termed the “overkill hypothesis,” suggests that as humans spread into Eurasia and North America, mammoth populations could not reproduce quickly enough to counteract increased mortality.

**Combined Factors and their Implications:**
- The most widely accepted view is that both rapid climate changes and expanding human populations acted together: climatic warming reduced and fragmented mammoth habitats, while human hunting and landscape manipulation (e.g., fires) increased mortality.

- The loss of large herbivores like mammoths likely changed ecosystems profoundly—affecting vegetation, fire regimes, and the survival of other animal species.

- The extinction of mammoths is now seen as an early example of how human activities, in combination with natural environmental changes, can push vulnerable species past a tipping point.

- These events are relevant today as we face a potential “sixth mass extinction,” with similar patterns of rapid climate change and human-driven habitat loss threatening modern species.

**Conclusion:**
The extinction of the woolly mammoth illustrates the interplay of environmental changes—and particularly the accelerating role of human impacts—in causing species loss.

This underscores the importance of understanding both natural and anthropogenic drivers of extinction to inform current conservation efforts and avoid repeating such losses in the present and future.

**Summary: Environmental and Human Causes of Extinction (with focus on relevance to Mammoth Extinction)**

Multiple lines of evidence from paleontological and geological research highlight that extinctions are often linked to dramatic environmental changes—such as fluctuations in climate, sea levels, and atmospheric composition—sometimes compounded by human activity.

For example, studies on the disappearance of ancient marine fauna in Antarctica show that changes in sea levels and global climate, particularly temperature shifts, can disrupt ecosystems and trigger mass extinctions.

The breaking of natural barriers, such as ocean currents, allowed for the intrusion of warmer waters, stressing cold-adapted species.

Similarly, terrestrial mass extinctions in Earth’s history, such as at the end of the Permian period, were related to environmental catastrophes like the degradation of the ozone layer, which increased harmful UV exposure and contributed to species loss.

Fossil records show that periods of climate instability and sea level rise or fall strongly correlate with significant reductions in biodiversity.

Ecosystems like coral reefs show how the loss of keystone species can lead to broader ecological collapses.

Human activity is now recognized as a powerful force in driving environmental change—a view that was not common a century ago.

The impacts of human population growth, global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, and over-exploitation of natural resources all threaten biodiversity.

Present-day concerns reflect how the disappearance of a single species, or the disruption of an ecosystem, can lead to cascading effects on food security, climate stability, and human livelihoods, similar to events in the distant past.

Here is a synthesized summary (2500 characters) focusing on the extinction of the woolly mammoth, drawn from the extracted material:

**Woolly Mammoth Extinction: Causes and Insights**

The extinction of the woolly mammoth involved a combination of rapidly changing environmental conditions and significant human influence, providing a critical lesson about the interplay between climate, ecology, and anthropogenic impact on prehistoric ecosystems.

Title:

Content: What we know as the Ice Age, the last long period during which global temperatures dropped dramatically and the polar ice expanded to cover much of the earth, is more properly called the Last Glacial Period (as there have been multiple ice ages).

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It started around 115,000 years ago and lasted for over 100,000 years. In that time many animal lineages rose and fell. In particular, it is known that many large mammal species went extinct during the transition from the Ice Age to the present interglacial period (from around 50,000 to 5,000 years ago).

These extinctions are thought to have occurred due to a combination of a quickly changing climate, changing vegetation and increases in human hunting. These megafauna included some truly huge and charismatic animals, from the iconic woolly mammoth to huge cave bears, to giant sloths standing nearly 12 feet tall! In this list you will find out about some extraordinary (now extinct) animals that lived during the age of ice and snow.

10 now-extinct animals from the Ice Age

1. Neanderthals

Our own species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 300,000 years ago, so persisted through the last ice age. We were not the only ancient humans around, however. Surviving the frigid temperatures along with us were our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. This species of hominid emerged at a similar time to us but went extinct around 40,000 years ago – during the Ice Age.

Theories as to why they went extinct vary, from outcompetion from or diseases introduced by Homo sapiens to assimilation into the human gene pool. However, recent theories suggest that the primary driver might have been climate change. It is thought that despite behavioural and biological adaptations to the cold they simply struggled to survive the frigid conditions and lack of available food. How we survived and they didn’t is an interesting question.

2. Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius)

Probably the most well-known of all Ice Age animals is the woolly mammoth (in part thanks to the film character Manny!). Woolly mammoths lived from about 300,000 years ago up until about 10,000 years ago. The appearance of these elephant-sized animals is perhaps the best known of any prehistoric creature, due to the many frozen specimens that have been found, with soft tissue preserved.

With their thick coat of hair, large fat reserves, and specially adapted 'antifreeze' blood they were very well adapted to the cold. They were also very important to the survival of ancient humans throughout the Ice Age; their coats, meat and bones provided valuable sources of warmth, food and building materials for homo sapiens and Neanderthals alike.

3. Giant ground sloth (Megatherium americanum)

These beasts were very different to the sloths we know and love today! Standing at a whopping 3.7m when up on hind legs and weighing up to four tonnes (as opposed to the 5kg of a modern sloth), they were truly colossal.

With its ability to walk on its hind legs, it was in fact the largest bipedal mammal of all time. They lived in the woodlands and grasslands of South America, and fossils have been found dating back from around 400,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. Despite its huge fearsome claws, it was actually a vegetarian, feeding on leaves and grasses.

4. Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus)

Slightly more modest in size, though still pretty massive, was the cave bear. Weighing in at between 400 and 1,000kg, the largest cave bears were comparable in size to modern-day polar bears. They could be found across Europe and Asia, including in the UK.

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We have a very good idea of what they looked like, as in 2020 a perfectly preserved specimen was found in the Russian Arctic, its remains revealed by melting permafrost. Even its teeth and nose were intact.

The specimen was dated to between 22,000 and 39,500 years old, living towards the end of the time of the cave bears, who are thought to have gone extinct 24,000 years ago. It is thought that hunting by humans, as well as competition with them over caves, may have contributed to their disappearance.

5. Dire wolf (Canis dirus)

That’s right, dire wolves are not just fictional pets from Game of Thrones, they were real animals. However, despite the name, and a lot of physical similarities, recent genetic analysis has revealed that they were not actually very closely related to grey wolves at all and were relatively closer to African jackals.

These canids were seemingly a common feature of the American Late Pleistocene landscape (approx. 250,000 to 13,000 years ago), roaming the grasslands, plains, and woods and preying on megafauna including giant ground sloths. There is almost an overabundance of fossil data on this species, with over 4,000 individuals excavated from California’s La Brea tar pits alone.

6. Sabre Tooth Cat (Smilodon genus)

The La Brea tar pits have also been responsible for giving us insights about another iconic Ice Age predator – the sabre tooth cat. More than 3,000 fossilised individuals have been pulled from the ooze, and their teeth in particular have been a valuable source of information about their diets and lifestyle.

Scientists have been able to examine the wear patterns on their iconic gnashers to determine that rather than bringing down very large prey like bison on the open plains, as was previously thought, they most likely fed primarily on smaller forest-dwelling animals like tapirs and deer. They were ambush predators similar to many modern-day big cats.

7. Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus)

As you can probably guess from the scientific name, this species of deer was BIG. They stood at over 1.8m tall at shoulder height and had the largest antlers of any known deer, extinct or living. These colossal antlers must have been something to behold, spanning up to a whopping 3.5 metres.

Despite the name, this elk was not restricted to Ireland, but some of the most well-preserved fossil specimens have been found there. The most recent remains come from western Russia and have been dated to approximately 7,700 years ago – seemingly another victim of the megafaunal extinction event that occurred around the end of the Ice Age.

8. Giant Beaver (Castoroides genus)

Continuing the theme of larger versions of modern-day animals is the giant beaver, with an average length of about 1.8m. Its teeth were large to match, with some reaching up to 15cm, about the size of a hot dog.

There is no definitive evidence that they built dams as modern beavers do, but it is plausible that these immense incisors could have been used for woodcutting. What we do know is that they had smaller, smoother brains than modern-day beavers, which could indicate that they had less behavioural and social complexity.

9. Megalania (Varanus priscus)

So far this list has focused on mega-mammals, but what about other Ice Age species? Understandably it was hard for cold-blooded species like reptiles to survive frozen ice age temperatures across much of the globe, but in fact, not all of the world was icy, and some places remained habitable.

One of these places was Australia, where giant reptiles ruled. These included huge land-living crocodiles, massive snakes and Megalania – a truly monstrous relative of the Komodo dragon. This monitor lizard reached an estimated length of 7 metres and was a key land predator, at the very top of the food chain.

It has been suggested that the loss of its mega-reptile predators has left the Australian ecosystem out of kilter, allowing introduced mammals to reign unchecked.

10. Diprotodon (Diprotodon genus)

Another feature of the Australian Ice Age landscape was not a reptile, but a huge marsupial mammal – in fact, the largest marsupial to have ever lived. Diprotodon measured an estimated 4m head to tail tip and weighed as much as 3,500 kg, dwarfing the current largest marsupial, the red kangaroo, which checks in at a mere 2.7m and 90kg.

Their closest modern relatives are actually much smaller: wombats and koalas. It also has the distinction of being the only known seasonally migrating marsupial, trekking very far in search of food and watering holes.

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Main image: Artist's impression of a sabre tooth cat. © Daniel Eskridge/Getty

Authors

Leoma WilliamsAnimal behavior researcher and science writer

Leoma Williams is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Manchester, and writes periodically for both the website and print magazine

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How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

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During the last ice age, woolly mammoths were among the largest creatures to walk the North American landscape. Now, a team of American and Canadian researchers has discovered that the elephantine beasts took the “walking” part of their job description quite seriously.

Based on an analysis of a single tusk from an adult male woolly mammoth found in Alaska, the scientists determined that the animal journeyed about 70,000 kilometres over the course of its life – a trip equivalent to nearly twice around the world.

“The range is staggering. ... He definitely moved across a huge, huge area,” said Clement Bataille, an assistant professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Ottawa and a co-author on the study.

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Dr. Bataille said the high degree of mobility may have been part of the mammoth’s mating strategy. In comparison, African elephants can travel a lot, too, he added, and males typically depart from the groups they are born into once they reach sexual maturity.

However, Dr. Bataille and his colleagues note that the requirement for such a large range to roam in may have ultimately hastened the extinction of the species once the climate warmed and the shaggy grazers were hemmed in by shifting vegetation patterns. That, in turn, would have left them more vulnerable to predators, including human hunters.

The study began in 2018 when Matthew Wooller, director of the Stable Isotope Facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, invited Dr. Bataille and other colleagues to join an effort to extract information from a mammoth fossil discovered in 2010 on the north side of the Brooks mountain range, a few hundred kilometres from the Arctic Ocean. The fossil dates back 17,000 years, to a time when much of Alaska was a glacier-free grass plain connected to Siberia by the Bering land bridge.

The researchers nicknamed their specimen “Kik,” after a river system near the place where it was found.

Using the mammoth’s sliced-open tusk, they obtained detailed measurements of oxygen and strontium isotopes that were locked in the ivory material. The mammoth acquired the isotopes, which vary according to local geology, through the vegetation and water it consumed over the course of its life. As the tusks grew at the rate of about five to six centimetres each year, they recorded changes in isotope levels, which reveal when and how often the animal moved between locations with different geology.

The team also tested isotope levels in rodents that were gathered in different parts of Alaska as part of museum collections. That allowed them to match their mammoth isotope measurements to geographic locations. Finally, they used artificial intelligence software to reconstruct possible paths the mammoth may have taken, working backward from the location where it died at the age of 28.

The results suggest that Kik began its life in the Yukon River basin of central Alaska. As a juvenile it moved regularly in a north-south pattern, during a time when it was likely part of a herd, the researchers said. At about age 16 its movements transitioned to longer distance travel, often centred on certain core areas where it stayed for periods of time before setting out for new pastures.

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“It just takes off and goes on these 500- to 600-kilometre trips all at one time, going from one core area to the next,” Dr. Bataille said. The study found that some of the places where the mammoth lingered are frequented today by migrating herds of caribou.

Jeffrey Rasic, a study co-author and archaeologist with the U.S. National Parks Service based in Fairbanks, said the data suggest that Kik followed a predictable sequence of movements. If that was typical for Alaskan mammoths, it would have provided a huge incentive for hunters moving into the area from Asia to situate themselves in places where they could reliably expect to meet their quarry at certain times of the year, rather than pursuing them over a vast landscape.

“That would be an ideal set-up for intercepting a really big ticket meal item like a mammoth,” he said.

Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the study, said that while it’s not surprising to find animals moving over great distances, it’s quite a different matter to show that it happened in a species that no longer exists.

“That’s the trick that makes this study interesting,” he said. “It helps us better reconstruct the behaviour and ecology of mammoths in a way that’s really remarkable for an extinct species.”

Dr. Lynch, who has studied the genetics of the last known population of woolly mammoths, which died out about 4,000 years ago, said it’s an open question whether large-scale movement was a disadvantage.

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“We tend to think that widely distributed species which are mobile ... might be better able to find new habitats should the environment change. But could mammoths find refuge in a world that was warming?” he said.

One obvious limitation of the study is that its conclusions depend entirely on the movements of a single individual. Dr. Bataille said that he and his colleagues plan to perform a similar analysis on a female mammoth specimen for comparison.

The team’s study was published Thursday in the journal Science.

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Environmental Change and Climate:**
- Woolly mammoths were highly adapted to cold, Ice Age environments, subsisting on tough, hardy plants found in snowy, open grasslands across the Northern Hemisphere.

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From time crystals to cannibal toads, 2021 was a wild year for science

2021 was full of innovation and discovery in the world of science, covering everything from biological discovery and archeology to not one but two burgeoning space races.

We learned some fascinating things about ancient animal species, including some surprising facts about dinosaurs, and we learned a lot about humanity as well.

Quantum computers jumped from the realm of practical technology to potentially physics defying breakthroughs while some of our most cherished scientific achievements started to show their age.

We broke the record for the coldest temperatures ever achieved and might have caught sight of our first exoplanet in another galaxy.

There was a lot going on this year, but we pulled out the major stories throughout the year that helped define the year in science for 2021.

January

We're not going to lie, January was tough, as several studies and reports showed just how quickly the climate crisis was advancing. One study showed that the triple-threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and overpopulation could spell calamity for humanity by the end of this century.

Following up on that study, another showed that Earth is now hotter than its been in at least 120,000 years, seeming to settle a major conflict over climate models in favor of "Yeah, it really is that bad."

We also got some stunning photography of Mars' Valles Marineris, the single largest canyon in the solar system. The gash cuts across one side of Mars for thousands of miles and about 10 times longer and three times deeper than the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

February

Ok, February was Mars' month to really shine.

First, the United Arab Emirates also sent its first probe to Mars on February 9, a major milestone for a country that only launched its first satellite a decade ago.

Not to be outdone, China's first interplanetary spacecraft, the Tianwen-1 orbiter, arrived in orbit around the Red Planet the next day on February 10, beaming back spectacular video in the process.

The big show came a little over a week later when the NASA Perseverance rover successfully touched down on Mars in an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater after "seven minutes of terror" as the rover's landing sequence played out via automated programming.

It went off flawlessly and Perseverance has been doing science on Mars ever since. Even better, Perseverance was able to send back the first audio ever recorded on another planet: a recording of the Martian wind blowing past the rover.

A little closer to home, NASA also chose SpaceX's Falcon Heavy to carry the first pieces of NASA's Gateway Station to the Moon's orbit, with an expected launch date sometime in 2024. NASA picking SpaceX for stuff is going to be a big theme for 2021, in case you're wondering.

March

Hubble had some trouble in March, suffering a software glitch that knocked it out of commission for several days. While in itself not terrible, it would end up foreshadowing more serious problems later in the year.

We also got a new digital recreation of the complete Antikythera Mechanism, a roughly 2,000-year-old device discovered in an ancient Roman shipwreck in 1900 and considered the world's first mechanical computer.

The mysterious device is missing many key parts and is covered in two millennia of corrosion and sediment buildup, so figuring out how the device actually worked is one of archeology's greatest ongoing challenges.

