University of Chicago graduate student Stewart Edie (left) and Prof. David Jablonski (right) studied how various animals survive extinction level events like a major impact from a large meteor or small comet, or from a pole shift that changes the surface orientation of the entire planet.
They studied the results of many ancient cataclysms on the biodiversity of the planet, and it directly relates to the upcoming pole shift I’m expecting in our near future.
“The rug gets pulled out from underneath all the species,” said Edie. “The landscape of the world completely and suddenly changed, making it all the more surprising that all functional types survived. Even the functional groups with only one or two species somehow make it through.”
“The big question is: Given that we’re working on a mass extinction right now, which flavor will it be?” Jablonski said. “Will we have a tropic-to-poles type, where we lose half our functional groups and so ecosystems are massively altered? Or will it be a mass extinction where you can lose all these species, but the functional groups still somehow manage to limp on? We need to understand this.”
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