Posts Tagged ‘extinction’
29 Cameras and 203 Hours of Footage Later, This Haunting Movie Exists
Emily Buder | No Film School Anthropocene: The Human Epoch directors and cinematographers unpack the ambitious scale of the visually-stunning and perennially haunting project. It’s fitting that Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a film that attempts to convey the massive impact of humanity on the earth’s landscapes, would require such a large-scale production. The film’s three directors —…
Read MoreSaying Goodbye to Sudan, the Last Male Northern White Rhino
It is with heavy hearts that we learn of the passing of Sudan, who was the last male northern white rhino, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Species extinction is one of the markers of the #Anthropocene. In May 2016 the #AnthropoceneProject Team had the honour of sharing some intimate moments with Sudan at Ol Pejeta. Sudan’s last days were…
Read MoreWill Not Even the Humble Hedgehog Be Spared by the Anthropocene?
By Kelly Faircloth | Jezebel Did you know that there are hedgehogs in London? Well—for now. NBC News reports that London’s last breeding population of these prickly little buddies covered in salmonella—an icon of the British landscape—unfortunately lives awfully close to one of the staging areas of a $73 billion rail project: The construction of Britain’s High Speed…
Read MoreCorals eat plastic the way humans eat junk food — because it’s tasty
By Nicole Mortillaro | CBC News Plastics are abundant in our oceans. Now scientists have found that corals — which already face numerous threats and have declined on a staggering scale — may be feeding on it not because it resembles prey, but because it actually tastes good to them. Corals are living organisms. Coral reefs are collections of…
Read MoreHuman activity blamed for increase in right whale deaths: report
By Canadian Press | Global News CHARLOTTETOWN – Analysis of six endangered North Atlantic right whales found dead since June in the Gulf of St. Lawrence suggests four were struck by ships and one died caught in fishing gear, says a report released Thursday. The sixth was too decomposed to be sure. Preliminary findings of a…
Read MoreOne of world’s largest marine parks created off coast of Easter Island
By Arthur Nelson | The Guardian One of the world’s largest marine protection areas has been created off the coast of Easter Island. The 740,000 sq km Rapa Nui marine park is roughly the size of the Chilean mainland and will protect at least 142 endemic marine species, including 27 threatened with extinction. An astonishing 77% of the…
Read MorePrimates face mass extinction by mid-century, scientists warn
By Ivan Semeniuk | The Globe and Mail Primates are now so threatened by human activity that the group is heading for “a major extinction event” by the middle of this century, scientists warn. The grim forecast comes from a global assessment of all known species of primates, the mammalian order to which humans belong and whose members…
Read MoreGiraffes, Towering and Otherworldly, Are ‘Vulnerable’ to Extinction
By Patrick Healy | The New York Times The majestic giraffe, the world’s tallest land mammal and a prime attraction at zoos worldwide, is threatened with extinction because of illegal hunting and a loss of its habitat, according to a report published on Thursday by an international monitoring group. The giraffe population has declined by 40 percent over the past…
Read MoreWhy Should Humans Care if We’re Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction?
By Smithsonian.com | Smithsonian Magazine Sometime in the near geological future, the landscape of life on earth as we know it will be transformed. It’s a mass extinction, and it’s only happened five times before in Earth’s history. There have been severe ice ages, perplexing losses of oxygen from our oceans, massive volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts.…
Read MoreWhat really happened to mammoths and other ice age giants
By Niki Rust | BBC Earth There might be as many as 10 million species of complex life on this planet today – a huge number. But add up all of the complex species that ever lived and some biologists think the grand total would be about five billion. The estimate leads to an astonishing conclusion:…
Read MoreWhat the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first
By Chris Mooney | The Washington Post | September 14, 2016 We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate…
Read MoreWilderness land set to disappear from planet by 2100 as humans move in
By Ian Johnston | Independent | September 8, 2016 A tenth of the world’s wild land – an area equivalent to half the vast Amazon basin – has been lost in just two decades in an “alarming” trend that requires urgent action on an international scale, experts have warned. At the current rate of decline there will be no…
Read More‘Our living dinosaurs’ There are far fewer African elephants than we thought, study shows
By David McKenzie and Ingrid Formanek | CNN | August 31, 2016 Linyanti Swamp, Botswana (CNN)Scanning Botswana’s remote Linyanti swamp from the low flying chopper, elephant ecologist Mike Chase can’t hide the anxiety and dread as he sees what he has seen too many times before. “I don’t think anybody in the world has seen the number of…
Read MoreDo the World’s Three Remaining Northern White Rhinos Have a Future?
By Rachel Nuwer | PBS NatureNOW | July 28, 2016 Sudan is the last of his kind on Earth. He just looks like a rhino. But as his keeper will quickly inform you, he is one of just three northern white rhinos remaining on the planet. The other two, a mother-daughter pair named Najin and Fatu,…
Read MorePODCAST: The Survivor
By Leslie Chang | Generation Anthropocene | July 26, 2016 The solenodon: a venomous, shrew-like mammal, found only in the Caribbean, that has survived for millions of years by hiding underground. Even the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago couldn’t kill this hardy little creature. But after surviving for so long, after…
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