Are we in a 6th mass extinction?
Robert Cowie, a research professor at the University of Hawaii, told Live Science that, strictly speaking, you can't declare a mass extinction until it's actually happened — once 75% of species are gone.
Some researchers have estimated that we'll reach the 75% threshold within 10,000 years, while other studies have concluded that we could be at this grim milestone in just a few centuries — with the potential for an even shorter time frame if things get worse.Mass extinctions occur within a short geological time period of less than 2.8 million years, according to the Natural History Museum in London."We are witnessing the sixth mass extinction in real time," Anthony Barnosky, a professor emeritus of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science in an email.A 2022 WWF report found that monitored vertebrate populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish declined by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018.For instance, a 2015 study co-authored by Cowie and published in the journal Conservation Biology highlighted the decline of Hawaii's Amastridae snails due to invasive species and habitat loss.