How do recent extinction rates compare to previous mass extinctions?
Clearly we’re killing off species much faster than would be expected. But does this fall into ‘mass extinction’ territory? Is it fast enough to be comparable to the ‘Big Five’?
One way to answer this is to compare recent extinction rates with rates from previous mass extinctions. Researcher, Malcolm McCallum did this comparison for the Cretaceous-Palogene (K-Pg) mass extinction.16 This was the event that killed off the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago. In the chart we see the comparison of (non-dinosaur) vertebrate extinction rates during the K-Pg mass extinction to recent rates. This shows how many times faster species are now going extinct compared to then.
We see clearly that rates since the year 1500 are estimated to be 24 to 81 times faster than the K-Pg event. If we look at even more recent rates, from 1980 onwards, this increases to up to 165 times faster. Again, this might even be understating the pace of current extinctions. We have many species that are threatened with extinction: there is a high probability that many of these species go extinct within the next century. If we were to include species classified as ‘threatened’ on the IUCN Red List, extinctions would be happening thousands of times faster than the K-Pg extinction.
This makes the point clear:
we’re not only losing species at a much faster rate than we’d expect, we’re losing them tens to thousands of times faster than the rare mass extinction events in Earth’s history.
https://ourworldindata.org/extinctio...ass-extinction