Humanity has three generations at most to mitigate the accelerating impacts of Earth’s sixth mass extinction. This is the stark assessment issued today by PAST (Palaeontological Scientific Trust), linking current climate disruptions, such as severe El Niño cycles and extreme weather, directly to deep-time patterns recorded in the fossil record, to contextualise accelerating global climate disruptions.
According to PAST, every child born today is entering a world undergoing a human-driven mass extinction event that mirrors prehistoric die-offs.
Deep-time evidence, the vast multi-million-year timeline of Earth’s history recorded in fossils and rock strata, demonstrates that when planetary systems heat rapidly, biodiversity collapses and entire branches of life vanish. While natural cycles like El Niño periodically alter weather patterns, human-driven climate warming is compounding these phenomena, driving unprecedented environmental pressure.
