Sixth mass extinction

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Many familiar animals, the big cats, the bears, and the wolves, already endangered, already under threat from us, will disappear in a few thousand years. — The Future Is Wild: Welcome to the Future.

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The sixth mass extinction, Human era mass extinction, or Anthropocene mass extinction is an extinction event which occurs around the end of the Human era. It contains two distinct pulses of extinctions, the first caused by human activities, and the second by the onset of the next ice age. Humans themselves disappear during the second pulse.

Human activities which contributed to the extinctions included energy consumption, urbanisation, and industrial pollution, which caused devastating habitat destruction and ecosystem fragmentation. The onset of glacial conditions severely exacerbated the crisis. The advance of the ice sheets across the northern hemisphere, falling sea levels, and extensive aridification and desertification wiped out habitats and ecosystems, resulting in the extinctions of thousands of species. The deposition of large amounts of mud in the ocean also decimated reefs, and causes the total extinction of corals after some 540 million years of existence.

Among the major clades which disappeared during the mass extinction were large carnivorans such as big cats, bears, and wolves; marine mammals such as cetaceans and possibly pinnipeds; much of the overspecialised rainforest fauna of South America, including most monkeys; and corals.