Animal Armageddon and Mass Extinctions
By Rachel Peter Digital Ranch Productions An image from Animal Armageddon illustrating the extinction of the dinosaurs. |
Sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest is presumed to have collided with the planet, leading to a mass extinction.
That event was one of five major documented extinctions in Earth’s history. According to Peter Ward, another one may have already begun.
Ward, UW professor of biology and earth and space sciences, believes that we are in a process of extinction that started with the dawn of the Ice Age about 2.5 million years ago. This process has since accelerated in its rate of species destruction. A staggering 99 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.
Ward shares his theories about extinction in Animal Armageddon, an eight-part miniseries on cable television’s Animal Planet (beginning February 12 at 9 p.m. PST). Ward is chief scientist for the series, which presents a history of life on Earth and periods of mass extinction. About two dozen top researchers in the field were interviewed for the program, including Greg Wilson, UW assistant professor of biology, and Christian Sidor, UW associate professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Produced by Digital Ranch Productions, the experts on the show argue that extinctions are not the end of life, but rather the motivation for enhanced life on Earth.
“We decided to do a marriage of Walking with Dinosaurs with any number of disaster movies,” says Ward. “What do you get? Walking with dinosaurs into a disaster!”
Ward also explores mass extinction in a new book--The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? --to be released April 21. He hypothesizes that all but one of the mass extinctions in the planet’s history were caused by life itself. The theory offers the antithesis to James Lovelock's widely accepted Gaia hypothesis that life sustains habitable conditions on earth. Lovelock’s theory draws on the idea of the "good mother" who nurtures life while Ward’s hypothesis is named after Medea, the mythical mother who killed her own children.
Both the series and The Medea Hypothesis discuss the possibility of a current extinction, drawing on official documentation of the 784 species that have become extinct over the last 500 years. Evidence points to man’s interaction with nature as the cause of this ongoing mass extinction, although Ward believes that humans themselves are “extinction proof.”
Animal Armageddon has a hopeful end for humans—seven billion years from now, when our Sun is reaching the end of its lifespan and the reality of space travel is at large, our species finds a new home on the now warm, ocean covered moons of Jupiter, and perhaps beyond.
To find out more visit the Animal Armageddon site (http://animal.discovery.com/tv/animal-armageddon/).