We now want to talk about what we're going to call here the 6th extinction. Now we talk about the big five, those big five extinction events that have happened in the Phanerozoic, but some scientists believe that a 6th extinction may be underway right now, and that's going to be due to human activity. Right? So we talked about those previous extinctions. It was due to things like, you know, massive volcanic activity and an asteroid slamming into earth, these sort of catastrophic events.
The catastrophic event this time is us. Alright? And this is well, people think this because the current extinction rate has been measured to be something like 10 to 100 times the background extinction rate as has been measured in the fossil record. And this rate, some scientists think, that 10 to 100 times may actually underrepresent the actual number of extinctions going on. Now why are they happening?
Well, again, it's us. Right? It's likely due to human impact or mostly due to human impact. Things like pollution, things like climate change, things like habitat loss. Right?
We just live in the world in a way that makes it harder for other organisms to live. Now we can look at the data here. Right? We have here a graph, from 0 to up to just 2% there, the percent of species that have gone extinct over time. And it's been measured here in different 100 year periods starting from 1500 up until well, it's measured in this graph up to 2010.
And what we see here is that, you know, the extinctions are pretty flat over time until just recently in those last 100 years, you get this huge uptick. Right? This big those slopes just get very steep. Now we'll just note right at mammals, the one that has the highest extinction rate, right, we're just at 2% of mammals that have been gone extinct. That's not a huge number, but it's the slope of the line that's pretty scary.
Right? If that slope continues or potentially gets steeper, we're going to be losing a lot of species. And remember, the fossil record tells us that it takes 5−10000000 years for similar levels of diversity to return. Now, of course, the species that go extinct, once they are gone, they are gone. But 5−10000000 years of living just with fewer species on the planet, I don't know.
It makes me kind of sad. Alright. Now with that, see you in the next video.