Sixth Mass Extinction

The Sixth Mass Extinction — also known as the Anthropocene extinction — is the ongoing extinction event in which species are disappearing at a rate estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times the background extinction rate. Unlike the previous five mass extinctions, which were caused by asteroids, volcanic activity, and climate shifts, the Sixth Mass Extinction is driven primarily by human activity: habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, invasive species, and overexploitation.

The concept connects conservation biology to Earth system science and complexity theory. Extinction is not a random process of individual species disappearing; it is a network phenomenon in which the removal of one species can trigger cascading losses through ecological interaction webs. The question is not whether the Sixth Mass Extinction is real — the evidence is overwhelming — but whether the remaining biodiversity can be stabilized before the system crosses a critical threshold into a fundamentally different ecological state.