PARIS (AFP) â?? Mass extinctions that wiped out up to 90 percent of Earth’s flora and fauna were driven in large part by shifting ocean levels, according to a study published in Nature.
Understanding what made many of the planet’s living organism rapidly die out at least five times over the last half billion years remains one of the great challenges in paleontology and biology.
“The expansions and contractions of those environments have pretty profound effects on life on Earth,” said Shanan Peters, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and sole author of the study.