Quotes About Impact

Walter [Alvarez] dubbed the formation the "Crater of Doom." It became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.

There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the woolly rhinos. With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.

Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming's "equally evil twin.

Chicxulub crater.

After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter.

Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap.

One weedy species," the pair observed, "has unwittingly achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this planet.

Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed, and they remained in that state for at least half a million, and perhaps as many as several million, years. (The desolate post-impact sea has been dubbed the "Strangelove ocean.")

A paper published in Nature by the former head of the One Tree Island Research Station, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, predicted that if current trends continue, then by around 2050 visitors to the Great Barrier Reef will arrive to find "rapidly eroding rubble banks.

IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

by the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.

Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed

succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and

Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.

A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity

One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it's changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims." A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.