The Sixth Mass Extinction: Are We Stoking Earth’s Next Collapse?

The phrase “mass extinction” often feels abstractlike something locked away in the fossil record, belonging to a world of dinosaurs or trilobites, not us. Yet some scientists argue we may be drifting toward one right now, not over millions of years, but within the next few centuries. And the culprit isn’t a meteor strike or a supervolcano. It’s usour relentless burning of fossil fuels, our clearing of forests, our refusal to take the carbon math seriously.

It’s not the cheeriest topic to bring up with friends over coffee, but it’s one of those looming issues that keeps resurfacing in the scientific community. The unsettling question is: how close are we, really, to pushing Earth’s lifesupport systems past the point of no return?

The Carbon Cycle: Nature’s Balancing Act

Think of Earth’s carbon cycle as a set of spinning plates. One balances the carbon stored in oceans, another in forests, another in soils, another in the atmosphere. For millions of years, nature has been juggling these plates with surprising steadiness, keeping the climate livable. Volcanoes release carbon, plants pull it down, oceans absorb and burp it backit’s a messy but stable dance.

The trouble comes when you dump too much carbon into the system too quickly. It’s like tossing another dozen plates into the act. Eventually, something crashes. MIT mathematician Daniel Rothman points out that most past mass extinctions were triggered not by slow, steady emissions (like a sleepy volcano burbling away), but by violent pulses of carbon that overwhelmed Earth’s buffering systems.

The end result is a runaway effect: warming feeds ocean acidification, which wipes out marine ecosystems, which destabilizes food chains on land. It’s a chain reaction, not a single event.

The Industrial Shortcut to Chaos

Humans, of course, have developed their own way of overloading the systemburning coal, oil, and gas, ripping through ancient carbon stores like teenagers raiding a pantry. Since the Industrial Revolution, our species has been injecting CO₂ into the atmosphere at a rate faster than even the Siberian Traps, a colossal volcanic outburst 252 million years ago that helped trigger the worst dieoff in history.

That eruption killed 96% of marine species and roughly 70% of land species. It happened over thousands of years, which is geologically fast but still sluggish compared to our current pace. We’re delivering carbon about ten times quicker. It’s as if we’ve managed to take one of Earth’s most devastating events and put it on fastforward.

Now, are we yet at the scale of the Siberian disaster? No. But Rothman and others warn that the speed alone is dangerous. Ecosystems can adapt to slow changeevolution is patient. They can’t keep up with whiplash.

Lessons From the Great Dying

The socalled “Great Dying” at the end of the Permian period is worth revisiting because it shows just how fragile the system can be. What began as “ordinary” volcanic activity turned catastrophic when lava started baking through carbonrich sediments underground. That released staggering amounts of CO₂, sending the carbon cycle into overdrive.

The oceans turned acidic, reefs dissolved, forests collapsed. Picture coral reefs bleaching today, but multiply the devastation until nearly all marine life is gone. That’s the kind of tipping point Rothman worries abouta shift where one collapse cascades into many, faster than life can recover.

Our Own Carbon Overdose

Fastforward to 2025. We’re pumping out gigatons of CO₂ every year. Forests that once soaked up carbon are burning or being cut down. Melting permafrost is starting to release methane, another potent greenhouse gas. Each of these changes is small in isolation, but together they’re nudging the system toward a dangerous feedback loop.

The uncomfortable truth is that we don’t know exactly where the threshold lies. Rothman has tried to map it mathematically, pointing to limits in how much carbon the oceans and biosphere can handle before unraveling begins. The problem is, we could already be edging uncomfortably close, and once a tipping point passes, there’s no going back.

It’s like leaning too far back in a chairyou don’t know it’s too late until gravity has taken over.

Could We Really Trigger a Sixth Extinction?

Skeptics sometimes argue that extinction talk is alarmist. After all, Earth has survived asteroid impacts and supereruptions. Isn’t nature resilient? Yes, but resilience has limits. Each of the five major mass extinctions reset life on Earth in brutal ways, wiping out dominant species and reshaping ecosystems for tens of millions of years.

Anthony Barnosky and other scientists estimate that if current emission trends continue, we could drive a similar upheaval within a few hundred years. In deep time, that’s an eyeblink. From our perspective, it means the grandchildren of our grandchildren could inherit a world where biodiversity collapsesnot in textbooks, but outside their windows.

The Way OutIf We Take It

So, what’s the alternative? The path isn’t mysterious. Reduce emissions. Protect forests. Shift energy systems away from fossil fuels. Invest in carbon capturenot as a license to keep burning, but as a safety net for the carbon we’ve already dumped. These aren’t radical solutions; they’re the same strategies we’ve been discussing for decades, just not acting on with the urgency they demand.

The window is narrowing, though. Unlike the Permian event, which played out over millennia, this crisis is unfolding on a human timescale. We don’t get geological patience. We get decades. Maybe a century.

A Sobering but Not Hopeless Outlook

What makes Rothman’s warning unsettling is not that extinction is guaranteed, but that it’s possibleand possible soon in planetary terms. He’s not saying the world will suddenly end in flames. He’s saying the trajectory we’re on echoes some of the darkest chapters in Earth’s history, only faster.

The nuance here is important: collapse is not inevitable. But the longer we treat CO₂ as just another tailpipe emission rather than a planetary disruptor, the more likely we are to stumble into that feedback loop. And once we do, no amount of clever technology will rewind the tape.

If there’s any silver lining, it’s that unlike past events, this one is in our hands. Volcanoes didn’t have a choice. We do.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: IDR