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Credit: Evan Davis; Marine biodiversity could plummet to levels not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs

As greenhouse gas emissions continue to warm the world's oceans, marine biodiversity could be on track to plummet within the next few centuries to levels not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs, according to a U.S. National Science Foundation-supported study in the journal Science by Princeton University researchers.

The paper's authors modeled future marine biodiversity under different projected climate scenarios. They found that if emissions are not curbed, species losses from warming and oxygen depletion alone could mirror the substantial impact humans already have on marine biodiversity by around 2100. Tropical waters would experience the greatest loss of biodiversity, while polar species are at the highest risk of extinction, the authors reported.

Credit: Rapid global climate change took place in an ancient ice-capped world much like the present; UC Davis

A new study describes a period of rapid global climate change in an ice-capped world much like the present -- but 304 million years ago. Within about 300,000 years in that long-ago time, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels doubled, oceans became anoxic and biodiversity dropped on land and in the seas.

"It was one of the fastest-warming events in Earth's history," said Isabel Montañez of the University of California, Davis.

Although several other "hyperthermal" or rapid warming events have happened on Earth, this is the first identified during an "icehouse" time when the planet had ice caps and glaciers comparable to the present day.

Credit: Gettyimages

"If you imagine the 4,500-billion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M., plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow...

Researchers studying the European olm, and other cave dwellers, believe these strange creatures can provide important answers about evolution and even human eye diseases. © Javier Ábalos Alvarez from Madrid, España, CC BY-SA 2.0

In watery underground caverns, there are creatures that live in eternal midnight. Over the course of generations, these animals have adapted to their isolated and unique environments, and scientists believe their pasty skin and blind eyes may hold secrets to evolution –– and to genetic adaptations that could cast light on longevity, surviving starvation, and eye diseases in humans.

'These caves are isolated worlds,' said Professor Peter Trontelj, a zoologist at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. 'If you go a couple of metres (below the surface), you enter a new world with totally different ecological conditions.'

Certain animals are able to adapt to these dark habitats where no plants grow, and lightless caves, like those found in Slovenia, are natural laboratories of evolutionary biology.

Credit: Gettyimages

What has ever amazed human beings is the inherent beauty of natural phenomena. Everything that happens in nature possesses an undeniable perfection and simplicity, which seems to be the most natural and easiest way for the world to run, but still impossibly difficult if one tries to explain them. But where does the problem lie? Is it that our languages and sciences cannot grasp the intricacy of the Universe? Or maybe our tools are too complicated for the simplicity that surrounds us? Maybe, we are addressing the wrong notions, maybe, it's not logic but harmony, not meaning but quality?

Well, we should admit that human beings have opened the Box of Pandora and have fathomed and calculated some of its infinite treasures and predicaments. We've made quite useful equations, apparatus, and devices that serve us extraordinary fine. Yet, whenever we confront questions such as - What is the meaning of life?, What is beauty?, or How come nature is so simple and complex at the same time? - we usually occur the same inability to give a single and finite answer. It looks like nature is ambiguous, and composed of controversies, however that doesn't seem to impede or taint anything at all.