Throughout Earth’s history, there have been several global extinction events, wiping out large portions of life across the ...

The worst mass extinction in Earth's history, 250 million years ago, was triggered by extreme El Niño events and volcanic eruptions in Siberia. These eruptions released vast amounts of carbon ...

Though mass extinctions are deadly events ... waters to more readily hold onto dissolved toxic metals. The second worst mass extinction known to science, this event killed an estimated 85 percent ...

That is, the 1 percent of species on Earth not yet extinct: For the last 3.5 billion ... Each mass extinction ended a geologic period — that’s why researchers refer to them by names such as ...

The "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon have long attracted significant attention from the geoscience ...

Specifically, the findings support the hypothesis that supernovae could have triggered two of the so-called "big five" mass extinctions ... estimated that 0.4–0.5 supernovae occur in galaxies ...

The research looked at peaks in biodiversity loss and their relationship with atmospheric CO2, finding 50 events over the last 534 million years that can be considered mass extinctions. When you ...

View Full Profile. Learn about our Editorial Policies. Most scientists agree that five events in Earth’s history qualify as “mass extinctions”—defined as events where more than three-quarters of ...

Many of the losers in these past mass extinctions were incredibly successful groups,” said Ceballos, a senior researcher at the Institute of Ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Asteroid impacts and volcanism have led to mass extinctions on our planet ... Among mollusks, for example, more than 7.5 percent of known species have gone extinct over the last 500 years.