mass extinction

The Earth is in the grips of what scientists have dubbed the "Sixth Mass Extinction" with the global rate of species extinction at least "tens to hundreds of times higher" than the average over the past 10 million years.

Plant extinctions endanger other organisms, ecosystems and the ability of humans to survive on our planet.

Study suggests weakening of the field resulted in reduced protection from UV rays, leading to mammalian extinctions on Earth.

The research could help scientists understand natural disasters like landslides.

But if we act now, conservation efforts could save "billions of years of unique evolutionary history," scientists say.

The Great Dying mass extinction saw 90 percent of life disappear in just 30,000 years.

The eruption may have wiped out the ozone layer.

The finding fills in the gap between volcanic eruptions and marine extinctions that had been bugging scientists.

The latest subject revealing our Earth's past: bonsai-like pine trees.

Time is running out, these experts say.

U.S. scientists find fossil fragments from 13 trees locked away on the Transantarctic Mountains.

You have never had luck this terrible.

Brrrr, it's cold in here, there must be 350 billion tons of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.

Michael Rampino believes dark matter may be responsible for catastrophic events on Earth.

Many scientists argue we are in the midst of a mass extinction caused by habitat destruction and climate change.

A newly discovered global extinction event resulted in 36 percent of marine megafauna going extinct.

A spike in mercury from the eruptions was recorded in sediments found across four continents.

The ancient hatchling will shed light on the evolution of the toothed birds that lived alongside the dinosaurs.

Newly discovered crater in the Falklands may correspond with the Great Dying event 250 million years ago.

Melting glaciers turning land to bog was behind widespread extinctions of animals like the giant sloth and woolly mammoth between 15,000 and 11,000 years ago.

The world may already be approaching a temperature at which complete loss of the enormous ice sheet that covers Greenland would "become inevitable"