We do know some things about it though, like the fact that it charted the positions of the planets, predicted lunar eclipses, and even counted down to the next Olympic games in Athens.

April

April was a historic month on Mars, as the Ingenuity helicopter drone made its first test flight after arriving on the planet with the Perseverance rover back in February.

It was the first time a human aircraft ever flew on another world, making it something of a Wright Brothers moment for NASA engineers.

"I don't think I can ever stop watching it over and over again," Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung said afterward.

Back here on Earth, just a really long time ago, we learned something remarkable about every kid's favorite dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Looking at new simulations of how a T. rex's tail would have moved given what we know of its physiology, it turns out its typical walking speed was a sluggish 3 mph (5km/h)

Speed doesn't scale well with weight, so this shouldn't be surprising, but given how many other huge dinosaurs were around at the time, T. rex hunting prey might have been history's slowest chase scene. Considering that T. rex possibly numbered in the millions right up until 66 million years ago, it seems to have gotten along just fine. Until the asteroid hit anyway.

Finally, just before the end of the month, China put the first section of the Tianhe space station into orbit. Called the Tianhe core module, the module provides life support and living space for up to three crew members, and includes the necessary guidance and navigation controls for the station as more modules are added in the months ahead.

May

Following up on NASA's Perseverance, China landed its first rover, Zhurong, on Mars in May.

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The Mars landing is a historic feat for China, making it only the second country to put a rover on another planet, after the United States. This is a further sign of the brewing space race between the two countries that is expected to accelerate in the years ahead.

Zhurong is equipped with panoramic and multispectral cameras and equipment to analyze rock compositions, as well as ground penetrating radar to explore subsurface features of the Utopia Planitia region of the planet.

Looking out a little bit past Mars, scientists were able to watch and document a star being eaten by a black hole in a process known as spaghettification

This is where the tidal forces of the black holes gravity on the side of the star nearest it is so much greater than the gravity on the star's far side that the difference in gravity literally tears the star apart, turning it into a stream of material that eventually forms an accretion disk around the black hole as it slowly consumes the material.

We knew that this process happened, but this was the first time astronomers got to watch it happen to an actual star.

Finally, there was news in May that scientists have determined that the longest a human can ever live, biologically, is about 150 years. After that point, the body is simply no longer able to repair itself. So, it turns out humans do have a definite shelf life.

June

June saw some disturbing news on the climate front, as a satellite photos taken from 2017 to 2020 showed Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier – one of the continent's most endangered – dramatically losing up to 20% of its supporting ice shelf in just four years.

The consequences of this kind of rapid ice loss will be dire, as melting ice from collapsing glaciers and ice sheets contribute to catastrophic sea level rise.

While we're talking about Antarctica, the southern most continent on Earth now officially has its own ocean, the Southern Ocean

While the idea of the Southern Ocean isn't new, it wasn't officially listed alongside the four other recognized oceans: the Altantic, the Pacific, the Indian, and the Arctic.

June also saw more evidence emerge that a comet fragment impacted Earth 13,000 years ago and caused the Younger Dryas period, a 1,500 year stretch starting around 11,000 BCE where Earth's climate suddenly snapped back into ice age conditions just as the last ice age was coming to an end.

The comet fragment theory – or the Clovis comet impact hypothesis, as it is known – has been a controversial one over the years.

New research into a global layer of platinum and other deposits in the geological record right at the start of the Younger Dryas though are pointing more and more to an impact, providing crucial support for the theory.

More research needs to be done, but it's looking increasingly like humanity survived an apocalyptic impact event 13,000 years ago, and the subsequent impact winter might have forced hunter-gatherer societies to work the Earth to try and grow food as it became more scarce – essentially forcing human tribes to form civilization as we know it in response to the crisis.

July

There was a lot that happened in July, but arguably the most important story of the month was the Billionaire Space Race kicking into high gear.

Both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos launched themselves into someone's definition of space, and we'll leave it to Bezos and Branson to pull out the measuring tape on that one and argue over where "outer space" actually begins.

Throw in half a year of Elon Musk's SpaceX launching a crewed mission to the International Space Station, several tests of SpaceX's Starship (many of which met a fiery end on a landing platform), and trash talk on Twitter, and one of the most obnoxious spectacles of the past decade spilled out into the open in July.

The saddest part about it all is that the future of space exploration is likely in their hands, and especially in the case of SpaceX, they are actually delivering results. So we're likely destined to have to put up with this for the foreseeable future as these companies become more integrated into our official space agencies in the US, Europe, and even in Russia.

Moving on from all that for now, there was also an exciting little tidbit of astronomy this August, with the discovery of a moon-forming disk around an exoplanet in a solar system in the earliest stages of its formation.

It was the first time we've ever seen anything like this, and it's a huge discovery for scientists researching solar system formation to actually see this process playing out.

As for the disk, it is surrounding an exoplanet that is about the size of Jupiter, and the disk itself is gargantuan, estimated to be about 500 times larger than the rings of Saturn, or comparable to the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

August

August was a huge month for quantum computing fans as Google announced that they had creating physics-breaking "time crystals", a quantum phenomenon that violates the principle of entropy laid out by the second law of thermodynamics.

The results have to be confirmed, and that isn't a simple task, obviously. No one just has a spare quantum computer lying around that researchers can use.

Still, if Google's Sycamore quantum computer has managed to create time crystals, all we can say is it's a big friggin' deal, and the implications of it still aren't clear even to physicists who do this for a living.

August also saw the announcement that researchers had identified the source of the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago.

Examining samples from the Chicxulub crater, the asteroid was determined to be a carbonaceous chondrite, an ancient class of asteroid that originates on the darkest, outer edges of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It's suspected that Jupiter's gravitational influence nudged the space rock into the inner solar system, and simulation models show that this happens more often than we originally suspected, with impacts with Earth occurring about once every 250 million years. So we've got time, yet.

While not the most ground-breaking event in science this year, it's still really cool that researchers spotted a metal-laden white dwarf rocketing against the rotation of the Milky Way at nearly 2 million mph (about 3.2 million km/h) like it was shot out of a cosmic cannon.

And in a lot of ways, it probably was. Astronomers suspect that the white dwarf was the companion to a star that went supernova, and the blast was so violent that the white dwarf remnant shooting through the galaxy has enough velocity to escape the Milky Way entirely and fly off into intergalactic space.

Oh, and if you thought you were done with the Jeff Bezos-Elon Musk fight over who gets dibs on outer space, you'd be wrong. By the middle of August, Jeff Bezos was suing NASA over its awarding SpaceX the Artemis lunar lander program, even though Bezos's Blue Origin bid was almost twice what SpaceX's bid was.

While this isn't really a fight between Musk and Bezos as much as it is a fight between Musk's SpaceX and the legacy military-industrial complex mainstays like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman, Bezos's lawsuit did manage to delay the Artemis mission and push it back to 2025 at the earliest.

September

Poisonous cane toads that even notoriously prickly Australian wildlife won't mess with have nothing to fear but themselves – literally.

The invasive cane toad, first introduced into Australia in the 1930s from South America as a pest control measure has spiraled out of control and now 200 million cane toads in Australia have made cannibalizing the young a key part of their development out of the tadpole stage, according to a recent study.

This in turn has made the cane toad hatchlings evolve to mature faster so that they can defend themselves against their older counterparts. This in turn is making the cane toads evolve to be even more ferocious in hunting down hatchlings to eat in a twisted evolutionary arms race.

"These toads have gotten to the point where their own worst enemy is themselves," the study author said.

We also saw new research in September that quantified the damage that a particularly strong solar flare could cause, and it's not good.

A powerful solar flare wouldn't harm any of us on the ground, not directly anyway. Earth's magnetic field protects us from any danger from the charged particles flying off the Sun during a solar flare event. But electronics? Yeah, they're toast.

The research revealed that there aren't enough redundancies in internet transmission capacity, particularly with undersea cables, which could be fried during a solar flare event and which could take months to replace.

Meanwhile, North America could be cut off from the rest of the world's internet until the cables were replaced, causing $7 billion dollars of economic damage a day while the internet remains out of commission.

In happier news, SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission, the first privately chartered space flight to orbit the Earth, helped raise tens of millions of dollars for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, which treats pediatric cancers and other diseases.

Inspiration4 also gave us something new from SpaceX: a cupola on the Dragon Crew capsule. This domed window gave the crew members stunning views of the Earth as they orbited, making everyone else on Earth jealous as hell.

See more

October

We had a couple of choice bits in October as well. First, there was news that researchers in Germany broke the record for the coldest temperature ever achieved in a lab.

Using a special state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, made from 100,000 rubidium atoms held in place with magnetic fields and cooled to about 2 billionths of a degree Celsius, the researchers dropped the condensate from a 120-foot tall freefall tower while flipping the magnetic field off and on rapidly.

This dropped the temperature of the atoms to just 38 picokelvins, or about 38 trillions of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero, for roughly two seconds.

Speaking of cold, a comprehensive study of wooly mammoth fossils and other environmental samples collected over 20 years claims to prove that the mammoths weren't hunted to extinction, but rather died off because of climate change.

Coming out of the last ice age, mammoths were adapted to finding and eating a tough kind of plant life that can survive in snowy climates, but when the snows melted, those plants got pushed out by the marshy plant life of a tundra, which the mammoths apparently couldn't eat, or which at least didn't provide the proper nutrients.

Finally, we got word toward the end of October that we might have spotted our first exoplanet in another galaxy. Unfortunately, it appears to be orbiting far enough away from a black hole or neutron star that we won't be able to confirm it using the transit method for about 70 years.

November

In November, we learned that it's no use hiding from you cat, they know where you are at all times thanks to some special process that can link sound to location like pinning audio cues on a 2D mental map.

Even when they're not looking, they're still watching you, apparently.

We also got new evidence of a unique kind of fast radio burst, one whose source appears to be repeatedly exploding, as many as 1,652 times in a single 60 hour period of observation.

The researchers who spotted it are at a loss to describe what could be causing such an unusual, and rapid, pattern, but they have some guesses.

We saw more space debris make the news in November as well, as several incidents involving space debris threatening the International Space Station made the news, including an anti-satellite weapons test conducted by Russia that sent shrapnel from the satellite into the path of the ISS, forcing astronauts to enter their Dragon and Soyuz capsules as an emergency precaution.

December

Closing out the year, we had a new EP drop from Mathematician and electronic music artist Dr. Valery Vermeulen that used data from black hole collisions and black hole simulations to create sometimes-haunting soundscapes.

We interviewed Vermeulen and explored the overlap between art and science, how we can use unorthodox tools to make complex science more accessible to the masses, and why that ultimately matters.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from black holes, the Parker Solar Probe finally touched the Sun's outer layer this year.

The announcement in December was met with a lot of understandable fanfare and wonder, but the accomplishment will also better help us understand solar winds and other space weather produced by the Sun.

And we obviously can't close out the year without talking about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launch. The successor to Hubble, JWST will be the next-generation observation platform for astronomers for the next five to ten years, and probably longer.

The incredibly delicate deployment is still underway as you read this, but we're getting closer to having an entirely new eye on the universe that will let us see further back in time to the earliest galaxies and stars to ever have formed. Exciting stuff, assuming everything goes right.

Fingers crossed, otherwise that'll be a crappy way to kick off the year in science for 2022.

John (He / Him / His) is TechRadar's Computing Staff Writer and is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Named by the CTA as a CES 2020 Media Trailblazer for his science and technology reporting, John specializes in all areas of computer science, including industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and the social impact of the tech industry.

You can find him online on Twitter at @thisdotjohn

Currently playing: Back 4 Blood, Metroid Dread, EVE Online

As the last Ice Age ended, global temperatures rose rapidly.

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Melting snows gave way to marshier tundra ecosystems, leading to a shift in dominant vegetation.

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Hardy grassland plants were replaced with marsh plants, which, according to available evidence, were not suitable as primary food sources for mammoths, or at least did not offer sufficient nutrients.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

food sources disappearing
shrank grassland
pastures becoming swampy

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

- The warming climate also caused a contraction in the mammoths’ range.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Mammoths required vast territories for seasonal migrations and foraging.

As suitable habitats dwindled and became fragmented, mammoth populations became isolated and more vulnerable to extinction.

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

Title:

Content: INTERVIEW

The Medea Hypothesis: Why some experts say life on Earth sows the seeds of its own destruction

What if life isn't calculating, but more akin to a "puppy running amok," accidentally destroying its own habitat?

Published December 19, 2022 3:01PM (EST)

Planet earth frozen in a block of ice (Getty Images/Andrew Bret Wallis)

To quote a famous fictional lion, the Earth is a beautiful circle of life — predators and prey, plants and animals keeping each other in perfect balance. This idea — of Earth's lifeforms as epitomizing a collective, life-cultivating system — has a long history: the ancient Greeks called Earth "Gaia," the mother of all life. In the 1970s, two scientists hypothesized that planet Earth is really one giant super-organism, with all animals, plants, fungi and other life actively influencing (and encouraging) one another's evolution; Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist, and James Lovelock, a scientist, environmentalist and futurist, accordingly called their theory the Gaia hypothesis.

"Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth," Lovelock told Salon in an interview from 2000. "It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia."

It is a nice idea, to think that life begets life — or that life on Earth works towards a larger purpose of self-perpetuation. The only problem is that this isn't a universally accepted proposition among scientists. Indeed, some believe the opposite is true: life on Earth doesn't have a larger goal, but rather, could accidentally and at any moment evolve in a way that would kill off great masses of life — or even all life.

Evidence for this much more cynical theory about life on Earth includes, for one, the numerous mass extinctions that have occurred throughout Earth's 4.5 billion year history, some of which extinguished 99 percent of all life. Some of these extinctions were caused not by asteroids, but by life itself behaving in its own self-interest.

Thus, some scientists say that Gaia, the mother of life, is a poor choice of deity to serve as a metonym for Earth. A better one might be Medea, an enchantress in Greek myth who murdered her own children.

"This name thus seems appropriate for an interpretation of Earth life ... to be inherently selfish and ultimately biocidal."

In the late 2000s, Peter Douglas Ward, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington in the geology, biology and astronomy departments, coined the term "Medea hypothesis" to describe the ways that complex life eventually generate the circumstances to drive their own extinction. The term was meant to evoke the Gaia hypothesis, the Medea hypothesis being somewhat of an opposite.

We see Medea's handiwork all around us in the fossil record. The Great Oxidation Event, some 2.45 billion years ago, is a prime example. Back then, the planet was all but devoid of oxygen, and microbial life metabolized just fine without it. But then cyanobacteria hopped on the scene, which evolved photosynthesis. That ended up spitting out tons of oxygen over millions of years, which was toxic to most life on earth, causing widespread death that shows up in the fossil record.

We also see Medea in the present, as the Earth undergoes its Sixth Mass Extinction, this one caused in large part by human activity. It's why we see billions of Alaskan snow crabs suddenly disappearing or thousands of other examples of ecosystem collapse. It's why climate change is so threatening to our continued way of life and why humanity may even join the dinosaurs in the dustbin of natural history.

"Why I started thinking about Medea [is that] I really disliked the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia is not even a theory to me, it's just New Age nonsense."

"This name thus seems appropriate for an interpretation of Earth life, which collectively has shown itself through many past episodes in deep time to the recent past, as well as in current behavior, to be inherently selfish and ultimately biocidal," Ward wrote in his 2009 book, "The Medea Hypothesis." "A result of this bad mothering, I propose, will be a shortening of the time that life will exist on our planet. Life will do this to itself by unconsciously changing environmental conditions to a point where there can no longer be plant life or, ultimately, any kind of life."

The Medea Hypothesis might be epitomized by the story of photosynthetic life on Earth. As Ward explained in our interview, plant life on Earth has a repeated tendency to evolve in a way that it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then freezes the entire planet, killing the majority of life that depends on Earth being, well, not frozen. This has happened many times in the fossil record.

Salon spoke with Ward about the basis for this theory and what it means for life on Earth — but also the implications for finding life on other planets, including Mars.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What got you interested in extinction events?

