Extinction event | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2019-03-17

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event


00:02:04 1 Major extinction events
00:08:38 2 List of extinction events
00:08:48 3 Evolutionary importance
00:11:18 4 Patterns in frequency
00:13:27 5 Causes
00:14:12 5.1 Identifying causes of specific mass extinctions
00:15:35 5.2 Most widely supported explanations
00:16:41 5.2.1 Flood basalt events
00:18:00 5.2.2 Sea-level falls
00:19:20 5.2.3 Impact events
00:20:08 5.2.4 Global cooling
00:21:02 5.2.5 Global warming
00:22:03 5.2.6 Clathrate gun hypothesis
00:23:24 5.2.7 Anoxic events
00:24:57 5.2.8 Hydrogen sulfide emissions from the seas
00:25:33 5.2.9 Oceanic overturn
00:26:36 5.2.10 A nearby nova, supernova or gamma ray burst
00:27:11 5.2.11 Geomagnetic reversal
00:27:38 5.2.12 Plate tectonics
00:29:03 5.2.13 Other hypotheses
00:30:20 5.2.14 Future biosphere extinction/sterilization
00:32:16 6 Effects and recovery
00:34:12 7 See also



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SUMMARY
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An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. It occurs when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation. Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from the threshold chosen for describing an extinction event as "major", and the data chosen to measure past diversity.
Because most diversity and biomass on Earth is microbial, and thus difficult to measure, recorded extinction events affect the easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere rather than the total diversity and abundance of life. Extinction occurs at an uneven rate. Based on the fossil record, the background rate of extinctions on Earth is about two to five taxonomic families of marine animals every million years. Marine fossils are mostly used to measure extinction rates because of their superior fossil record and stratigraphic range compared to land animals.
The Great Oxygenation Event, which occurred around 2.45 billion years ago, was probably the first major extinction event. Since the Cambrian explosion five further major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent and arguably best-known, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which occurred approximately 66 million years ago (Ma), was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. In addition to the five major mass extinctions, there are numerous minor ones as well, and the ongoing mass extinction caused by human activity is sometimes called the sixth extinction. Mass extinctions seem to be a mainly Phanerozoic phenomenon, with extinction rates low before large complex organisms arose.