We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care – but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species – rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now. Interestingly, if climate change was the key driver of species losses, you’d expect a more evenly distributed set of risks to organisms. “I’ve worked on the Permian mass extinction quite a bit, it shows environmental evidence of ocean warming, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation, the loss of oxygen from seawater,” says Payne. But the Permian extinction, some 250 million years ago, did not feature a selective disappearance of large-bodied organisms, Payne says.

Source: National Post September 15, 2016 04:30 UTC