What is the impact of humanity on the development of the earth? This question heated up in the Wake of the current climate debate, the tempers. Because we humans dominate the planet, and this, although we represent only a fraction of its total biomass. As measured by the carbon – the Element from which all living tissue is built up, weighing the whole animal, vegetable and other life on earth, a gigantic 550 gigatons (550 billion tons). Our body make up a mere 0.06 gigatons of it.
To this end, a ground-breaking study came to, which was released almost a year ago in the prestigious Journal of the American Academy of science and nothing of their topicality has been lost. The responsible biologists were for the first time, the weight of all living organisms on earth and their carbon content, so that variable components such as the water content of the organisms distort the result. The result shows how incredibly small mankind really is.
people as hard as all of the termites
by far The largest part of the plant, the 82 percent of the living beings existing carbon to unite. With 450 gigatons of you are 7500 times heavier than we are. Also, bacteria surpass humans with 70 gigatons of many times, and have a share of 13 percent. All other living things – fungi, archaea (Urbakterien), protists (single celled eukaryotes) and animals (including Homo sapiens) – make up the tiny remainder.
The proportion of more than 7.6 billion people on earth is a 0.01 percent is vanishingly small. Also within the genus of the animals, we play a minor role. 0.06 gigatons, we are the same weight as all of the termite on Land, or all the Krill (a type of crustaceans) in the ocean. Molluscs, worms, fish, and Link point kneeling (insects, spiders, etc.) will bring considerably more on the scale. And even farm animals like cows and chickens weighing a total of ten times more than the people.
Little mass, tremendous impact
we have but ourselves to blame. Through the domestication, the plants gradual transformation of wild animals into Pets and from wild-growing plants in culture, have taken the people a significant impact on the planet.
Today, people and animals together 96 percent of the mammals on Land. Only 4 percent are of wild mammals such as elephants. In the case of the birds it looks similar: Almost three-quarters of the biomass is eliminated today on domesticated poultry, mainly chickens, while wild birds make up the Rest.
Earlier it was still different. According to the controversial study of the man has been wiped out since the beginning of human civilization, but 15 percent of all the fish, 80 percent of the marine mammals and 85 per cent of wild mammals. Moreover, half of the plant biomass is gone.
at the same time other surveys assume that insects could be extinct in a hundred years. Per year of their biomass goes back to 2.5 percent. A third of the insect species is now threatened with extinction.
in Spite of their small mass humanity left on the earth, i.e., clear traces and the biosphere irreversibly affected. Scientists talk of dying from the “sixth great mass” and have given the age in which the human is one of the most important factors of influence on the biological, geological and atmospheric processes on the earth, even its own name: the Anthropocene.
“I hope our work shows how humans, as the dominant and disproportionate role on the earth is,” said Ron Milo, the conductor of the study, compared to the “Guardian”. If he was doing with his daughters is an animal Puzzle, find there is usually an elephant next to a Giraffe and a rhinoceros. “If I wanted to convey a realistic picture, should there not be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and a chicken would come,” said the Professor of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
(editing Tamedia)
Created: 25.04.2019, 11:53 PM