Peter Ward: What really struck me and why I started thinking about Medea, is I really disliked the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia is not even a theory to me, it's just New Age nonsense. So much good came out of it. Lovelock was no fool. But this idea has been bastardized to the point of thinking that life knows that we humans are putzes and will clean up our mess.

One of the really driving definitions of life is that, given a chance, any species will do anything it can to have all the resources. There's no altruism in nature. Take everything you can, reproduce to the point that you control everything. This is what humans have done. Other species have tried it in the past, they've just never had the ability technologically. But where does that drive come from? I think it's so innate within the structure of DNA and how cells are constructed, this dominance principle. Altruism is nonsense.

When I first encountered this idea of the Gaia hypothesis, I found it very seductive. It's very cute. It's a nice little narrative and there's some evidence for it, I can sort of see that. If you zoom out and you look at the planet, it's like this shelled organism that has a system, just like a microscopic cell. Like, it has a bunch of different components in it, that are all working together, that all evolved independently and then assembled. So maybe you can apply that same sort of lens to the entire planet. But in the Medea hypothesis, what are some of the most pointed examples?

Carbon dioxide has to be the most powerful molecule in all biological systems. We're going from 360 parts-per-million CO2 molecules [in the atmosphere] among a million other molecules... all we have to do is go up to 450 or 500 [parts-per-million]... I mean, you're adding another 100 out of a million, and the world goes from benign to completely insane. I mean, completely ends of the world, adding just 100 more [per] million molecules. When you think about the power, that is unbelievable.

CO2 runs the world. And we're on such a knife's edge. Long-term climate stability is partly plate tectonics, but an awful lot of is the carbonate feedback system. When you have CO2, it gets warmer. When it's warmer, chemical weathering increases in rate and therefore it gets colder and colder till now, chemical weathering isn't working as fast. Then you have more volcanoes pumping out CO2. So the balance is up, down, up, down. Three billion years of balance, then along come plants. And photosynthesis kicks in and CO2 is ripped out of the atmosphere, more and more of these plants grow. And then boom, the whole world freezes. Well, the first time plants get roots, boom. Life makes these innovations into very narrowly controlled systems. And it all goes to hell. It's not like life's mean, it's just the bad puppy idea. It f**ks up and knocks things over. Gaia would never do that.

It's embarrassing to admit, but I used to not really believe in climate change, like over a decade ago, until I started looking into the science. And that statistic was one of the things I used to dismiss it. Like there's only 400 million parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere? How could this have any influence? But it's amazing how even that small change is so impactful.

It's scary. The nice thing about deep time is you really get to relive this stuff. You asked, why am I wrapped up in death? Well, it fascinates and horrifies me. But there's such powerful lessons that you can see. The fossil record doesn't just tell us about the past. It predicts the future.

And usually after a mass extinction, I don't know how long, probably a long time, but there's sometimes an explosion of life. The Cambrian Explosion came after a mass extinction, right?

Yeah. But I had this argument with the SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Life] dudes, back in the day, Seth Shostak and I used to go back and forth. Someone said, "mass extinctions are good things. And in fact, if we hadn't had the critical number we did, we probably wouldn't have the diversity we do." It's equivalent to thinning out the garden to get your other stuff to grow. But I had to point out that following the Permian mass extinction, it took 2 million years to get anything close to what was there before. I personally don't think I want to wait that long. It's a long dead period.

"If there's life on Venus it's up in the clouds. But I've never liked that idea. I think there's a much better chance around Jupiter's moons."

When teaching my undergrad class, I started really looking at how bad ice ages are for planets. I've been to Antarctica four times. What struck me was how little life there was down there.

And if you go all the way back to the snowball Earth — we had one [event] at 2.1 billion years ago and we had one 700 to 600 million, where the planet froze over. You can see it in carbon isotopes. Carbon isotopes are really a meter of the quantity of life on the planet. And every time we have ice ages, the amount of life on this planet drops. Why do we have these cold periods? Why is it the longest Ice Age in Earth history followed [by] the first forests? Plants did it every time.

Every time roots figure out how to go deeper, they break up more rock below them. More minerals with silicate minerals in them get exposed to CO2, they turn into clay, they pull the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Boom, Earth becomes cold. It's life that does it every single time. Every one of the mass extinctions, it's life that kills itself off.

It's like a stupid puppy. It runs amok. It doesn't have evil intentions — that's not possible. This is not some guiding principle. I just have the sense that life is just this clumsy oaf.

What does the Medea hypothesis tell us about the search for life on exoplanets?

There's only a few ways you could make life. Life is probably going to always be affected by natural selection, it's going to have to metabolize, it's gonna have to reproduce. And this is what NASA says. The three parts, if that's how it works, then it is going to be this blunt instrument. Once you start introducing these little chemical factories — that's what a bacterium is, a tiny, little chemical factory — there's only three morphologies.

Bacteria are a little spheres, little rods or little spirals. That's all they can do. Three things. Not a lot of body plans. So when their environment gets f**ked up, they build new chemicals. I can't change this. I can't change myself physically. But I'll change where I'm living chemically. I will make it chemically different. I can make it chemically warmer, chemically colder, I can change the toxins. All I can do is build chemicals. That's profoundly different.

There's probably no life on Mars. But if there's bacteria — if Mars ever had life down deep in the rocks, you're probably gonna find it [there].

Could Mars life have killed itself off in the way that Medea tries to kill itself off here? Of course it could. Same principles are going to apply. Life does some blunderbuss thing on a system that's less forgiving than Earth was. Smaller planet, gas is thinner, you don't have many minerals. You've got a much smaller toolkit to build yourself with. So the margin of error is probably narrower. Surely, blundering life [on Mars] could easily knock itself off.

What about life on Venus or Jupiter's moon Europa?

Well, in the early Earth history, the sun was way less energetic. So Venus wouldn't have been as nasty as it is now. But Venus is the bad case history for too much CO2. It just got hotter and hotter. And then sooner or later, it lost its surface water. And once you do that, you've got a runaway greenhouse [effect].

If there's life on Venus it's up in the clouds. But I've never liked that idea. I think there's a much better chance around Jupiter's moons. The cool thing about Jupiter's moons is that you've got oceans down there. And if you look at Europa, you see all these craters in it. Well, those craters would punch right through. Any asteroid punching through is going to throw a whole bunch of seawater up into space. Those moons are being orbited by frozen water that was blasted out of them. If there was life there, you don't have to go [down] into it. You're gonna find it in orbit around it. So the joke among us is, let's just get a scoop and go fish up the fish frozen in orbit around Europa.

By Troy Farah

Troy Farah is a science and public health journalist whose reporting has appeared in Scientific American, STAT News, Undark, VICE, and others. He co-hosts the drug policy and science podcast Narcotica. His website is troyfarah.com and can be found on Twitter at @filth_filler

MORE FROM Troy Farah

Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Biology Evolution Gaia Hypothesis Interview Medea Hypothesis Peter Douglas Ward Science

Human Activities:**
- The disappearance of mammoths coincided with the expansion of early human populations into their habitats.

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

This added a significant new pressure.

- Early humans were effective hunters.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

Archaeological evidence suggests that as human hunting intensified, it further reduced mammoth populations already weakened by habitat loss.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Overhunting likely accelerated their decline, preventing surviving populations from recovering.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

Synergistic Effects:**
- The combined effects of climate change and human hunting created a situation where mammoths could not adapt quickly enough.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

The shifting vegetation and loss of grazing lands reduced their numbers, while human predation hastened their extinction.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

food sources disappearing
restricted habitat
shrank grassland

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Fragmented, small populations were also likely more susceptible to genetic drift and inbreeding, further reducing their viability.

Title:

Content: We have completed maintenance on DiscoverMagazine.com and action may be required on your account. Learn More

In-Breeding Likely Didn't End the Last of the Mammoth Population

A study of the last likely surviving mammoth population shows that genetics from in-breeding likely did not lead to their demise.

By Paul Smaglik
Jun 27, 2024 6:20 PMJun 27, 2024 6:22 PM
Wrangel Island mammoth tusk (Credit: Love Dalén)

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It would seem obvious that rising sea levels that cut off the last population of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island from the Siberian coast 10,000 years ago caused in-breeding, leading to their eventual extinction. But a new genetic analysis, reported in Cell, counters that claim.

That result was unexpected, since an earlier report indicated that the mammoth population likely built up harmful genetic mutations, according to Love Dalén, a scientist with the Centre for Palaeogenetics of Sweden, and one of the paper’s authors.

“I was fairly surprised both at how few the mammoths on Wrangel Island were in the beginning (less than 10 individuals), and that we did not find any evidence for an accumulation of highly deleterious mutations,” Dalén says. He calls the relative lack of harmful mutations surprising, because an earlier paper published in 2017 in PLOS Genetics predicted they may have played a factor.

Natural Selection and Genetic Drift

The genetic story of this population — which likely started from 8 individuals and grew to 200 to 300 mammoths over 6,000 years within 20 generations — is a bit more complicated. Two sometimes competing genetic factors were at play.

Natural selection tends to purge harmful variants, because offspring carrying them would be less likely to survive. But genetic drift works to preserve mutations across generations.

This effect tends to be stronger in smaller populations, so it would make sense that it would impact the Wrangel Island mammoths.

Read More: Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time

What Made the Island Mammoths go Extinct?

Although it appears that these two genetic forces competed, it wasn’t necessarily a fair fight.

“Whereas genetic drift affects all deleterious mutations in the same way, natural selection will be stronger the more deleterious a mutation is,” says Dalén. “That way, natural selection is expected to remove the very deleterious mutations from the population, while genetic drift leads to an increase in slightly deleterious ones.”

Therefore, over time, the most harmful mutations were purged, while a bunch of relatively innocuous ones remained. So, if inbreeding didn’t do in the mammoths, what did?

“This leaves us with some other possibilities, such as a disease outbreak, some sort of tundra fire, or very short-term climatic perturbation, where the latter two could have ruined the plant growth for one or a few seasons, which could have had disastrous consequences for such a small population,” Dalén says.

Read More: How Do We Know When a Species Is Extinct?

Conservation of Today

Although the interplay between natural selection and genetic drift didn’t appear to wipe out the mammoths of yore, it still has implications for conservation efforts of today.

For example, conservationists wishing to preserve a species that has almost gone extinct, but has partially recovered, could look to the Wrangel Island mammoths. The implication is that moving a few individuals between two isolated populations could slow genetic drift.

The study’s authors have yet to analyze DNA from the most recent Wrangel Island mammoths. However, researchers have found fossils from the last 300 years of the mammoths’ existence and plan to analyze their genomes.

Read More: Scientists Are Trying to Save These Animals From Extinction

Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.

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What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

Broader Implications:**
- The study of mammoth extinction adds to the growing body of evidence that current rates of species extinction are much higher than the historical norm, echoing warnings of a looming “sixth mass extinction” event driven by rapid climate change and human activity.

Title:

Content: 44 mins ago - Science

Earth's sixth mass extinction is underway and "rapidly accelerating," study warns

Earth's sixth mass extinction is already happening — and it is rapidly accelerating, researchers warned in a study out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.

Why it matters: The study adds to a growing understanding of how humans have — often negatively — impacted Earth's trajectory.

What they found: The study noted that animal species are going extinct at rates 35 times faster than the historical norm over the past million years.

  • Researchers highlighted the role of humans in the phenomenon, noting that animal species lost in the past 500 years would have taken about 18,000 to go extinct in the absence of humans.
  • Habitat destruction, illegal trade and climate disruption will likely continue to drive extinction rate acceleration in the coming decades, the study added.

The mass loss of animal species means losing a record of the planet's evolutionary history and potential, and will have ramifications for humans, Gerardo Ceballos, the study's lead author, told Axios.

  • "There is life on the planet because of the plants and animals — wild plants and animals — and the ecosystems that they form," Ceballos said.
  • The crops humans use, the combination of gases of the atmosphere that make it suitable for life on Earth, and active compounds used for medications, are all in some ways dependent on plants and animals, he added.
  • By losing entire branches of genera, "we're losing the capability of the planet to maintain life in general, and to maintain human life in particular," Ceballos said.

State of play: The new research builds on a number of studies from past years that warned Earth is experiencing a sixth mass extinction.

  • Scientists have previously warned that up to 1 million species are threatened with extinction and some could be lost within decades.
  • A separate study published earlier this summer in the journal Biological Reviews noted that the sixth mass extinction, currently underway, is the first mass extinction "directly induced by a single species – humans."
  • Researchers in June proposed the demarcation of a new epoch to reflect humans' impact on Earth.

Yes but: Not all scientists are convinced that the current wildlife loss constitutes a sixth mass extinction.

  • "We have no idea how to identify a sixth mass extinction," Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, told Axios.
  • Disagreeing with the premise of a sixth extinction doesn't mean disputing the fact that the Earth is experiencing wildlife loss that's much faster than in the last few million years, he stressed.
  • "When you start saying, 'Well, how does this compare to what happened 65 million years ago?' That's when it gets really difficult," Pimm said.

Ceballos defined mass extinction as a catastrophic event that happens relatively quickly, is caused by a natural catastrophe, and wipes out 70% of the plants and animals on Earth.

  • The debate over whether a sixth mass extinction is occurring "doesn't really matter," Ceballos said.
  • Regardless of what you call it, Earth is facing massive biodiversity loss, climate change, and the toxification of the environment, he added.

Background: The last mass extinction occurred after an asteroid struck the earth roughly 66 million years ago.

The bottom line: The new study notes that "immediate political, economic, and social efforts of an unprecedented scale" are necessary in order to prevent these mass extinctions and their impacts.

  • Humans have the science, technology, and knowledge "to do much better," Ceballos said.
Go deeper

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- The mammoth’s fate underscores the vulnerability of even highly successful, well-adapted species to sudden environmental shifts and the profound, sometimes inadvertent, impacts humans can have on ecosystems.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

In conclusion, the extinction of the woolly mammoth demonstrates how complex interactions between environmental change and human activity can drive species to extinction.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

This history offers important lessons for conservation and the management of current biodiversity crises.

**Summary: The Extinction of the Mammoth – Causes and Insights**

The extinction of the woolly mammoth is a complex event that reflects the interplay between environmental changes and early human activity.

Title:

Content: Partners news
The cause of the extinction of mammoths
Scientists have found that mammoths died out due to climate change
Photo: Stanislav Krasilnikov / TASS
An international team of researchers found that the cause of the extinction of mammoths in Siberia was primarily a sharp climate change, not human activity.
The article is published in the journal Nature.
Woolly mammoths became extinct only about four thousand years ago.
They were not only the main source of meat of ancient people – the latter made from their bones the basis for dwellings, from their tusks made harpoons and even musical instruments.
Therefore, there is a widespread theory that the main cause of extinction was humans.
Researchers from the Institute of Earth Sciences of St. Petersburg State University together with colleagues from the UK, Denmark, China, Norway and the United States decided to restore the appearance of the tundrosteppe, which was inhabited by mammoths.
To do this, they using the shotgun method — obtaining from a random massive sample of cloned fragments of the original sequence — analyzed the DNA of ancient plants and animals collected from 535 different places in the Arctic, where the mammoth lived, over 20 years.
They also analyzed the DNA of more than 1,500 modern plants and animals.
Researchers were able to map the distribution of populations of mammoths and other representatives of the megafauna of the tundrosteppe.
They saw that over time their populations and genetic diversity became smaller and smaller — making survival increasingly difficult.
With the end of the Pleistocene about 12 thousand years ago and the accompanying retreat of glaciers and the formation of rivers, lakes and marshes, vegetation has decreased in volume, and it has become insufficient to maintain the previous level of populations.
As the climate warms, trees and swamp plants have taken the place of former mammoth pastures.
“We have shown that climate change, in particular rainfall, has directly led to changes in vegetation.
According to our models, people did not have any influence on them [mammoths], ” said the first author of the work, a researcher at the University of Cambridge Yuchen Wang.
However, the extinction of mammoths was influenced not only by the warming of the climate itself.
“His speed was the last nail in the lid of the coffin – they (megafauna tundrosteppe – approx.
“Tape.ru ”) could not adapt quickly enough, when the landscape radically changed and food was not enough, ” said the head of the scientific group, Professor of Copenhagen and Cambridge universities Eske Willerslev.
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How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Scientific consensus, as reported in journals such as Nature, points to climate change as a major driver in their disappearance.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

As the last Ice Age ended, global temperatures rose, resulting in dramatic changes to mammoth habitats—open steppe-tundra landscapes transformed into forests or wetlands, reducing the area where mammoths could find suitable food.

