How humans are driving the sixth mass extinction

Scientists have been warning for decades that human actions are pushing life on our shared planet toward mass extinction. Such extinction events have occurred five times in the past, but a bold new paper finds that this time would be fundamentally different. Fortunately, there's still time to stop it.Periodically, in the vast spans of time that have preceded us, our planet's living beings have been purged by planetary catastrophes so extreme they make your typical Ice Age look like the geological equivalent of a stroll in the park. Scientists count just five mass extinctions in an unimaginably long expanse of 450 million years, but they warn we may well be entering a sixth.According to a bold new paper in The Anthropocene Review, this time would be different from past mass extinctions in four crucial ways - and all of these stem from the impact of a single species that arrived on the scene just 200,000 years ago: Homo sapiens. Continue reading...