Earth will recover. She always does. Life on earth is what's at risk. In all our time searching we've never found any other life. Life is a precious thing and it's what we have no compassion for anymore. 💔
Claudia Steffensen was walking in the Valtellina Orobie Mountains Park in Lombardy in 2023 when she stepped on a rock that looked like a slab of cement. "I then noticed these strange circular designs with wavy lines. I took a closer look and realized they were footprints."
Scientists analyzed the rock and found that the footprints belong to a prehistoric reptile, raising questions about what other clues beyond Steffensen's "rock zero" were hiding in these Alpine heights. Experts subsequently visited the site multiple times and found evidence of an entire ecosystem dating back to the Permian period (299 million to 252 million years ago). The first five mass extinctions occurred without the presence of humans. However, the difference is the speed at which these mass extinctions happen.
Fossil records don't just tell us what creatures existed before us, but also how long a species can naturally survive before becoming extinct without human interference. This is referred to as the background rate, and it is equal to around one species extinction per 1 million species per year. The Permian was characterized by a fast-warming climate and culminated in an extinction event known as the "Great Dying," which wiped out 90% of Earth's species. Currently, because of human activity, the actual background rate is tens of thousands of times higher, meaning species are becoming extinct much faster than they should be. Studies have found that some species lost from Earth would have continued to survive for 800 to 10,000 years without the interference of human activities
