Humans affect animal adaptation to warming
Photo by charlieyack
By looking into the past, a researcher is trying to understand how animals might adapt to global warming now.
Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been studying a climate warming event of 55 million years ago. Although there seemed to be major extinctions in the deep ocean, he said, that ancient climate change wasn’t as detrimental for animals on land.
Richard Norris: It allowed animals to migrate from central Europe over to North America. We have the first record of horses in North America, the first record of primates in North America associated with this episode of global warming. And so, a lot of species spread all over the planet when their northern migration routes were opened up by becoming much warmer.
But, he said, 55 million years ago there was no large human presence on the planet. And that’s important.
Richard Norris: Back then, organisms could freely move around, because we weren’t in the way. We build highways and cities and agricultural land and all sorts of things that interfere with migration of organisms. So it’s quite plausible, I think, that there will be much heavier extinction from this particular episode of global warming than occurred in the past.
Our thanks today to NASA: explore, discover, understand.
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