It’s Not Too Late to Stop Mass Extinction in the Ocean
A quarter of a billion years ago, things were not going well on planet Earth. Back then the planet was in the middle of the worst mass extinction event ever—much worse than the one that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. “These environmental changes are also happening in the modern ocean today,” says Penn, a research associate at Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences and coauthor of a new paper published in the journal Science. This led Deutsch and Penn to a natural question: If greenhouse gas emissions precipitated ocean extinctions in the distant past, what level of extinctions might climate change lead us to? In one of them, fossil fuel emissions rapidly increase—way beyond current expected trends—and lead to warming of around 4.9 degrees Celsius by 2100.
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