The mass extinction events in Earth’s past, perhaps counterintuitively, have been responsible for a surprisingly small percentage of the total number of extinct species. Make no mistake though, their effects have been profound. Each time, of course, the world has recovered, but it’s a slow and arduous process. In many ways, the recovered Earth found itself as an entirely different planet from the one that came before. What exactly that could mean by the end of the Holocene extinction is impossible to tell.
Extinction events take a long time, at least on human timescales, but the recovery process takes far, far longer. According to one study at University College London, fossil records show that it takes Earth’s ecosystems around 2 million years to recover after an extinction event. This varies dramatically from ecosystem to ecosystem, though, with some taking even longer. After Earth’s largest-ever extinction, it took coral reefs 14 million years to fully recover.
Mass extinctions do leave behind plenty of unoccupied ecological niches for new organisms to reclaim and occupy. With so much left behind, living things are free to either develop new specializations or even learn entirely new survival strategies. Unfortunately, evolution is not a fast process. Can the world recover from the Holocene extinction? Yes, very likely. But what that future Earth will look like is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, humanity may easily find itself living on a very lonely planet.
