The Five Extinctions

“The Sixth Extinction” is based on the possibility of a new mass extinction that follows five preceding extinctions. If the species of the world are going through a new extinction process, it probably started in the Ice Age. Therefore, although in the context of Earth’s age the Ice Age isn’t that long ago, it can readily seen that the process of extinction is a very slow one in terms of modern man’s view of it.

The authors of an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by herpetologists David Wake of the University of California-Berkley, and Vance Vredenburg, of San Francisco State, caught author and reporter Elizabeth Kolbert’s attention. The article entitled, “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?” intimated that the Earth and many of its species may be in the process of the next...