Extinction events

have hypothesized various extinction events. The following essay will cover the five major extinction events, otherwise known as the “Big 5 Mass Extinction Events”. According to Wikipedia (2016), a mass extinction is “a widespread and rapid decrease in the amount of life on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms”. The first major extinction event is said to have been the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction, 443 million years ago

In the course of Earth’s history, there have been five major extinction events: the Ordovician-Silurian, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction events. Now, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert, we are entering another one that is caused by a single species: ours. Human beings have decimated the rainforest, hunted animals like the great auk to extinction, pumped billions of tons of pollution into our atmosphere and oceans

asteroid that wiped out 95% of all species. This devastating event was followed by another natural disaster when, 50 million years later, a volcanic eruption caused massive lava floods. The floods triggered the breakup of Pangea, the original continent. This volcanic eruption created extreme global warming and the extinction of 70% of marine life. These two examples are not the only times Earth has experienced mass extinction. An extinction may be viewed as a natural part of evolution that occurs when

Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event Over 98% of all organisms that have lived on Earth are now extinct. A mass extinction event occurs when a large number of species die out within a small time frame (relative to the age of Earth). Mass extinctions are intensively studied for both cause and effect, as there is usually room for debate regarding catalysts that precede the extinction and the massive influx of new biological species that follows. There have been five major mass extinctions, dubbed the “Big

are, however, several plausible causes for each extinction event that either by themselves, or with the help of other factors, triggered the mass extinctions of a numerous amount of life forms. One of the largest supposed causes of many mass extinctions are flood basalt events, which are the result of a giant volcanic eruption, or series of eruptions, that coat large stretches of land and the ocean floor with basalt lava. While when small, these events can be seemingly harmless, large eruptions can

Dinosaur Extinction Sixty-Five Million years ago, a giant space rock believed to be some six miles across hit Earth near the town of Chicxulub, Mexico, blasting a crater more than 110 miles wide. The impact is believed to have released as much energy as 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than 1 billion times the power of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The giant mosasaurs and plesiosaurs in the seas and the pterosaurs in the skies. Plankton, the base of the ocean

primary cause or ( causes ) of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass extinction ?. This particular question interested me primarily on the fact that it not only took away many species from earth, but also the many different theories that associate with this mass extinction. Just as quick as these species were taken from the earth , their origin for their demise is just as important. The first thing to know about this particular mass extinction is the species that inhibited the earth

something extinction occurred 65 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous period, something very terrible that it changed the course of life on Earth. It seems like it happened so suddenly, like geological time away, but almost all the dinosaurs lived on Earth disappeared. So how dominant creatures just die? It has to be a slow extinction, or it happened all of the sudden? These questions bring arouse many different beliefs about how dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Extinction itself is

the dinosaurs really just a random event or did Earth’s location in the galaxy play a part in their deaths? Crawford, Filipoic, Horner, Tothill and White have combined their minds to explain their hypothesis about how Earth’s mass extinctions are caused by the solar system’s movement through the Milky Way galaxy’s spiral arms in the article titled, Mass Extinction and the Structure of the Milky Way. In all Earth’s history there have been five known mass extinctions, 415, 322, 300, 145, and 33 million

and are not even close to being comparable to each other. To human minds, however, it would seem as though anything beyond the scope of their lifetime blends into a series of events on a page. The years before their birth sticking together into an amalgam of history, distorted beyond recognition. We place prominence on events which have taken place recently, while discounting the vast eons between the ages of the distant past. It may seem as though an eternity has passed between now and 1945 for the