Scientists from Australia and several European countries made use of a supercomputer to develop a “Virtual Earth” with which they predicted the mass extinction of our planet, the reason for our end and when this apocalypse will occur.
According to the report published on the website of rock and popexperts were able to better map and model the mass extinctions of all species on Earth, caused by climate change.
Giovanni Strona, lead author of the study and an expert from the European Commission, and Professor Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, They argued that the Earth “is already in its sixth mass extinction, driven by human activity and climate change.””.
What is Virtual Earth like?
Scientists created a world with more than 15,000 “food webs” in order to predict the fate of species. With these networks they could model the “coextinctions”, that is, species that die because others they depend on die as a result of climate change.
In Virtual Earth, species were linked by “who eats whom”, then applying climate change and land use to generate future projections of both biodiversity loss and extinctions.
Strona explained: “Essentially, we’ve populated a virtual world from scratch and mapped the resulting fate of thousands of species across the planet to determine the likelihood of real-world tipping points.”.
According to the data from the study, by the year 2050 the Earth would lose 6 percent of the world’s biodiversity, which would increase to 13% in 2100. This is an “optimistic” projection, since the worst-case scenario is a biodiversity lost by 2050 of 10% and 27 percent in 2100.
Bradshaw concluded: “Children born today and living to be 70 years old will witness the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species.from the tiniest orchids and tiniest insects to iconic animals like the elephant and koala”.
