Storyline: Part I: The Five Mass Extinctions That Have Swept Our Planet
It was Cuvier who firmly established the fact of the extinction of past lifeforms.
Scientists then found out that there have been five mass extinction events in Earth's history. In the worst one, 250 million years ago, 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species died off. It took millions of years to recover.
Then what caused mass extinctions and how did those lucky species survive the catastrophe?
Part II: Sixth Extinction: Present and Future?
Across time and around the planet, extinctions of one or another individual species are always occurring. Known as the "background rate" and documented both historically and in the fossil record, these extinctions are like low-volume static compared with the sudden cymbal crash of a mass die-off. Determining extinction rates as they are unfolding is difficult, but a 2015 Science Advances study, using a range of conservative estimates, placed the current pace at up to 100 times the normal background rate.
Human activities are to blame, including population growth, increased resource consumption and climate change spurred by fossil fuel burning and the release of greenhouse gases.
Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.
_________________
Director & Host: Jie Wang
Jie Wang in Chinese sounds like "诘问", which means "cross-examine evidence to seek out truth".
Jie is a well-known popular science commentator and communicator in China.
Jie's hardworking and productive. His masterpiece The Shape of Time (Historical Story about Relativity) won the eighth annual Wenjin Award, China's national-level comprehensive book award to encourage public reading. His science fiction novel The Cage of Time won the eighteenth Hundred Flowers Awards for Literary, one of the most professional and authoritative awards on the Chinese mainland.
Jie's self-media radio station Science Has Stories was prized top 10 commercial technology anchors in 2018 and the most commercially valuable anchor in 2019 in Himalaya FM, a Chinese pioneer in live-streaming broadcasts, audiobooks and podcasts.
Jie also acts as the executive secretary of Voice of Science, a science media league to popularize scientific knowledge and disseminate scientific spirit. Voice of Science takes its mission to improve people's scientific literacy, advocate logic and empirical evidence, oppose pseudoscience, and eliminate ignorance and superstition.
Business Contact: niuniverse8566@gmail.com
0 Comments