Title:

Content: In one of the most common versions of the extinction of giant mamutes, it is claimed that this was caused by the hunting of ancient people.
Our ancestors literally ate most of the animals.
But recent studies say that this is not the case and people have become far from the main reason for the disappearance of mammoths.
Hunger caused by climate change is the real killer.
Searching for gold, but found mammoths: an incredible story with the Yukon
Drawing of a mammoth on the wall of the cave of Arcy-sur-Cure, France / Photo Wikipedia
The Hungry Death of Great Animals
It would seem that mammoths existed for millions of years and survived several ice ages.
That is, climate change did not affect them critically.
But as soon as they encountered humans, they began to die out.
Finally, we were able to prove that the problem was not only climate change, but also the speed of these changes.
This was the last nail in the coffin – the mammoths could not adapt quickly enough when the landscape changed dramatically and food became scarce.
- says the author of the study Eske Willerslev, a professor at the University of Cambridge and director of the Center for Geogenetics of the Lundbeck Foundation at the University of Copenhagen.
The team, led by Prof. Willerslev, sequenced the DNA of plant, animal, and their fossilized excrement, coprolites.
The selection of these samples lasted about 20 years and allowed us to fully understand why the majestic animals died out.
After the end of the last cooling, the glaciers began to melt.
The environment quickly became quite humid, leading to a chain change in flora.
Typical mamut habitats and pastures became increasingly swampy and vegetation changed accordingly.
As a result, there is simply no food left typical for animals.
From birth to death: scientists have fully investigated the life path of the mammoth
Giants did not have time to adapt to rapid changes, so the total number of mammoths was constantly declining.
Because of this, isolated and partially isolated animal populations arose, which already caused little genetic diversity.
It is clear that all this did not positively affect the chances of survival.
Scientists say climate change is critical.
When such changes destroyed mammoths and probably another megafauna.
Today, we live in a time when the average temperature on the planet is rising again, so we need to take this “harsh lesson ” seriously.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

food sources disappearing
restricted habitat
shrank grassland
pastures becoming swampy

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

The inability of such large animals to rapidly adapt to these changing landscapes and dwindling food supply was a crucial factor in their extinction.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

food sources disappearing
restricted habitat
shrank grassland

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

DNA analysis of ancient species, including mammoths and other megafauna like cave lions, supports this view, showing that many large mammals suffered declines and disappeared after the Ice Age.

Title:

Content: Cave lions in Europe and mammoths in the United States.
Scientists have told what the Earth would be without Homo sapiens
The researchers say that in general, the planet could be an exciting place, which would be inhabited by representatives of megafauna.
Scientists believe that without humans, the Earth would be a more wild and fertile place, in which giants such as ostrich moa birds with a height of 3.6 meters still lived.
They lived in New Zealand for millions of years, but disappeared 750 years after their land was invaded by man, writes LiveScience.
The vanished giant moas and eagles of Haast, whose wingspan was 2.6 meters or more, are a small example of how human activity has changed the planet.
The survival of such large animals is crucial in thinking about what the Earth would be like without humans, as such giants have a crucial influence on landscapes.
Senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Seren Forby, says humans have played a crucial role in the extinction of many large mammals.
Forby led the study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions.
It said that without humans, the Earth would resemble an ecoregion in East Africa, the Serengeti, teeming with life.
In such a scenario, extinct animals, along with elephants, rhinos and lions, would live throughout Europe.
For example, the African lions (Panthera leo) would still be replaced by cave lions (Panthera spelaea), a larger species that lived in Europe about 12,000 years ago.
At the same time, America would be home to larger relatives of elephants and bears, as well as unique species such as the glyptodon – car-sized armadillos and giant sloths.
“In a world without humans, there would be a lot more different species of large mammals, as well as a much more open habitat, ” says Forby.
Elephants or other species of large animals do not tolerate obstacles in their search for food.
In such cases, the territory acquires a less wooded appearance.
The world would be brighter
During the last Pleistocene Ice Age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), the Earth was rich in megafauna.
Much of it went extinct after the end of this ice age or millennia later.
A 2021 study from the journal Nature found that climate change had wiped out woolly mammoths as well as other Arctic megafauna, but humans also put additional pressure on these species by hunting them.
Christopher Doughty, an ecologist at the University of Northern Arizona, modeled how large animals, among other things, affected ecosystems by moving seeds and nutrients during eating and defecating.
The expert found that the movement of elements such as phosphorus, calcium and magnesium, which play a crucial role in life, decreased by almost 90% along with the disappearance of megafauna.
The researcher emphasizes that without human intervention, all the necessary elements would be evenly distributed throughout the landscape.
Thus, the soil would be more fertile and productive.
Agriculture and zoning make land less fertile compared to systems in the wild.
Such increased fertility means that the Earth would be much richer in crops and colors, the planet would definitely be brighter without humans.
Without humans, the climate would be different.
Human induced global warming is known to have raised the average temperature by 1 degree Celsius since the early 20th century.
Consequently, the weather on the planet would be cooler without humanity.
A 2016 study in the journal Nature found that current warming delayed the onset of the ice age by at least 100,000 years.
But this should not have happened for another 50,000 years, so it is unlikely that without humans there would be another ice age on Earth right now.
People are inevitable
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) were not always the only hominins on the planet.
The disappearance of Homo sapiens could open up new perspectives for Neanderthals.
There is no single answer to the question of why the Neanderthals died out about 40 thousand years ago.
There were probably several reasons for their disappearance, and Homo sapiens are the main suspects.
Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London believes that the competition between Neanderthals and humans was one of the reasons for the disappearance of the former.
“If Homo sapiens hadn ’ t come to Europe about 45,000 or 50,000 years ago, I think Neanderthals and their descendants would still have lived on Earth, ” Stringer says.
The expert notes that Neanderthals led a complex life in Europe, they faced climate change, were a small group with low genetic diversity.
“Neanderthals probably were already in distress when modern humans came to their lands, and this factor could be the last, ” the expert notes.
But humans could have influenced the survival of more than just Neanderthals.
At least there is another relative of Homo sapiens who shared land with humans and Neanderthals: the Denisovans.
This line is closer to Neanderthals than to modern humans in terms of genes and appearance.
Judging by a number of studies, people interbred with Denisovans, because modern people continue to find the DNA of Denisovans.
It is assumed that Denisovans had a wider range of habitat than Neanderthals.
They may also have more genetic diversity than Neanderthals.
"Perhaps the Denisovans were even better species for survival than the Neanderthals," Stringer said.
In general, Denisovans and Neanderthals could pave the way similar to H. sapiens, moving from hunting and gathering to the development of agriculture.
"There is no obvious reason why Neanderthals or Denisovans would not have evolved if they had the time to do so," he said.

When did the wooly mammoth mostly become extinct?

The rapid change in climate outpaced the ability of these species to adapt, acting as the "last nail in the coffin" for the mammoth, which could not survive in diminished and altered habitats.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

The role of humans in mammoth extinction has been debated.

According to most recent research, what cause of wooly mammoth extinction is not as important as previously believed?

While early theories emphasized overhunting by prehistoric humans as the primary cause, recent studies suggest that while human hunting contributed, it was likely not the principal driver.

According to most recent research, what cause of wooly mammoth extinction is not as important as previously believed?

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Instead, it is more probable that human activity acted as an additional stressor on already vulnerable populations, compounding the impacts of climatic and environmental changes.

Title:

Content: Science 2021-11-11T12: 03: 35 + 02: 00
Ukrainian News
Giant armadillos and mammoths.
Scientists have told what the Earth would look like if there were no people on it.
Giant armadillos and mammoths.
Scientists have told what the Earth would look like if there were no people on it.
This is what a glyptodon might look like, an armadillo-like creature that went extinct during the Ice Age.
Photo by Stocktrek Images
Man has greatly changed the landscape of planet Earth since the time of the development of tools.
And the more active the progress, the faster a person changes the face of the world around.
But if there were no humans on the planet, then there would be giant animals that are now extinct.
This conclusion was made by scientists, writes the publication Live science.
The land would belong to giant plants and animals.
Along with megafauna, Neanderthals, the distant ancestors of man, would also live.
Animals would be bigger.
For example, moa birds, similar to ostriches, would still live in New Zealand.
After humans came to the islands, the birds became extinct in 200 years.
According to Seren Faurbi of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, for thousands of years, humans have played a crucial role in the extinction of many giant animals.
Without us, today ’ s Earth would in many ways resemble an African ecosystem teeming with life.
Thus, the animal world of Europe would resemble Africa with its elephants, lions and rhinos.
But instead of African lions, cave lions would live - they are larger.
And in Africa, there would be giant bears and animals similar to armadillos, but the size of a car.
Scientists are still arguing about what led to the extinction of mammoths.
This could be both climate change and human activity.
Christopher Doughty of the University of Northern Arizona studied how representatives of megafauna contributed to the distribution of seeds.
He believes that with the extinction of large animals, the redistribution of elements such as phosphorus, calcium and magnesium decreased by 90%.
Without humans, these elements would have been more evenly distributed, he said, leading to a more productive system.
Without humans, the climate would be different.
But what exactly – scientists can not say exactly.
As reported by Ukrainian News, in Tanzania found the bones of a previously unknown species of titanosaur with a unique coccyx in the shape of a heart.
The deposits in which the bones were found are dated to 100-110 million years old.
On the British Isle of Wight, archaeologists have found two new species of dinosaurs that were predators of large size.
In size, the fossil lizards were no less than a bus and hunted both on land and in water.
They had crocodile-like snouts, sharp teeth, and a whip-like tail.
In addition, scientists have discovered a small crab that was stuck in wood tar 100 million years ago, so perfectly preserved.
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According to most recent research, what cause of wooly mammoth extinction is not as important as previously believed?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Like many large animals, mammoths would have been sensitive to both direct human predation and indirect effects such as habitat disturbance.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

This case underscores the broader lessons about species extinctions: major climatic shifts often create stressful conditions for wildlife, and even limited human impacts can tip struggling populations into extinction.

Title:

Content: WomenDraiv.ru
Science and technology
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On the way to disaster: the sixth mass extinction has already begun
According to some scientists, the sixth mass extinction has already begun.
Don ’ t you think that reality is becoming more and more like apocalyptic movies?
Take, for example, “Don ’ t Look Up ” with DiCaprio and Lawrence in the lead roles.
The characters and events of the film are certainly grotesque, but sometimes what happens on the screen becomes more difficult to distinguish from reality.
And although the killer asteroid does not fall on us, the problems of humanity do not become less.
I would even say there are too many.
One such problem is the beginning of the sixth mass extinction of wildlife.
We ourselves are on the verge of extinction – the most optimistic forecasts give our civilization a little more than four hundred years.
But the current extinction, unlike any other, is our handiwork.
Climate change, habitat destruction, pollution and industrial agriculture all play a role in humanity ’ s journey to self-destruction.
Extinction is near
We are witnessing the first mass extinction in 65 million years – at least one million species are at risk of extinction.
Even more alarming are the results of a major study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which showed that life on Earth is at risk.
According to calculations, the extinction of species can occur at a time different from the previous mass extinctions that swept the planet in the distant past.
We are faced with radical changes that occur within one human life.
Data collected as part of the IUCN report showed that 77 of the most endangered species have lost 94% of their populations over the past century.
It turns out that over the past 100 years, more than 400 vertebrate species have died out - a figure that would have taken about 10,000 years to reach in the normal course of evolution.
Climate change threatens wildlife
Available data also point to a series of extinctions in the near future that could have catastrophic consequences for the natural ecosystem.
Experts warn that “extinction breeds extinction, ” as species whose well-being depends on endangered life forms are also on the path to extinction as a result.
It is believed that over the next 20 years, about 500 species will disappear forever from the face of the Earth.
Mass Extinction of Animals Could Turn Water into ‘ Poisonous Soup ’
What does the sixth mass extinction look like?
It is no secret that 99% of all living organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct.
The natural ecosystem of the planet is constantly evolving, and as the environment changes, some species will begin to disappear anyway.
So, groups of researchers around the world are studying species capable of transmitting dangerous viruses to humans, as wild animals and humans are increasingly forced into close contact.
The reason is the fragmentation of the habitat and the destruction of natural ecosystems.
Here ’ s an example of what ’ s already happening – the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 likely came about thanks to children playing near a tree full of bats.
Although the origin of COVID-19 is still unclear, some scientific studies have linked it to wild bats.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that about 10 million hectares of forest have been cut down each year since 2015.
Another example is the extinction of birds and insects.
Bees, for example, play a vital role in our food security.
About a third of the world ’ s food supply depends on pollinators such as bees, and if they die out, crop yields could plummet, the researchers write.
What ’ s more, some crop pests can thrive as predators disappear, further affecting yields.
Millions of people rely on wild species as a source of food and livelihood, especially for fisheries, which are already facing challenges.
See also: The media reports about the leak of the UN report on climate change.
What does it say?
Fishing seriously affected by climate change
Food insecurity, which will also be associated with increased drought and floods, will hit poor regions hardest, especially sub-Saharan Africa and parts of south-east Asia.
Agriculture will also be at risk, as soil health depends on microorganisms that, according to some scientists, are dying out at a rapid pace.
The New Normal – Lack of Water and Food
Most of the world ’ s fresh water comes from lands that purify and redistribute this source of life.
For example, the Himalayan water tower, fed by rivers, supplies about two billion people.
If such systems collapse, including algal blooms and the disappearance of vegetation, humanity could lose a lot of drinking water and resources for agricultural use.
Read more fascinating articles about the future of humanity and the Universe on our channel in Yandex.Zen.
There are regularly published articles that are not on the site
As forests shrink, rainfall patterns are likely to change, and with the loss of trees and vegetation — the main regulators of atmospheric carbon dioxide — climate change is expected to worsen, leading to more extreme weather events.
In connection with fires unprecedented before, many animals have lost their habitat
Crop failures and other environmental threats are likely to trigger mass migration as people flee hunger and conflict over dwindling resources.
Fortunately, dedicated conservation biologists and conservation agencies are doing their best to focus on endangered birds and mammals.
Scientists believe that some species can be saved from extinction.
Fortunately, we still have the opportunity to prevent a catastrophe and save as many living beings as possible.
The full text of the work can be found here.
Comment

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

It highlights the importance of understanding the balance of ecological forces and the cumulative effects of human activity—issues still highly relevant to current biodiversity and conservation debates.

