That level raises the likelihood of more calamitous consequences, including intensified storm and drought cycles, wider extinction of species and perhaps the eventual freeing of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which could raise sea levels a century or two from now 15 feet or more, inundating coasts where most human settlements are concentrated.
Lieberman and Melott ([2013]) describe this increased risk of clade-wide extinction as resulting in a "survival of the blandest" pattern as high volatility clades are weeded out over time while low volatility clades persist.
For I believe the science (the best guesses of our best minds) predicts cataclysmic change, and perhaps the planet-wide extinction of most species in our grandchildren's or great-grandchildren's lifetimes.
At the very least, the stories support a wider extinction window for the giant subfossil lemurs, suggesting that their extinction was recent enough for such vivid stories to still survive in the oral traditions of the Malagasy people.
Blocking access to the tributaries decreased overall population growth rates and increased the likelihood of network-wide extinction.
In contrast, neutral dynamics lead to sudden biodiversity collapse at a system-wide extinction threshold of habitat [17].
These local extinctions in turn increased the likelihood of system-wide extinction, as tributaries could no longer function as population sources.
In contrast, isolating the larger open tributary, with nearly 4× the effective population size, but much lower emigration rates, had a smaller impact on system-wide extinction, largely because this subpopulation is less dependent on immigration and can persist longer when isolated.
Human, mouse, rat, opossum, and platypus sequencing projects revealed a general loss of Class II DNA transposon activity, suggesting a general mammalian-wide extinction of these elements (Lander et al. 2001; Waterston et al. 2002; Gibbs et al. 2004; Mikkelsen et al. 2007; Warren et al. 2008).
"In the deep past, with small populations that were prone to local or wider extinctions, innovations did not always take hold and spread.
Both species exhibited strong resistance to environmental stressors, and none of six other pond-breeding amphibians that were monitored suffered site-wide extinctions from 1996 to 2006.
