The 10,000+ years of the Holocene Epoch have ended abruptly, and a new Epoch is coming to dominate the Earth: that of the Anthropocene.
Since becoming the dominant species on the planet in the last few hundred years, humans have exploded in numbers. That population boom has had extremely negative effects upon virtually all of our fellow animal species, and many plant species as well. These species existed within the balanced webs of organisms that we call ecosystems. There are thousands of small, localized ecosystems, and some vast, even oceanic is scale, but they all fit together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to sustain life and biodiversity.
Because humans have tipped the balance of the scales by transforming the surface, destroying and poisoning habitat, and otherwise hunting or driving thousands of species to extinction, we have initiated a cascading failure in the ecosystem of the planet. Today the rate of extinctions is estimated to be about 100 times (some sources say over 700 times) the normal background extinction rate.
According to an article published by Jeremy Hsu, Senior Writer for LiveScience.com, the Earth is going to be a far different world in a few short years, as humans have hit the "reset button" for the global ecosystem.
Although the ecosystem seems like a solid, resilient structure, because of the complex interdependencies, it is rather self-supporting, not unlike the mechanical design of the World Trade Center. Thousands of species are disappearing, and they will take many thousands more with them in a collapse akin to a house of cards.
"The main implication is that we're really rolling the dice," according to paleobiologist John Alroy, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. "We don't know which groups will suffer the most, which groups will rebound the most quickly, or which ones will end up with higher or lower long-term equilibrium diversity levels.".
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This entire likely scenario of cascading extinctions is built solely upon the interdependency of the species involved, and does not take into account the accelerating effects of global climate change. The expected global temperature increase, predicted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to be six to eleven degrees centigrade this century, will add tremendous further stress to most species as it destroys habitats and heats lakes, rivers and oceans.
Ultimately, the species that originated these tremendous changes will be caught up in the avalanche of extinctions as most food crops and animals will also be unable to adapt to the heat. Worldwide famine will be the likely result.