The temperature in many parts of China reaches 40℃, does it mean that

Already, several cities reached 40 ° C during the heat wave in July 2022, and the dog days of summer have just begun.

Britain, which is located in high latitude, also recorded a high temperature of 41 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record of 38.7 degrees Celsius.

The summer heat in the Northern Hemisphere is a sign that global warming has reached a fever pitch. Is our planet really entering the next round of extinction?

The mass extinction

There have been many extinction events in Earth's history, to be precise, but only five can be called "mass extinctions."

The five mass extinctions were the end-Ordovician, End-Devonian, End-Permian, End-Triassic, and End-Cretaceous.

Scientists have suggested that we may well be experiencing the sixth mass extinction.

There is a myth about mass extinctions, that they happen suddenly, that life goes extinct all at once.

No, extinctions usually last a long time, and many species do not go extinct at the same time, but gradually die out over long periods of environmental change.

And there is a long time of warning before a mass extinction.

Take the fifth mass extinction, which is already the most sudden mass extinction on Earth, caused by an asteroid impact.

However, scientists have discovered that most of the creatures did not die directly from the impact, but went extinct over a long period of time after the impact.

Global warming is not unheard of in history, such as after the end-Permian mass extinction, when volcanic eruptions increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, the Triassic was the hottest and driest period in Earth's history.

According to geological traces, there were no traces of ice during the Triassic period, which was much warmer than we are today.

Even when the greenhouse effect is off the charts, life is still alive.

Many of the stars of the Mesozoic era, such as dinosaurs, pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs, emerged during the Triassic period.

Each of the five mass extinctions in history wiped out more than 50 percent of all species, and the worst was the end-Permian mass extinction, which wiped out almost 95 percent of all species, leaving the biosphere just short of returning to the Carboniferous.

But life always finds a way, and it turns out that no single extinction can cut all living things in half. There will always be something that survives to start the next era.

So, is the sixth mass extinction caused by humans?

Certain extinction

Many people say that the sixth mass extinction was brought on by humans, which is only partially true.

It may have something to do with humans, but it's not dominated by humans, because the Earth resets its ecosystem every once in a while, and the way it resets it is through extinction events.

It can be understood that Earth is a game, and every once in a while it needs to change its servers, and in the process some players are no longer needed.

Scientists believe the sixth mass extinction would have occurred even without humans.

In many ways, there is evidence that a sixth mass extinction may be under way.

First, let's take a look at when the last five mass extinctions occurred.

The first mass extinction, also known as the end-Ordovician Mass extinction, occurred about 440 million years ago.

The second mass extinction occurred at the end of the Devonian period, about 365 million years ago.

The third mass extinction, the worst, the end-Permian extinction, occurred about 250 million years ago, followed by the End-Triassic extinction, which occurred about 200 million years ago.

The most recent mass extinction occurred about 65 million years ago.

This means that the Earth resets itself every 50 million to 100 million years, so the timing of a sixth mass extinction is a sure thing.

Not to mention that after the end of the Cretaceous mass extinction, the Earth experienced several small and medium extinction events.

Second, the Earth has just completed an ice age, and according to the principle of alternating hot and cold, the Earth's next age will be hotter.

The global warming we are experiencing now is the Earth's own trend, and humans have merely accelerated it.

About 12,000 years ago, the Earth ended its most recent Quaternary glaciation, or ice age in our narrow sense, which began about 2.5 million years ago.

The end of ice ages can take a long time, as in the case of the well-known ice age mammoths, the last of which died out more than 4,000 years ago.

This shows that the rise in temperature is not an instant thing, and the extinction of animals during the ice Age is not as simple as melting snow and ice.

Changes in temperature and cooling are bound to trigger extinctions, but the planet has already experienced them in the past.

A catalyst for extinction

So what role do humans play in the sixth mass extinction?

Scientists believe that humans are more like the catalyst for the sixth mass extinction, speeding up the rate at which it happens.

Global warming is the trend of the Earth's next era, but at its own pace, it will take at least millions of years.

The geology of the earth is a history book, and this history book is written in millions of years.

The history of mankind is spoken in the language of the Earth, just like the blink of an eye. What could have taken millions of years has been compressed into hundreds of years by human activity,

It is reported that the average temperature of the earth has risen by about 1.1℃ in the past 200 years since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Continuing at this rate, when temperatures rise to about 3 ° C, the glaciers will probably melt more than half and sea levels will rise.

With all the glaciers on Earth melting, the land area would be reduced by about 10 to 20 percent, and coastlines would be 66 meters higher than they are today.

That's why scientists are so desperate that even if we were to abandon all fossil fuels and burn nothing more, reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would not be able to resist the planet's determination to heat up.

The sixth mass extinction is inevitable, and human emissions of carbon dioxide are an accident to the Earth.

So why are we so afraid of the sixth mass extinction? Can't human technology save us?

When the extinction happens

When Earth's extinction event happens, the higher up the food chain you go, the harder it will hit you.

At the end of the Triassic extinction, for example, the dinosaurs weren't dominant, they were still on the rise, so they weren't being decimated.

However, by the end of the Cretaceous mass extinction, dinosaurs had become the dominant force, and after more than 100 million years of Jurassic and Cretaceous, dinosaurs were finally wiped out.

This is like a game, ready to change the server, all the player information will be cleared, all the previous fight monster upgrade level of practice invalid.

For lower-level players, the loss is not so great that they can choose to start over.

However, for very high rank, even the first full server, the loss is very high.

They spent a lot of time and money on it, and it all went away with the version change.

It is not easy for creatures to rise to the top of the food chain. Before humans, generations dominated the Earth, and today most of them can only be seen in fossils.

Humans may be the only species to break the rule, the only top species to survive a mass extinction.

The best thing to do is to leave the Earth where extinction is taking place.

Such as building a settlement base on the moon or Mars, or emigrating to another planet with a similar environment to Earth.

After the end of the sixth mass extinction, the Earth once again entered a habitable environment for living things, and human beings returned from the settlement.

As mentioned above, mass extinctions tend to last a long time, ranging from tens of thousands of years to millions of years, if you add in the signs that preceded them.

If humanity can achieve its technological ascent in that time, it will avoid the sixth mass extinction.

Humans leave the Earth

Every mass extinction is followed by a new age of species, and perhaps this time, humans will be the witnesses.