Title:

Content: Environmental and industrial safety are our main objectives
2439
Dear voters!
On April 26 of this year, extraordinary elections of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan will be held.
Elections are an opportunity to draw the attention of society to the main issues of our life.
My vast work, production and life experience suggests that the attention of the state is not always properly paid to environmental and industrial safety issues.
That's why I put forward my candidacy.
The main goal of my election platform is to consider the tasks of transition to environmentally friendly development in the context of human development, to demonstrate the need to take into account environmental aspects and industrial safety issues in such a transition.
* * *
The second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries is a time of unprecedented economic growth.
However, rapid economic growth is increasingly carried out without proper consideration of the capabilities of the environment, permissible economic loads on it.
Irrational use of natural resources, pollution of the natural environment with waste, depletion of the gene pool and biological diversity leads to the degradation of the natural environment and human habitat.
As a result, the natural environment is degraded.
Today, the issues of ozone depletion, pollution of the waters of the World Ocean, pollution of land and soil cover, depletion of biological diversity as a result of human industrial activity are relevant.
As a result of the processes of soil degradation, about 7 million hectares of fertile land are removed from the world agricultural turnover annually.
The main reasons for this process are growing urbanization, water and wind erosion, as well as chemical (clogging with heavy metals, chemical compounds) and physical (destruction of soil cover during mining, construction and other works) degradation.
Of great concern is the pollution of the atmosphere by dust and gaseous wastes, the emissions of which are directly related to the combustion of mineral fuels and biomass, as well as to mining, construction and other earthworks.
One of the main aspects of the environmental problem is the reduction of biological diversity.
Currently, the Earth ’ s biodiversity is estimated at 10 to 20 million species.
The damage in this area is already felt enough.
In the second half of the 20th century, the process of reducing the gene pool accelerated dramatically, and if the existing trends continue in the 21st century, 1 / 5 of all species that now inhabit our planet may disappear.
Man is depleting non-renewable natural resources and endangering the production of those elements that could be revived.
It changes the environment of nature upon which its physical and mental existence as a biological and social phenomenon depends.
Environmental pollution is becoming more acute and alarming.
Therefore, today it is necessary to talk about ecology not only as a section of biology, but also in a broader sense.
With the advent of man and the development of his economic activity in the evolution of the biosphere began to act a new factor - anthropogenic.
Man began to use the biosphere to meet his needs.
The level of human impact on the environment depends primarily on the technical equipment of society.
It was extremely small in the early stages of human development.
However, with the development of society, in the course of technological progress, the situation changed radically.
The twentieth century, which formed a qualitatively new relationship of science, technology and technology, enormously increased the scale of the impact of society on nature and posed a number of extremely acute problems for humanity.
However, no matter how we try to change the environment, life on Earth develops according to the strict laws of nature.
That is why human civilization, in order to ensure its sustainable development, must also follow these laws and principles.
Living in harmony with nature is one of the fundamental principles of the existence of Man on Earth.
Even the great philosophers of antiquity taught that it is possible to command nature only by obeying its laws.
However, many facts give grounds to characterize the current relationship between man and nature as anthropogenic ecocide - the destruction of people's natural habitat, including the conditions of their own existence.
Therefore, today we must understand and perceive ecology as the science of our own home.
That is, about the biosphere, the features of its development and the role of man in this process.
People should understand the laws of the development of the biosphere, know the possible causes of its degradation.
Society should form a model of behavior in which the laws of the development of the biosphere are not violated.
Back in the early twentieth century, the famous naturalist V. I. Vernadsky said that humanity has become the main geological-forming force of the planet, and one day the time will come when people will have to take responsibility for the further development of both Nature and Man.
It was obvious to Vernadsky that the biosphere, under the influence of intelligent human activity, was changing into a qualitatively new state.
This new state of the biosphere, transformed by human thought and labor, Vernadsky called the noosphere.
Its essential characteristic is the maintenance of the global equilibrium of the system on the basis of an optimal combination of socio-historical and natural-natural laws.
The biosphere existed before the appearance of man on Earth, it can exist without him.
But man cannot exist without the biosphere.
Awareness of the global environmental danger threatening to destroy humanity has forced the world community to look for new ways out of the situation and led to an understanding of the need to develop the concept of sustainable development.
Noospheric humanity must find a way to restore and preserve the ecological balance on the planet, to develop and implement in practice a strategy of crisis-free development of nature and society.
In the late 1960s, the idea of using a scientific approach to the problem of biodiversity conservation increased again, which was reflected in the creation of a global network of protected areas, on the basis of which international cooperation and exchange programmes began to develop.
Within the framework of these programs, special zones have been created in which it is possible to deal not only with the conservation of biological diversity, but also with the monitoring of environmental processes.
It was during this period that the concept of zoning was proposed, which consists of the creation of three special zones: the core, the buffer zone and the transition zone, or the zone of cooperation with the local population.
In the same period, biological reserves began to be created, the main activity of which was to conduct long-term research on the conservation of biological diversity.
The result of the research was the creation of a worldwide network of biosphere reserves, combining specially protected natural areas, reducing biodiversity losses, preserving the values of the ecosystem.
Today, the network of biosphere reserves is a kind of engine for the exchange of experience, the basis for educational and research programs, monitoring of the environmental situation.
Unfortunately, at present, man is an aggressive element of the ecosystem, but only he, being a sentient being, can stop the destruction of biological diversity and Nature as a whole.
Man is quite capable to assume the functions of managing the ecological development of the planet.
That is why ecology today must go beyond just biology.
Ecology should become an interdisciplinary science that studies the problems of human interaction with the environment.
The interaction of man with nature has its own specifics.
Man is endowed with intelligence, and this gives him the opportunity to realize his place in nature and purpose on Earth.
Today, humanity needs a new paradigm of progressive development that can ensure the well-being of society without undue pressure on the natural environment and without its destruction.
In the near future, advanced countries will move to the formation of a new technological base based on the application of new scientific ideas and developments, globally advanced technologies, biotechnology, etc.
And we must not lag behind them.
Particular attention should be paid to the issue of modernization of environmental policy and the role of civil society in a systematic transition to environmental development.
It is important to be clear that we will be able to achieve safe development only by revising the concept of development of our economic system.
In particular, the source of growth should be the transformation of the economy through the transition to environmentally friendly, low-waste technologies that are environmentally friendly and allow us to ensure an intensive increase in the degree of our competitiveness, well-being and quality of life of society.
Our primary task should be the rational and planned use of natural resources, the protection of the environment from pollution, the introduction of a planned system of state control, international and social measures aimed at the rational use, protection and restoration of natural resources, satisfaction of the material and cultural needs of future generations.
The role of education should not be underestimated.
Therefore, vital measures for the dissemination of knowledge about environmental and industrial safety are the introduction of a compulsory subject in general education schools and the teaching of the basics of ideas about ecology and safe development, as well as constant environmental and educational activities.
We must inculcate knowledge about the environment, the principles of a safe and environmentally friendly existence, knowledge about the need to protect and preserve nature and the reality around us.
Civil society structures, including mass public organizations and youth movements, as well as professional institutions, have a special role to play in disseminating the ideas of preserving environmental balance and industrial safety.
It is necessary to develop civil activity in environmental and environmental issues.
People themselves must consciously come to the idea of   the need to preserve the ecological balance and pristine nature.
All human economic activity must be subjected to a thorough analysis for environmental impact.
The development of such institutions in the center and regions will contribute to the consolidation of the efforts of the expert community and civil society to identify ways and implement clear tasks of modernizing the economy to ensure environmentally friendly development.
Ensuring the success of these tasks involves the development of a broad movement in Kazakhstan in support of increasing the environmental competence of the masses and safe development, as a priority for the activity of civil society, and the definition of this topic as one of the fundamental vectors of support from the state.
Dear Kazakhstanis!
Industrial safety issues are also important in the life of all industrialized countries.
Industrial safety is aimed at compliance with industrial safety requirements established in technical regulations, rules for ensuring industrial safety, various instructions and other regulatory legal acts.
All these documents must be executed.
A certain degree of protection of the vital interests of the individual and society as a whole from possible emergency situations at hazardous production facilities and minimization of the consequences of these accidents should be guaranteed.
To prevent these situations, a set of measures aimed at ensuring the safe operation of technical devices should be implemented at all hazardous production facilities.
All organizations operating hazardous production facilities are obliged to take care of the safety of their employees, facilities and the environment.
All businesses must operate in a way that minimizes the harmful impact on the environment.
In 2004, the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan "On technical regulation" was adopted.
The law clearly sets out norms on the safety of products and processes, on multi-level standards and certification.
My goal is to achieve transparency and the correct implementation of these norms.
It is necessary to ensure systematic public control over the activities of enterprises in the interests of ensuring the safety of products and processes.
It is necessary to ensure that the requirements of technical regulations become mandatory not only on paper.
It is necessary to ensure that in the implementation of construction, industrial development, any economic activity does not suffer our rich nature, our unique landscape.
Dear voters!
In my program, I tried to convey to you the main idea – the importance of the principles of clean ecology and industrial safety in the life of the state.
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The mammoth’s disappearance, alongside other Ice Age megafaunal extinctions, reminds us that large-scale changes (climate, habitat, and human presence) can dramatically reshape ecosystems, sometimes irreversibly.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

**Summary: Causes of Woolly Mammoth Extinction—Environmental and Human Factors**

During the last Ice Age (2.6 million–11,700 years ago), Earth was home to a great diversity of large animals, or “megafauna,” including the woolly mammoth.

Title:

Content: How would the earth be different if modern man did not exist?
The Libyan Observatory Newspaper
LATEST NEWS
The human footprint can be seen across the planet today, from the towering skyscrapers that define our modern capitals to the pyramids and other ancient relics from our past.
Human activity also represents the sprawling open fields of agriculture, the roads that connect everything together.
But what would the world look like if humans didn ’ t exist before?
Some scientists paint a picture of a pure wilderness and an abundance of species, from fashionable to uncommon.
Trevor Worthy, a paleontologist and assistant professor at Flinders University in Australia, told Live Science: “I think it would be a much more vegetative place with a wealth of animals, of great size, spread across all continents except Antarctica. ”
A world without modern humans may also mean that our extinct human relatives, such as Neanderthals, will still exist.
And, of course, they would have changed the scene as well.
Humans shaped the world at the expense of many species, from the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) to the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus), which pushed us to extinction through activities such as hunting and habitat destruction.
The rate of extinction on Earth today is more than 100 times what it would have been without humans, according to the most conservative estimates, and has not been higher since the Cretaceous and Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event that wiped out about 80% of animal species, including non-floating dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
In other words, humans collided with the planet like an asteroid, and the dust continues to settle as wildlife continues to deteriorate.
“My great-grandfather was able to see herds of thousands of parrots in the landscape, my grandfather saw a hundred flocks, my father saw little and I ’ m lucky if I could see two in the woods, ” said Worthy.
The human-driven decline of nature suggests that Earth would be a more wild place without us, with some lost giants, such as moas, standing out the most.
This group of ostrich-like birds, some of which extend up to 11.8 feet (3.6 m) in New Zealand, evolved over millions of years.
Within 200 years of humans reaching their land 750 years ago, all nine species of moa have disappeared, along with at least 25 other vertebrate species, including the giant Haast eagles (Hieraaetus moorei) that hunted moa, according to Worthy.
The giant moa and the Haast vultures are recent examples of large animals whose eventual extinction is linked to human activities, such as unsustainable hunting and the introduction of invasive species into new habitats.
They are also indicators of what our relationship with large animals might be like elsewhere.
The survival of large animals is crucial to speculate on the existence of a land without humans, as these monsters have a significant impact on the landscape.
– Serengeti System
Soren Furby, senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, believes that humans played a key role in the disappearance of many large mammals thousands of years ago.
He led a 2015 study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, which suggested that without humans, the Earth would be much like the contemporary Serengeti system, an African ecosystem teeming with life.
In this scenario, extinct animals similar to those found in Serengeti today – including elephants, rhinos and lions – would live across Europe.
For example, instead of African lions (Panthera leo), there are still cave lions (Panthera spelaea), a slightly larger species that lived in Europe until about 12,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Americas will be home to relatives of huge elephants and bears, along with unique species, according to Forby.
"In a world without humans, there will be much more diversity than large mammals, and if you see a greater diversity than large mammals, you tend to see a more open habitat," Forby said.
Elephants and other large animals are well identified when finding food, and will not tolerate unnecessary obstacles.
“If you ’ re old enough, it might be easier to knock on a tree and eat fresh leaves on top of it, ” Forby said.
But also, if there are a large number of large mammals, there is a tendency to have fewer wooded plants in the first place, he said.
Large animals, such as elephants, are known as megafauna.
During the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), the world was rich in megafauna, but most of them died at the end of the ice age, or in the thousands of years since.
For example, about 38 genera of large animals went extinct in North America at the end of the last ice age, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Over the past century, scientists have debated whether natural climate changes or human activities, such as overfishing, are the main reason for the decline of these large animals.
A 2021 study published in Nature concluded that climate change ultimately wiped out the woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) and other Arctic megafauna that survived the end of the ice age.
However, humans hunted mammoths.
Scientists who believe humans may have been the main factor in their extinction, such as Forby, argue that mammoths survived climate change before humans appeared and would probably survive to this day had it not been for the added pressure humans placed on them.
Christopher Dottie, an associate professor and ecologist at Northern Arizona University, is modeling how past and present large animals transport seeds and nutrients through eating and defecating.
His work indicates that the transport of elements such as phosphorus, calcium and magnesium, which are important for life, was reduced by more than 90% through the extinction of large animals.
Dotti hypothesizes that without humans, elements would be evenly distributed across the landscape.
This means more fertile soil, which makes ecosystems more productive.
Humans tend to group elements together through practices such as farming and creating fenced areas, so that these areas become less fertile over time compared to terrestrial systems, according to Dauty.
Greater fertility means that plants can devote their resources to more fruit and flowers, so that the world looks more vibrant and feeds more animals.
While it is difficult to determine how humans and megafauna have influenced climate change for thousands of years with evidence obscured over time, it is much easier to judge our impact on Earth ’ s climate today.
Through global warming, caused by activities such as burning fossil fuels, humans have raised the global average temperature by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) since the beginning of the 20th century.
Therefore, the Earth would have been at least colder without us.
A 2016 study published in the journal Nature concluded that human-induced warming would delay the next ice age by at least 100,000 years.
And it wasn't due for another 50,000 years, though, even without human delay, so it's unlikely that Earth would be in the middle of another ice age today if we didn't exist.
Humans are inevitable.
Scientists aren ’ t sure why Neanderthals went extinct about 40,000 years ago, but because they mate with Homo sapiens, parts of their DNA are found in some of us.
There were probably multiple causes of Neanderthal death, but we're a prime suspect.
Chris Stringer, a professor and research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, believes competition for resources was a factor in the disappearance of Neanderthals.
“If we weren ’ t around, if we hadn ’ t come to Europe 45,000 or 50,000 years ago, I think they ’ d probably stay here, ” he told Live Science.
According to Stringer, Neanderthals lived a complex life in Europe, similar to modern humans, but they had difficulty adapting to climate change and were relatively few in number, with low genetic diversity.
This is bad news for any species, as it is a sign of inbreeding and ill health.
Stringer said Neanderthals were probably “already in trouble, and when modern humans got there too, I think that ’ s probably what pushed them to the edge. ”
Scientists are still learning about at least one human lineage that lived around the same time as modern humans and Neanderthals: Denisovans.
This lineage appears to be closer to Neanderthals than modern humans in genes and appearance, but it can be distinguished from Neanderthals with very large molars.
There is evidence of DNA in current humans living in places like New Guinea in Oceania — a finding that suggests Denisovans were in Southeast Asia interacting with ancestors of modern humans who later settled in the East, according to a 2012 study published in the journal Science.
These Denisovan interactions, along with fossil evidence, suggest that they had a larger geographic range than Neanderthals, encompassing a variety of environments and, therefore, arguably, were more adaptive than Neanderthals.
DNA evidence also suggests that Denisovans may have had greater genetic diversity than Neanderthals, according to Stringer.
Stringer said: “There ’ s no reason why Neanderthals or Denisovans shouldn ’ t do it eventually, given enough time. ”
He added that they may have overcome any potential intellectual deficiency, which is not clear to them, through evolution.
So maybe the world won ’ t look completely different after all.
Likewise, they could have made the same mistakes we have made since then.
So, global warming could have been here, but with Neanderthals or Denisovans leading it, not us.
"Who knows?"
Source: Live Science

When did the wooly mammoth mostly become extinct?

The extinction of these giant mammals, especially the mammoth, has been a subject of debate among scientists, with two main factors often discussed: environmental/climate changes and human activities, especially hunting.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

**Environmental/Climate Factors:**
- At the end of the last Ice Age, the climate underwent major warming.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Earth transitioned from cold, glacial conditions to the warmer, more stable climate we know today.

