Europe’s best supercomputer says 1/4 of life will be gone by 2100©Provided by The Daily Digest
Earth is currently going through its sixth mass extinction event, and at the beginning of 2023, Europe’s best supercomputer predicted most of the deaths of this event are probably going to occur between now and the turn of the century.
One of the biggest mass extinction events the planet has ever faced will take place before the end of the century according to one of Europe’s most powerful predictive supercomputers.
Modeling from a supercomputer operated by the European Commission found that over a quarter of today’s species will be extinct by 2100.
The findings of the European Commission’s death-predicting computer were recently published in the journal of Sciences Advances by Corey Bradshaw and Giovanni Strona, and their conclusions were a bit dire…
At the very least the Earth will lose 17.6% of its vertebras
Bradshaw and Strona predicted that in the best-case scenario, the planet would only lose 17.6% of its vertebrate diversity by 2100.
What’s the worst that could happen?
In the worst-case scenario, the scientists found that the Earth’s animal diversity would be reduced by roughly 27% by 2100.
Digging into the study’s findings
Popular Mechanics staff writer Tim Newcomb dug into Bradshaw and Strona’s study and revealed one more startling statistic that you will probably be able to see in your lifetime.
10% of all plant and animal species will be gone by 2050
“The supercomputer says 10 percent of all plant and animal species will disappear by 2050,” Newcomb wrote in his analysis of Bradshaw and Strona’s findings, “and 27 percent of vertebrate diversity will vanish by 2100.”
It will only take 75 years…
“Yeah, that’s over a quarter of our animals gone in about 75 years,” the Popular Mechanics writer added.
But it isn’t the statistics that are the scariest part of this story
One of the most frightening pieces of this story is how the reduction of the Earth’s biodiversity will affect the human population long-term.
Bradshaw and Strona comment on their findings
“Communities will lose up to a half of ecological interactions, thus reducing trophic complexity, network connectance, and community resilience,” Bradshaw and Strong wrote in the abstract of their study.
Wreaking havoc on our world
This means the complex ecological systems that underpin our modern world could fall apart, which would make the situation even worse as the knock-on effects wreaked havoc on our world.
The big problem
“The model reveals that the extreme toll of global change for vertebrate diversity might be of secondary importance compared to the damages to ecological network structure,” the scientists added.
Things only get worse
If the destruction of the world’s ecological systems wasn’t enough, the European Commission’s supercomputer also predicted that this mass extinction event is completely unavoidable. It’s going to happen no matter what we do to try and stop it.
Source: A supercomputer predicts 25% of life on Earth will soon be extinct (msn.com)