Study Finds 5 Climate Regime Shifts Raised Mass Extinction Risk Over 539 Million Years
Updated
Updated · ScienceAlert · Aug 16
Study Finds 5 Climate Regime Shifts Raised Mass Extinction Risk Over 539 Million Years
2 articles · Updated · ScienceAlert · Aug 16
Summary
Five distinct climate regimes over the past 539 million years were separated by abrupt transitions when Earth's biosphere became especially vulnerable and the Big Five mass extinctions clustered, the new study found.
Researchers tied that vulnerability to a biosphere index combining extinction and origination rates with standing biodiversity, using it to flag periods when ecological turnover outpaced diversity and instability rose.
Higher temperatures broadly tracked greater background vulnerability, but the sharpest spikes came at regime boundaries—suggesting environmental "wobbles" made life more fragile even if impacts or volcanism delivered the final blow.
The authors said today's Cenozoic era appears unusually stable in their historical framework, though that does not rule out severe damage from human-driven climate change or other external shocks.
Scientists found warmer periods spiked biosphere vulnerability, so how close is our modern era to a sudden biological breaking point?
Asteroids didn't act alone; if rapid climate transitions made ancient life fragile, is human-driven warming setting the stage for another mass extinction?