Title:

Content: Scientists warn of what could lead to a “mass extinction ” of marine life that“ rivals ” the severity of the Great Death!
The Libyan Observatory Newspaper
A new study has revealed that greenhouse gas emissions could lead to mass extinctions of marine life to levels not seen since before the dinosaurs.
Researchers in New Jersey modeled the future extinction risk of marine life in all of the world's oceans under different projected climate scenarios.
If emissions are not curbed, the loss of marine species due to global warming and oxygen depletion could reverse the “Great Death, ” the most serious extinction event on Earth, by about 2100, they say.
The Great Death, known as the deadliest extinction on Earth, saw the loss of 95% of all marine species when it occurred about 250 million years ago.
It can also match other major extinction events in Earth's history, including the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
According to the researchers, tropical waters will face the greatest loss of biodiversity, while polar species are more at risk of extinction.
On a more positive note, experts say reversing greenhouse gas emissions could reduce the risk of extinction by more than 70 percent.
Lead author Justin Penn, at Princeton University ’ s Department of Earth Sciences, said: “The bright side is that the future is not written in stone.
The scale of the extinction we have discovered depends heavily on the amount of carbon dioxide [CO2] we release going forward.
“There is still enough time to reverse the trajectory of CO2 emissions and prevent the magnitude of warming that could cause this mass extinction. ”
The Great Death marks a period when life on Earth has never been so close to extinction without recovery, either before or after.
When carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans, it becomes extremely acidic and the level of oxygen in the water drops, killing marine life.
Scientists have long debated theories of the cause of extinction ranging from meteorite impact to volcanoes, which could have caused climatic and environmental changes that make the Earth uninhabitable.
But in the event of the next mass extinction, history will directly blame anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
For the study, Ben and co-author Curtis Deutsch, also based at Princeton, combined existing data on marine species with climate change models to predict how changes in habitat conditions will affect their survival.
The experts compared their model to the size of the “Big Five, ” five historical mass extinctions recorded in the fossil record, among them the“ Great Death. ”
The researchers say that with global temperatures rising “as usual, ” marine life is likely to be subjected to a mass extinction that could potentially rival the size and severity of the Great Death.
Since the Great Death is the deadliest extinction event on Earth, the next marine extinction is likely to surpass the other four species.
Among the events, they found a common pattern – as the ocean warms and oxygen availability decreases, there is a clear decline in the abundance of marine life.
Water temperature and oxygen availability are key factors that will change as the climate warms due to human activity.
Warm water is not only a risk factor for species adapted to cold climates; it also contains less oxygen than cold water, slowing ocean circulation further and reducing the supply of oxygen at depth.
Paradoxically, the metabolic rates of the species increase as the water warms, and therefore the demand for oxygen rises as the supply decreases.
“Once the oxygen supply is less than what a species needs, we expect to see significant species losses, ” he said.
Experts say marine animals have physiological mechanisms that allow them to adapt to environmental changes, but only to a certain extent.
The researchers found that polar species are more likely to become extinct globally if climate warming occurs because they will not have suitable habitats to move to.
Tropical marine species are likely to be better off because they have traits that allow them to cope with warm, low-oxygen waters in the tropics.
To determine the relative importance of climate in the occurrence of extinctions, the team also compared future extinction risks from climate warming with data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on current threats to various marine animals.
They found that climate change currently affects 45% of marine species at risk of extinction, but is only the fifth most important stressor after overfishing, transport, urban development and pollution.
However, Ben said climate change could soon overcome all these stressors in importance.
"Extreme warming will lead to climate-induced extinctions, which, towards the end of the century, will compete with all current human pressures combined," he said.
The study, “Avoiding mass extinction of oceans due to climate warming, ” was published in the journal Science.
Source: Daily Mail

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- This warming led to changes in vegetation.

Title:

Content: Scientists fear a repeat of an ancient fire that wiped out entire species
Science and Technology
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Over the past decade, deadly wildfires have become increasingly common due to human-induced climate change and disruptive land management practices.
Southern California experienced a wave of wildfires 13,000 years ago.
These fires have permanently changed vegetation in the region and contributed to the largest extinction on Earth in more than 60 million years.
A team of researchers has a unique perspective on the causes and long-term consequences of environmental changes, both those associated with natural climate variability and those caused by humans.
In a new study published in August 2023, researchers sought to understand the changes that occurred in California during the last major extinction event at the end of the ice age.
The event wiped out most of the large mammals on Earth about 10,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dramatic climatic disturbances spread.
Scientists often call the past 66 million years of Earth's history the Age of Mammals.
During that time, some organisms exploited the extinction of dinosaurs to become the dominant species on the planet.
During the Ice Age, Eurasia and the Americas were teeming with enormous beasts such as woolly mammoth, giant bears, and terrible wolves.
Two camels, three species of ground sloths and five species of big cats roamed what is now Los Angeles.
And then suddenly she went away.
Around the world, the large mammals that characterized global ecosystems have disappeared for tens of millions of years.
North America has lost more than 70% of mammals weighing more than 97 pounds (44 kg).
South America lost more than 80%, and Australia lost almost 90%.
Africa, Antarctica and a few remote islands hold what can be considered “normal ” animal communities today.
The cause of these extinctions remains unclear.
For decades, paleontologists and archaeologists have debated possible causes.
With the end of the last ice age, the warming of the climate changed weather patterns and reorganized plant communities.
At the same time, the population was growing rapidly and spreading all over the world.
Either or both of these processes could be involved in the extinction event.
But the fossil record of any region is usually so rare that it is not known exactly when large mammal species from different regions disappeared.
This makes it difficult to determine whether habitat loss, resource scarcity, natural disasters, human hunting, or a combination of these factors is the cause.
Some records provide evidence.
La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, the richest ice age fossil site in the world, preserves the bones of thousands of large mammals that have been trapped in sticky asphalt spills for the past 60,000 years.
The proteins in these bones can be accurately dated using radiocarbon, giving scientists unprecedented insight into the ancient ecosystem and a chance to shed light on when – and why – it collapsed.
A recent study of La Brea Tar Pits and nearby Lake Elsinore uncovered evidence of a tragic event 13,000 years ago that permanently altered southern California ’ s vegetation and caused the disappearance of La Brea ’ s famous mega-mammals.
Sediment archives from the bottom of the lake and archaeological records provide evidence of a deadly combination — a warm climate punctuated by decades of drought and a rapidly growing population.
These factors have pushed the Southern California ecosystem to a turning point.
The catalyst for this dramatic shift seems to have been the unprecedented increase in wildfires, possibly caused by humans.
The processes that led to this collapse are familiar today.
As California warmed up after emerging from the last ice age, the landscape became drier and forests receded.
In La Brea, herbivores have declined, possibly due to a combination of human hunting and habitat loss.
In the millennium before the extinction, average annual temperatures in the region rose by 5.5 degrees Celsius, and the lake began to evaporate.
Then, 13,200 years ago, the ecosystem went into a 200-year drought.
Half of the remaining trees were lost.
With fewer large herbivores eating them, dead plants accumulated on the landscape.
Humans and our ancestors have used fire for hundreds of thousands of years, but fire has different effects on different ecosystems.
Coal records from Lake Elsinore reveal that before humans, fire activity was low on the southern coast of California.
But from 13,200 to 13,000 years ago, as the population grew, fires in the region increased in order of magnitude.
The research suggests that the combination of heat, drought, loss of herbivores and human fires has pushed this system to a tipping point.
At the end of this period, Southern California was covered with plants that thrive after the fires.
A new fire system was created, and the huge animals disappeared.
Lessons for the future
Studying the causes and consequences of Pleistocene extinctions in California can provide a valuable context for understanding today ’ s climate and biodiversity crises.
A similar combination of climate warming and population expansion, biodiversity loss and human-ignited fires that marked the receding ice age in Southern California is once again emerging today.
The worrying difference is that temperatures today are rising 10 times faster than they were at the end of the ice age, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels.
This human-caused climate change has contributed to a fivefold increase in the frequency, intensity and area burned in California in the past 45 years.
While California is now famous for severe fires, the study reveals that fire is a relatively new phenomenon in this region.
In the 20,000 years leading up to the extinction, the Lake Elsinore record showed a drastic reduction in the incidence of any fire even during similar droughts.
It is only after the arrival of man that fire becomes a regular part of the ecosystem.
Even today, collapsed power lines, campfires and other human activities have caused more than 90% of wildfires on the California coast.
The similarities between the massive extinctions of the Pleistocene and the current ecological crises are striking.
The past teaches us that the ecosystems we depend on are prone to collapse when subjected to multiple intersecting pressures.
Redoubling efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, prevent reckless fires and preserve the massive organisms remaining on Earth could help avoid another, more catastrophic transformation.
The report was prepared by Lisa N. Martinez, PhD candidate in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Regan E. Dunne, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences from the School of Arts, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California, Duransev.
Source: Science Alert
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How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

food sources disappearing
shrank grassland
pastures becoming swampy

As ice sheets retreated, the cold, dry mammoth steppe—once rich in grasses and herbs—was replaced by forests and wetlands unsuitable for large grazers like mammoths.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

food sources disappearing
restricted habitat
shrank grassland
pastures becoming swampy

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Increased temperatures also affected water, oxygen availability, and the overall productivity of ecosystems, further stressing large mammals.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Past extinction events have been linked to rapid changes in the carbon cycle, causing environmental disruptions similar to but generally slower than those induced by humans today.

Title:

Content: Study: Sixth mass extinction in Earth by 2100
11: 49 PM Thursday 09 Dec 2021
Washington, D.C.:
The planet could face a serious event leading to mass extinction by 2100, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology warned, adding that climate change is pushing our oceans to the brink of collapse.
Professor Daniel Rothman added that at least five mass extinctions have occurred in the past, driven by cosmic and natural phenomena.
Scientists estimate that up to 99.9 percent of all plant and animal life has been wiped out.
The last extinction, the so-called third Cretaceous extinction, occurred about 66 million years ago when a deadly asteroid struck the planet off the coast of modern Mexico.
Not only did the Cretaceous extinction abruptly end the reign of the dinosaurs, it wiped out as much as 75% of life on Earth at that point.
Many scientists fear that a similar fate may await us in the future, and even more worrisome is that humans may have a hand in the planet ’ s demise.
According to geophysicist Rothman, human activity has the potential to disrupt the global carbon cycle and cause a 10,000-year environmental disaster.
In a study published in the journal Science Advances, Rothman said he analyzed changes in the carbon cycle over the past 540 million years, including the past five mass extinctions.
Based on his research, Professor Rothman claimed that the Earth could enter an “unstudied zone ” by 2100, leading to a planet-wide disaster that could last up to 10,000 years.
The MIT scientist is concerned about how much carbon is deposited in the oceans as a result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The presence of so much carbon in the ocean makes the water extremely acidic and potentially inhospitable to many animal species.
According to Professor Rothman, at least four of the past five mass extinctions have been linked to an increase in the rate of carbon cycle change.
He believes humans pump a lot of carbon into the atmosphere, faster than in past geological events and on much shorter time scales.
Professor Rothman estimates the amount of carbon in the ocean at about 300 gigatons per century.
Unfortunately, some estimates suggest that Earth is on track to add up to 500 gigatons by 2100.
“Mass extinctions represent a kind of chain reaction that causes the global ecosystem to collapse, ” Rothman said.
“What we see today is extremely dangerous; however, I don ’ t know how much is necessary to take us to a tipping point that would create a global catastrophe for the global ecosystem. ”
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What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

**Human Impacts:**
- The arrival of humans marked a turning point: humans hunted mammoths for meat, hides, and bones, contributing to their decline.

Title:

Content: What caused the extinction of giant animals?
Science and Technology
Copy Link https: / / www.rt.com / t6iw
Scientists are asking why giant prehistoric animals, including dinosaurs, pterosaurs, crocodiles and huge snakes, have disappeared.
Fossil evidence suggested that the ancient past already had larger animals and could be classified as huge beasts but also larger on average than today's organisms.
Greg Erickson, a vertebrate paleontologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who specializes in ancient reptiles, told Live Science: "Since scientists discovered the first known cache of dinosaur bones, in the 19th century, researchers have put forward ideas to explain why giants have been popular millions of years ago but less so today."
Erickson commented, “But no one can point to a single answer. ”
Along with other giant reptiles, dinosaurs can adapt to different areas as they grow over the course of life, chasing smaller prey such as events and larger victims such as adults.
In part, they can do this because they have replaced sets of teeth over a lifetime.
“They constantly change their teeth, just like sharks do, but along the way they can change the type of crocodile teeth, for example moving from needle-like teeth to more powerful teeth, ” Erickson said.
University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brosat told Scientific American: "In dinosaurs the alveoli are likely to extend from their lungs to their bones, creating strong but light scaffolding.
That gave the dinosaurs skeletons that were "still strong and flexible but lightweight and that helped them get bigger and bigger and bigger, in the same way that skyscrapers get bigger and bigger and bigger because of their internal supporting structures," Prosat said.
Physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said: "Of course, although airbags have helped form strong, lightweight bones, no animal can reach the size of a skyscraper because body weight grows much faster than bone strength as animals grow in size."
Prosat said mammals lack such air sacs that can invade bones and lighten bones.
It is thought that the size of the elephant may be around the limit that large land mammals can reach, and mammals such as warm-blooded or heat-absorbing creatures need a lot of fuel.
Professor of Geological Biology and Paleontology at the University of California, Davis, told Live Science: "Elephants are complete heat absorbers, and dinosaurs at least herbivorous dinosaurs probably weren't so often, so the nutritional needs of a giant elephant, for example, would be...
Maybe five times bigger than even the biggest dinosaurs. "
Paleontologists debated whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded, and Erickson said that current science puts many animal species on a gradient between cold-blooded and warm-blooded, and that dinosaurs may have been at the lower end of the warm-blooded range, making the large body less energy-expensive for the dinosaur.
In a 2016 study published in the journal PLOS One Fermage concluded that gigantism is mostly dependent on sufficient resources that are produced and recycled by highly developed ecological infrastructure, in other words the environment needs to produce enough oxygen, food and habitat to grow a truly gigantic being.
Erickson said that although animal breeds tend to reproduce over generations, it takes an enormous amount of evolutionary time to reach gigantic sizes.
Fermage explained that mass extinction events tend to wipe out large creatures, so these events could leave giant animal openings vacant for tens or hundreds of millions of years, commenting: "It took about 25 million years for the first mammals to weigh a ton, in the case of the woolly mammoth, wiped out by climate change and human hunters just 10,000 years ago. These huge creatures: our ancestors helped kill them not so long ago. ”
For Vermeig, the most comprehensive explanation for size reduction comes not from physiology or ecology, but from social structure.
He said: "Evolution...
Organized social behavior, not just herds but really organized hunting, in mammals introduced a new form of dominance.
He wrote in a 2016 study: "Mass hunting by relatively small predators makes even very large prey vulnerable, in fact individual gigantism on land has been replaced by gigantism at the group level."
“Smaller individuals working together, such as wolves and hyenas, for example, may be a more effective way of becoming larger than building a massive body.
Social organization may also help explain a rather gigantic exception to the timeline: In the ocean, the largest animals that ever lived are still present today: blue whales.
"Marine life makes long-distance communication more difficult, hindering the development of complex fishing groups," Fermage said, adding that the development of such groups occurred on land much more than in the ocean, at least until recently, like killer whales.
In one potentially significant environmental change, ancient atmospheres contained higher concentrations of oxygen, and experts say this may have played a role in gigantism, especially among insects.
Source: Live Science
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How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Human-induced fires became a prominent environmental factor, altering landscapes, reducing suitable habitat, and further increasing stress on megafaunal populations.

- Overhunting, often termed the “overkill hypothesis,” suggests that as humans spread into Eurasia and North America, mammoth populations could not reproduce quickly enough to counteract increased mortality.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

**Combined Factors and their Implications:**
- The most widely accepted view is that both rapid climate changes and expanding human populations acted together: climatic warming reduced and fragmented mammoth habitats, while human hunting and landscape manipulation (e.g., fires) increased mortality.

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- The loss of large herbivores like mammoths likely changed ecosystems profoundly—affecting vegetation, fire regimes, and the survival of other animal species.

- The extinction of mammoths is now seen as an early example of how human activities, in combination with natural environmental changes, can push vulnerable species past a tipping point.

