Headed for a sixth mass extinction? MIT geophysicist warns oceans are on the brink

Earth’s skin already bears the scars of the climate crisis. Fires ravage forests, hurricanes swamp coastlines, floods drown city blocks and entire species disappear. But beneath the surface layer, in the planet’s rocks, lies evidence of past catastrophes much more severe.

Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes we may be creeping toward a calamity for Earth’s life system as a whole — the planet’s sixth mass extinction event.

The staggering amount of carbon humans are pumping into the atmosphere and the oceans may soon cross a threshold that will disorder the planet’s carbon cycle and cause a cascade of disruptions we cannot fully envision, Rothman said.

What we do know is that such disruptions in the past have coincided with a series of mass extinctions in the 540 million years since life became abundant on the planet. And while the climate crisis is usually framed in terms of years, decades, or the next century, mass extinctions play out over thousands of years.

“Every time there has been a major event in the history of life, there has also been a major perturbation of the environment. These things tend to come together,” he said. READ MORE