Mass Extinction

Sanjay Seetharaman Article 2/3 What Triggers a Mass extermination? habitat Loss and Tropical Cooling Were Once to fault The second-largest push-down store quenching in Earths history coincided with a improvident but aggravated ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped. Although it has long been hold that the so-cal contribute Late Ordovician mass extermination -- which occurred about 450 million years ago -- was related to wag change, exactly how the climate change produced the extinction has not been known. Now, a team led by scientists at the California bestow of Technology (Caltech) has created a framework for weighing the factors that might bind led to mass extinction and has used that framework to instruct that the majority of extinctions were caused by habitat loss due to go sea levels and temperature reduction of the tropical oceans. The work -- performed by scientists at Caltech and the University of Wisconsin, Madison -- is depic t in a paper soon online in the earliest edition of the Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences. The researchers combined schooling from two separate databases to overlay fossil occurrences on the sedimentary rock record of North the States near the beat of the extinction, an exit that wiped out about 75 percent of naval species alive then.

At that time, North the States was an island continent geologists outcry Laurentia, located in the tropics. Comparing the groups of species, or genera, that went extinct during the event with those that survived, the researchers were able to figure out the congeneric importance of some(prenominal) variables in dictating whether a g enus went extinct during a 50-million-year ! time interval around the mass extinction. What we did was essentially the same thing youd do if confronted with a disease epidemic, says Seth Finnegan, postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and lead condition of the study. You ask who is affected and who is unaffected, and that can tell you a mass about whats causing the epidemic. As...If you want to get a dependable essay, order it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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