Title:

Content: Impacts of climate changeReuters
Climate change..
A real threat to biodiversity
Climate change is wreaking real devastation on the natural environment, leading to higher temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels and changing rainfall patterns.
All animal and plant species are affected by climate change, but some species are particularly affected, with animals living in polar regions facing extinction due to melting ice.
In contrast, animals living in coastal areas are subject to extinction due to sea level rise.
Extinction of animals
Egyptian expert on climate affairs, Dr. Ahmed Abdel Aal, says that "rising temperatures lead to increased evaporation, and therefore a lack of water that directly affects the lives of marine organisms."
The impact on the lives of marine organisms does not stop, according to Dr. Abdel Aal to Eram News, but the repercussions of climate change extend to maritime traffic, which causes significant economic repercussions due to the decline of maritime traffic.
In a study published in the journal Science years ago, environmentalists noted that “climate change could push one-sixth of the world ’ s animal and plant species to extinction. ”
Organisms in South America, Australia and New Zealand are most at risk because many live in limited areas and cannot easily adapt to heat waves, droughts, floods or rising sea levels.
Experts agree that "climate change affects all aspects of life, including human health, food availability, economic growth, migration, food security, and social change, and also affects all other organisms, where it can lead to the extinction of some species."
An environmental disaster
For his part, explains Professor of Environmental Sciences at Ain Shams University, Dr. Wahid Imam, that "exceeding the temperature rise of 1.5 ° C is a disaster, because it will lead to desertification of agricultural lands, and increase droughts, which is a direct danger to human life and other living organisms."
Imam stressed, in a statement to "Eram News", that "the extinction of living organisms affects the environmental balance, which puts human life and the environment at risk," noting that "drought and desertification cause the degradation of agricultural lands, which increases the scarcity of food in the world."
Some conservationists worry that removing plants and animals from their ecological context would alter their evolutionary trajectory or even accelerate their extinction.
Animals play an important role in maintaining a healthy environment, and every species lost due to human intervention can bring us one step closer to irreparable environmental damage.
According to Live Science, the rate of animal extinction is accelerating, with one million species currently threatened with extinction, and the loss of these animals will have unprecedented and irreversible effects on the environment, and may lead to the loss of other species.
"Many organisms cannot survive, except at freezing latitudes or in corals that will dwindle under constant high temperatures."
Heat stress
Professor of Geology and Water Resources at Cairo University, Dr. Abbas Sharaki, pointed out that "the increase in evaporation intensity in water, causes many burdens for most countries of the world, where it leads to low water levels, which affects plants and animals, and causes the so-called thermal stress, which affects the productivity and growth of plants, and the ability of animals to grow."
Sharaki added, in statements to Eram News, that "the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, is the main reason for the increase in the pace of climate change, as the burning of fossil fuels results in greenhouse gases that lead to higher temperatures, and increased climate variability."
The Secretary General of the Environmental Training Center in Sweden, Dr. Ezzat Hassan, explains that "the pollution of the seas and oceans affects the health and diversity of marine organisms, and causes changes in the forms of some organisms, making them unable to adapt to the new environment."
What's the solution?
On ways the world can avoid worsening the crisis, environmentalists agree that “reliance on renewable fuels is the best solution to climate change. ”
Dr. Ezzat Hassan explained, in statements to "Eram News", that "renewable fuel does not produce carbon emissions, which helps to reduce the temperature of the Earth."
“Fuel emissions lead to higher temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels and changing rainfall patterns, causing the extinction of some species, changing genetic diversity and disrupting the food chain, ” he said.
The Ambassador of the European Climate Charter, Ambassador Mustafa Al-Sherbini, believes that “the immediate elimination of fossil fuels is impossible, because renewable energy sources are unable to meet the needs of many industries, especially heavy industries, such as iron and steel. ”
Although relying on green hydrogen is an important step in the fight against climate change, it still faces challenges, such as its high cost in Europe, Al-Sherbini told Erm News, who pointed out that "Arab countries have the advantage of the solar belt, which makes them more suitable for the production of hydrogen."
“Nuclear energy is a vital option to address climate change, as it can fill the deficit caused by reducing the use of fossil fuels, as well as it does not depend on external factors such as the weather, making it more stable than renewable energy sources, ” said Dr. Wahid Imam.
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- These events are relevant today as we face a potential “sixth mass extinction,” with similar patterns of rapid climate change and human-driven habitat loss threatening modern species.

Title:

Content: General Supervision
Elham Aboul Fath
Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for your patience.
General Supervision
Elham Aboul Fath
Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for your patience.
The Sixth Mass Extinction.
A study that raises questions about the future of life on Earth.
A new study raises troubling concerns about the future of life on planet Earth, suggesting that we may already be in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.
Mass extinctions throughout history
Earth's history has seen five major mass extinctions, which wiped out a large proportion of living species.
These extinctions are thought to have been caused by catastrophic factors such as asteroid collisions and intense volcanic activity.
Evidence of the Sixth Extinction
The new study is based on an analysis of species extinction rates in the modern era, and the results suggest that current extinction rates are much higher than normal rates, and that we have already lost a large number of species.
Contributing factors
Scientists attribute the main cause of the sixth extinction to human activities, including:
Habitat destruction: Urban, agricultural and industrial expansion is destroying forests and other natural areas, threatening the survival of many species.
Climate change: Rising temperatures and changing weather patterns strain ecosystems and threaten the survival of species that cannot adapt.
Pollution: Pollution of various types poisons the environment and destroys habitats, affecting the health and survival of species.
Overfishing and illegal wildlife trade: The unsustainable exploitation of species causes their numbers to decline and threatens their survival.
Consequences
Scientists warn that the sixth extinction will have serious consequences for the environment and human health.
The loss of biodiversity affects the stability of ecosystems and threatens the services they provide to us, such as pollination and purification of water and air.
SOLUTIONS
Scientists stress the urgent need to take serious action to reduce biodiversity loss.
These procedures include:
Protection of natural habitats: establishment of natural reserves and expansion of protected areas.
Combating climate change: reducing greenhouse gas emissions and switching to renewable energy sources.
Reducing pollution: Applying strict laws to reduce various types of pollution.
Combating poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking: strengthening law enforcement and raising awareness of the importance of wildlife protection.
The Future of Life on Earth
The future of life on Earth depends on our ability to take decisive action to address the environmental challenges we face.
Scientists warn that failure to do so could lead to catastrophic consequences for our planet and civilization.

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

**Conclusion:**
The extinction of the woolly mammoth illustrates the interplay of environmental changes—and particularly the accelerating role of human impacts—in causing species loss.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

This underscores the importance of understanding both natural and anthropogenic drivers of extinction to inform current conservation efforts and avoid repeating such losses in the present and future.

**Summary: Environmental and Human Causes of Extinction (with focus on relevance to Mammoth Extinction)**

Multiple lines of evidence from paleontological and geological research highlight that extinctions are often linked to dramatic environmental changes—such as fluctuations in climate, sea levels, and atmospheric composition—sometimes compounded by human activity.

Title:

Content: A recent study has revealed the mysterious disappearance of marine animals that occurred in Antarctica between 390 and 38.5 billion years ago.
The study provides new insights into the profound impacts of climate and sea level changes on marine ecosystems.
During the Early Middle Devonian period, Gondwana supercontinent was located near Antarctica, including parts of present-day Africa, South America and Antarctica.
Contrary to the icy landscape we now associate with Antarctica, this ancient land experienced a warmer climate and higher sea levels that led to widespread flooding.
Scientists have long been puzzled by the emergence and subsequent disappearance of the Malvinnox Hawthorne biota, a group of marine animals that thrive in colder waters.
This group consists of various types of shellfish, many of which are now extinct.
After two centuries of mystery, the study ’ s lead author, Dr Cameron Payne Clark, explains that the origin and disappearance of these animals has finally been unravelled.
To study this phenomenon, researchers collected and analyzed large amounts of fossil data.
By using advanced analytical methods, they scrutinized ancient rock formations, each containing its unique fossil record.
The analysis showed seven to eight different layers, indicating a gradual decline in marine animal diversity.
Comparing these layers with ancient environmental data and global temperature records, the researchers made a shocking discovery.
They found a strong correlation between the decline in marine species diversity and sea level fluctuations and climate change.
It was during the global cooling phase that the Malvinnox Hawthorne biota flourished.
Cooler conditions allowed these animals to specialize by benefiting from the circumpolar thermal barrier near the poles.
However, as temperatures began to rise, the Malvinnox Hawthorne animals disappeared, making way for species more suited to warmer waters.
Changes in sea level during this period may have broken the natural ocean barrier, allowing warm equatorial waters to penetrate the Antarctic.
As a result, these warm-water species dominate, marking the demise of Marvellous Knox Hawthorne marine life.
The collapse of the polar ecosystem caused by the disappearance of the Malvinnox Hawthorne biota is catastrophic and irreversible.
Dr Payne-Clark described it as a "murder mystery 39 billion years ago."
The results show that the combined effects of sea level and temperature change are the main factors that triggered this extinction event.
Although this particular event coincided with a known extinction event during the Early Middle Devonian period, the researchers lacked accurate age inference.
Understanding the sensitivity of polar environments and ecosystems to changes in sea level and temperature is critical, especially given the current biodiversity crisis.
The study highlights the permanence of the changes taking place in the polar regions.
These findings highlight the urgency of protecting and preserving these fragile ecosystems.
The source:
– Study lead author Dr. Cameron Penn-Clarke of the Institute of Evolutionary Studies at King Hill University.

According to most recent research, what cause of wooly mammoth extinction is not as important as previously believed?

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

For example, studies on the disappearance of ancient marine fauna in Antarctica show that changes in sea levels and global climate, particularly temperature shifts, can disrupt ecosystems and trigger mass extinctions.

The breaking of natural barriers, such as ocean currents, allowed for the intrusion of warmer waters, stressing cold-adapted species.

Title:

Content: A recent study revealed the mysterious disappearance of marine animals that occurred in Antarctica between 39 and 385 billion years ago.
The study provides new insights into the profound impacts of climate and sea level changes on marine ecosystems.
During the Early Middle Devonian period, the Gondwana supercontinent was located near the South Pole, including parts of present-day Africa, South America, and Antarctica.
Contrary to the icy landscape we now associate with Antarctica, this ancient land experienced a warmer climate and higher sea levels that led to massive flooding.
Scientists have long been puzzled by the emergence and subsequent disappearance of the Marvinox Hawthorne biota, a group of marine animals that thrive in colder waters.
This group consists of various types of shellfish, many of which are now extinct.
After two centuries of mystery, the study ’ s lead author, Dr. Cameron Payne Clark, explains that the origins and disappearance of these animals have finally been unraveled.
To study this phenomenon, researchers collected and analyzed large amounts of fossil data.
Using advanced analytical methods, they carefully examined ancient rock layers, each containing its unique fossil record.
The analysis showed seven to eight different layers, indicating a gradual decline in marine animal diversity.
After comparing these layers with ancient environmental data and global temperature records, the researchers made a shocking discovery.
They found a strong correlation between declining marine species diversity and sea-level fluctuations and climate change.
It was during the global cooling phase that the Malvinox Hawthorne biota flourished.
Cooler conditions allow these animals to benefit from the circumpolar heat barrier near the poles, allowing them to specialize.
However, as temperatures began to rise, the Marvinox Hawthorns disappeared, making way for species more suited to warmer waters.
Changes in sea level during this period may have broken the natural ocean barrier, allowing warm equatorial waters to seep into the South Pole.
As a result, these warm-water species dominate, marking the demise of marine life in Malvinox Hawthorne.
The collapse of polar ecosystems caused by the disappearance of the Malvinox Hawthorne biota is catastrophic and irreversible.
Dr. Payne Clark described it as "the mystery of murder 39 billion years ago."
The results show that the combined effects of sea level and temperature changes are the main factors that triggered this extinction event.
Although this particular event coincided with a known extinction event from the Early Middle Devonian period, the researchers lacked an accurate age inference.
Understanding the sensitivity of polar environments and ecosystems to changes in sea level and temperature is critical, especially given the current biodiversity crisis.
The study highlighted the permanence of changes occurring in polar regions.
These findings highlight the urgency of protecting and preserving these fragile ecosystems.
Source:
– Study lead author, Dr. Cameron Penn-Clarke, of the Institute of Evolutionary Studies at King ’ s University.

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Similarly, terrestrial mass extinctions in Earth’s history, such as at the end of the Permian period, were related to environmental catastrophes like the degradation of the ozone layer, which increased harmful UV exposure and contributed to species loss.

Title:

Content: People 's Daily Online > > Economy and Technology
Direct evidence of ozone depletion leading to mass extinction found
01 / 07 / 2023 08: 39 | Source: Guangming Daily
Small number
The end of the Permian extinction event 252 million years ago was the largest extinction event in the Pleistocene, resulting in the extinction of about 81% of marine species and 89% of terrestrial species.
The main cause is believed to be environmental changes caused by large-scale volcanic eruptions, but there is still no direct evidence that environmental factors affect terrestrial ecosystems.
Recently, Liu Feng, a researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues in Britain and Germany, discovered direct evidence that the destruction of the ozone layer caused the mass extinction of terrestrial organisms at the end of the Permian by studying the changes in the content of "sunscreen" in fossil pollen grains in that period.
Scientists generally believe that the increase in global greenhouse gases, global warming and ocean acidification caused by the eruption of the Siberian Great igneous Province at the end of the Permian period may be the main cause of the mass extinction.
How do these environmental factors affect terrestrial ecosystems?
There is still a lot of debate.
Some sporophylogists have found some deformed spores and pollen in the terrestrial Permian-Triassic transition profile, speculating that this may be caused by an increase in ultraviolet radiation induced by the global ozone layer destruction caused by the ejection of halogenated elements from the Great igneous Province of Siberia.
However, studies on the deformed spores and pollen produced in modern plants have shown that drought, air pollution and trauma of plant bodies may induce plant bodies to produce deformed spores or pollen.
A small amount of malformed spores and pollen found in the terrestrial Permian-Triassic transition profile alone does not directly demonstrate increased ultraviolet radiation from the global ozone hole during the end-Permian mass extinction.
How to determine the intensity of ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere during the retrograde geological history has become a breakthrough point in the research.
Photosynthesis can provide energy for plant growth, but harmful ultraviolet rays in sunlight can destroy genetic information in plant germ cells (spores and pollen).
In order to adapt to the terrestrial radiation environment, the germ cells of the plant have evolved a regulatory mechanism.
The outer wall of the plant spores and pollen contains a large number of compounds (coumaric acid and ferulic acid) with functions very similar to that of sunscreen, which can form resonance stable phenol free radicals and resist oxidation caused by ultraviolet rays, thereby protecting fragile spores and pollen and providing guarantee for the propagation and reproduction of terrestrial plants.
Modern botanists have observed that plant objects automatically regulate the amount of "sunscreen" on the outer wall of their germ cells according to the surrounding ultraviolet radiation environment, and that "sunscreen" can be preserved in inert spores and pollen walls for a long time.
The research team believes that theoretically it can be determined by the content of "sunscreen" in spores and pollen to invert the intensity of ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere during geological history.
This is also the first time that the research method has been used outside of modern pollen studies.
The research team used Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to quantitatively measure the coumaric acid and ferulic acid in 1011 grains of Ali type pollen produced from the Permian-Triassic transition section of southern Tibet, and found that the content of coumaric acid and ferulic acid in the outer wall of hay during the Permian period was significantly higher than the content of the fossil pollen before and after extinction. There was an increase in global ultraviolet radiation during the end mass extinction.
At the same time, by analyzing the concentration of organic carbon isotopes and mercury in the profiled strata, it is found that the abnormal fluctuation of these two indexes is basically equivalent to that of coumaric acid and ferulic acid in the fossil pollen.
The increase in the amount of ultraviolet radiation in the air has far-reaching effects on the entire terrestrial ecosystem.
In order to resist the damage of ultraviolet rays to the leaf cells, plant objects will synthesize lutein in large quantities in their leaves, and correspondingly reduce the synthesis of chlorophyll, resulting in the weakening of photosynthesis of plant objects, and thus the absorption capacity of plant objects to greenhouse gases is weakened, which further aggravates the increase of global greenhouse gases caused by volcanic eruptions at the end of the Permian era.
In addition, lutein and other herbivores and insects are difficult to digest, low in nutritional value, and the increase in ultraviolet radiation indirectly affected the land food chain, which may be the main cause of the extinction of land herbivores and insects at the end of the Permian.
“Plant photosynthesis is the largest carbon reduction and sequestration process in the world, and this process is easily inhibited by the increase in UV intensity.
The land mass extinction at the end of the Permian was actually caused by an increase in greenhouse gases and an increase in ultraviolet radiation.
"We need to pay attention to the intensity of ultraviolet radiation and avoid the superposition of the two, causing ecological disasters," Liu Feng told reporters.
(Editor: Guo Simiao, Yang Di)
Public Number ： People 's Network Finance
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Fossil records show that periods of climate instability and sea level rise or fall strongly correlate with significant reductions in biodiversity.

