Science Focus
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At various times in its past, the Earth has succeeded in killing off most of its inhabitants. Although the impact that killed the non-avian dinosaurs and many other species gets most of the attention, the majority of the mass extinctions we're aware of were driven by geological processes and the changes in climate that they triggered.
Unfortunately, based on the current rate at which animals are vanishing for good, we're currently in the midst of another mass extinction, this one driven by a single species: humans. (And many of the extinctions occurred before we started getting serious about messing with the climate.) This week's edition of Science contains a series of articles tracking the pace of the extinction and examining our initial efforts to contain it.
Extinction and “defaunation”
Estimating the total number of animal species is a challenging task, but numbers range from roughly five to 10 million. Of those, we seem to be exterminating about 10,000 to 60,000 every year. Up to a third of the remaining vertebrate species are thought to be threatened or endangered. Amphibians have it even worse, with over 40 percent of species considered threatened.
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