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Ecosystems like coral reefs show how the loss of keystone species can lead to broader ecological collapses.

Title:

Content: UN report: Disasters everywhere are more interconnected than people think | Technology | DW | 12.09.2021
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UN report: Disasters everywhere are more interconnected than people think
Whether it is a climate crisis, an ecological crisis, a natural disaster, or a plague pandemic, the interconnectedness of these disasters is often beyond our imagination.
A recent report by the United Nations University attests to this view.
Locust infestation in Kenya
The cold snap of Texas, the locust disaster in East Africa, the extinction of the Yangtze River sturgeon -- this is an ancient fish from the Cretaceous period of the dinosaur era in China, known as the "living fossil in the Yangtze River", but because of the impact of human activities completely disappeared.
Despite the fact that borders and oceans are separated and that individual species or entire ecosystems and communities may be affected, the common denominator of disasters is beyond recognition and planning to date.
This is the key finding of a report published by the United Nations University on 8 September.
Scientists have confirmed that over the past two years, several of the most serious disasters have sprung up, interacting with each other and aggravating the situation, in many cases being fueled by the same human behaviour.
According to Zita Sebesvari, a senior scientist at the United Nations University and one of the lead authors of the report, “People often feel distant when they learn about disasters from news reports.
However, even disasters thousands of kilometres apart are often interrelated. "
As the planet warms and tropical cyclones become stronger, the COVID-19 pandemic adds to the devastation
Recurrent crises
According to the United Nations University report, the analysis shows that the root causes of most disasters are the following three: burning fossil fuels, poor risk management, and too little consideration of environmental factors in decision-making.
According to the report, a large number of disasters are related to extreme weather.
In Vietnam, nine different storms, heavy rainfall and floods occurred in just two months, causing severe damage nationwide.
A tropical cyclone caused by climate change made landfall in Bangladesh, forcing people to shelter in the new crown.
Jack O'Connor, another senior UNU scientist and another lead author of the report, said that disasters "interacted": if emergency shelters were used to protect people from extreme weather while sheltering coronavirus patients, fewer people could or wanted to use them because they were more vulnerable to the virus.
As soon as the hurricane hits, it will damage hospitals and disrupt the supply lines needed to treat patients.
He noted that the authorities had not taken the pandemic into account when considering the hurricane response, “but that ’ s something we have to start doing. ”
In July, floods hit Central Europe, and early evacuations could have saved many lives.
Extreme weather is becoming more frequent.
A week before the release of the UNU report, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also published an analysis showing that climate-related disasters have occurred almost every day in the world over the past 50 years — from hurricanes to droughts, causing an average of 115 deaths and $202 million (170 million euros) in property damage every day.
However, mainly due to advances in forecasting and early warning systems, the number of deaths due to extreme weather has declined overall, despite the warming of the planet as a result of human burning of fossil fuels.
Improved forecasting and early warning systems have made it possible for Governments to evacuate people safely in advance of extreme weather events, reducing the death toll from devastating storms and floods.
At the same time, however, the number of displaced persons increased.
It is unclear whether this tie-up will continue as the planet warms and more disasters pile up.
According to a landmark report released in August by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), human impacts may have increased the incidence of “complex extreme events ” since the 1950s.
For example, heatwaves and droughts are occurring more frequently and simultaneously throughout the world; in some areas, there is a similar trend in heavy rain and storms or fires.
According to the IPCC, if the Earth were 4 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average, the frequency of heatwaves in the past 50 years would increase by 38 times.
The Earth is currently warming by 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Despite the commitment of world leaders to limit warming to an ideal 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, their current policies are likely to double that.
The ecological crisis and the climate crisis
The UNU report highlights three examples of ecological hazards closely related to climate change as illustrative.
As of last year, about 25 percent of Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been severely bleached.
If global warming is 1.5 degrees Celsius, coral reefs will be reduced by 70 to 90 percent; if global warming is 2 degrees Celsius, all the world's coral reefs will disappear.
However, Professor O ’ Connor said that while climate change was a major factor, the loss of coral reefs could also be linked to factors such as pollution and overfishing.
He trained as a marine scientist and surveyed coral reefs in situ before and after bleaching.
"It used to be like 'Undersea Mobilization'... full of color and life," O'Connor said, referring to the famous Pixar cartoon depicting fish, and now, "you see a coral reef bleached by rising ocean temperatures."
All the colors are gone and everything is white.
Not only that, but it's like a graveyard: all the animals have moved away. "
In the Amazon rainforest, large swathes of forest have been burned to meet the global demand for meat, to be levelled out for livestock, or to grow soybeans for fodder.
As a result, carbon uptake in forests and polluting the atmosphere is reduced.
According to some studies, deforestation and global warming will accelerate the rate of forest death until the tipping point, from where the Amazon will become dry savannah.
Epidemic lockdown increases difficulty for firefighters fighting fires in Amazon rainforest
In China, the Yangtze River sturgeon became extinct last year after decades of overfishing, pollution and the construction of several dams that cut off its life in the upstream spawning grounds.
As with coral reefs, the loss of a species can lead to the collapse of an entire ecosystem.
How to balance
Based on its findings, the report highlights how policymakers can fake a number of “win-win solutions ”, such as reducing emissions or designing more natural infrastructure to prevent disasters.
The authors point out that in the Amazon and the Yangtze, people forcibly change their natural features in order to use economic resources, often without regard to environmental costs.
The report also points to the costs of ignoring the links between disasters and implementing wishful thinking solutions that make other extremes worse: for example, dams that generate clean electricity and provide alternatives to fossil fuels have led to the demise of the Chinese paddlefish.
In some cases, the trade-offs may outweigh the gains and losses; in some cases, targeted policies may offset the losses.
"We can't have any more short-sighted behaviours that end up hurting us... we have to do better," O'Connor said.
© 2021 Deutsche Welle Copyright Notice: All content in this article is protected by copyright law and may not be used without special permission from Deutsche Welle.
Any misconduct will lead to recovery and criminal prosecution.
DW.COM

Human activity is now recognized as a powerful force in driving environmental change—a view that was not common a century ago.

Title:

Content: The Anthropocene: Has Humanity Really Changed the Earth?
Stone Science Studio 2023 / 7 / 22 13: 17: 06 Editor ： Mengze
Background
On July 11, the International Commission on Stratigraphy ’ s “Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) ” recommended that Lake Crawford, Ontario, Canada, be regarded as a“ golden nail ” to open a new chapter in the geological era, marking the Earth ’ s entry into the “Anthropocene. ”
Small knowledge: stratigraphy "golden nail"
Since the formation of the earth 4.6 billion years ago, in the original crust, slowly covered with layers of rock, for the evolution of the earth left a stone made of "ten thousand books".
In geology, these rocks are strata, and each strata has its own geologic age.
How to accurately demarcate the "age" of the strata? Under the diligent exploration of scientists, the definition of "golden nail" came into being.
Officially known as the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), the rock record at this point clearly distinguishes it from previous geological ages.
Gold nails contain particularly rich information on strata events
According to the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) and the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the "golden nail" is the only symbol for determining and identifying the boundary between the two epochal stratigraphic layers.
The earth's cosmos, epochs, epochs, epochs and epochs must be distinguished by the "golden nail", and once it is "nailed down" somewhere in the world, the site will become the "international standard" of a geological age.
Minor knowledge: Geological age
Geological age generally refers to relative age and absolute age.
The relative age of the Earth is determined primarily by fossils.
In the strata of different periods, most of the standard fossils of ancient animals and plants are preserved.
All kinds of animal and plant fossils appear in a certain order in the morning and evening, and the lower the level, the earlier they appear, the higher the level, the later they appear.
This is the British geologist Smith proposed the "fossil sequence."
So how do we relate time to biological fossils? We know that there are different marker fossils or fossil combinations in the strata of different epochs, so we can invert the strata ages of these fossils by means of marker fossils.
The absolute age of the earth is based on the determination of the content of a radioactive element and its metamorphosis products in the rock to calculate the actual number of years after the formation of the rock.
The older the rock, the longer the strata are.
What is the "Anthropocene"?
Earth is about 4.6 billion years old.
In order to describe the long period of earth history and major earth historical events, geologists and paleontologists have divided the earth's nearly 4.6 billion years of history into several stages according to the sequence of natural formation of the strata.
The unit of expression of the earth's age in time can be divided into the universe, generation, period, period and time.
For example, the geological epoch in which we are currently living is: Eocene / Cenozoic / Quaternary / Holocene.
The beginning of the Holocene was marked by the end of the last Quaternary glacial period 11,700 years ago.
But some geologists wanted a new geological age to describe the impact of human activity on the planet, so they proposed the Anthropocene Epoch, the age of humanity.
The Origin of the Anthropocene
As early as 1873, the Italian geologist Stopani said that the earth has entered the "age of mankind."
The word he used at the time was “human. ”
Later, the former Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (Владимир Иванович Вернадский, 1863-1945) proposed a more modern concept of the Anthropocene, the "Anthropocene". Vernadez also participated in the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, so he foresaw at that time the human ability to transform the world.
Unfortunately, this concept, similar to the "biosphere", did not receive enough attention from Western academia at the time.
Until 2000, atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (Figure 1, Paul J.
Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, began popularizing the term “Anthropocene ” widely, arguing that a new geological age was created due to the effects of human behavior on the Earth ’ s atmosphere over recent centuries (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2021).
Paul Crutzen's influence soon attracted wide attention, and the word "Anthropocene" appeared in more and more articles in the title.
An article from the British Guardian details the next development of this matter (Davison, 2019). At a meeting of the Geological Society of London in 2006, a stratigrapher named Jan Zalasiewicz proposed a formal definition of the Anthropocene in the geological age.
However, the content of the chronological strata table, like the adoption of a constitutional amendment at the national level, needs to be adopted through multiple rounds of proposals and deliberations within the International Commission on Stratigraph-y (ICS).
As a result, the Quaternary Stratigraphy Subcommittee of the International Commission on Stratigraphy established the "Anthropocene Working Group" in 2009 to investigate and define the "Anthropocene", chaired by Zarasvić.
After 10 years of research, on May 21, 2019, 34 members of the Anthropocene Working Group voted on whether the Anthropocene should be recognized as a new geological age, and 29 voted in favor.
At this point, the group ’ s next priority is to identify the “golden nail ” that distinguishes the Holocene from the Anthropocene (Figure 3,“ golden nail ” is the only global criterion for geologically dividing geologic chronological strata, see Waters et al. (2018))).
Previously, the Anthropocene Working Group had listed 10 candidate sites, including Sihai Longwan Lake in northeastern China and Lake Crawford in Canada (Figure 2).
But as the press reported on July 11 this year, Four Seas Longwan Lake fell off the list, and the Anthropocene Working Group nominated Lake Crawford as the “golden nail ” of the Anthropocene at a stratigraphic conference in Lille, France, and at a press conference in Berlin, Germany (McCarthy et al., 2023), where the lake floor mud layer recorded an increase in radioactive plutonium resulting from nuclear bomb tests.
If adopted, the proposal will be submitted to the International Commission of Stratigraphy and finally to the International Union of Geosciences.
By then, if the proposal is finally approved, the sediment core of Crawford Lake will mark the beginning of the Anthropocene.
The controversial "Anthropocene"
The term has been hotly debated by scientists since it was first formally proposed.
In these debates, it is worth recalling at least two points:
Should a “Anthropocene ” be established?
Proponents argue that the impact of human activities on the planet has greatly exceeded natural change itself.
As the geologist Colin Waters said: “If you were in 1920, your sense of nature would be, ‘ Nature is too big for small humans to change it ’. ” But this thinking has completely subverted over the past century, and the change in thinking is as dramatic as a planet hitting the earth.
Many studies have revealed the unnegligible changes that human activity has caused to the natural world.
Examples include “plastic rocks ” reported earlier this year (Figure 4, (Wang et al., 2023)) and traces of radioactive debris from every human nuclear test (Figure 5).
Some opponents argue that compared to the cataclysmic events of Earth's history, such as the Cretaceous mass extinction event 65 million years ago (which wiped out all dinosaurs and eventually led to the extinction of about 80% of the Earth's species), the changes currently experienced are not too serious, and the traces of human activity are only "about two centimeters thick loose organic matter".
Others argue that the name Anthropocene may also have dangerous political significance.
For example, climate warming, which may be caused by humans, has become a means of political criticism.
In this regard, the Anthropocene Working Group believes that human activities, especially after the Industrial Revolution, have become a geological force that has led to changes throughout the earth.
We need a whole new time unit to describe these changes.
And these changes are not yet over, and human activities may have a greater impact on the planet in the future.
When should the “Anthropocene ” begin?
If the Anthropocene period is to be determined, it must be proved that the Holocene period is over.
At this point in time, the geological community has different opinions.
Some scholars have suggested that the soaring concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a node, because the heavy use of fossil fuels by humans has led to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions.
Some scholars have suggested using human artifacts as a marker, such as plastic bags, ballpoint pens will exist in rock formations for millions of years.
Through these remnants, it is possible to clearly distinguish them from the different geological ages before them.
The alternation of geological epochs is always accompanied by the extinction of a wide range of plants and animals.
Therefore, some scholars hope to determine the boundaries of the Anthropocene by counting human-caused extinctions.
In March 2015, Nature published an article on the definition of the Anthropocene suggesting the beginning of the two Anthropocene periods, 1610 and 1964 (Lewis and Maslin, 2015).
These two time points represent the two growth points of global civilization (Great Acceleration): the advent of the Great Voyage era and the high concentration of radioactive elements. In 2019, 29 scientists in the Anthropocene Working Group identified the beginning of the “Anthropocene ” around 1950, because it was the moment when humanity exploded the first atomic bomb.
However, there were four negative votes on the two issues, which shows that there are still many voices of opposition and doubt (Davison, 2019).
Opponents argue that linking the beginning of a new era to the atomic bombings ignores the fact that humanity has been changing the planet for much longer.
Is the Anthropocene really important?
Current natural changes associated with the Anthropocene include: loss of biological habitats, global warming, the emergence of concrete, plastics and other substances.
These changes will persist for millennia or more and will gradually change the Earth system.
So the Anthropocene "golden nail" is not to determine the time point of human activity on Earth, but to recognize the enormous human impact on the planet.
It is a meaningful step to remind humanity of the geological impact of human social activities on the planet, and we must recognize this and find ways to deal with possible future crises. ”
But there are also doubts that the push for formal recognition of the Anthropocene may be more of a political cause than a pursuit of its geological significance.
For example, from a geological point of view, the change in the Anthropocene is actually not at the level of the Holocene, and it can be the fourth period of the Holocene, that is, the Crawford period after the Greenlandic period, the Northripian period, and the Meghalian period, but it is obviously not as remarkable as the Anthropocene (Davison, 2019).
In Colin Waters ’ words, the Anthropocene represents that “humanity ” itself has become a geological process.
I can ’ t help but think of the last Earth overlord – the dinosaurs.
Anyway, with the passage of time, the epoch of humanity, including you and me, will always be represented by the geological year.
But relative to this, I am more curious: dinosaurs may have evolved into chickens (Asara et al., 2007), what is the future of humanity?
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Protein sequences from mastodon and Tyrannosaurus rex revealed by mass spectrometry.
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The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?
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The varved succession of Crawford Lake, Milton, Ontario, Canada as a candidate Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene series.
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This article comes from WeChat public number: Stone Science Studio (ID: Dr _ _ Stone), author: Ye Xiangying
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Key words: Geological age of the Earth
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