A New Way to Measure Five Mass Extinctions on Earth

Andrew Knoll and a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Carnegie Institution for Science, used a metric they termed "swing factor" to determine the ecological impact from the change in the number of animals within each palaeo-community in a given time-frame. The study, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that of the five extinction events, the Permian-Triassic event had the largest swing. Using the swing factor, palaeontologists can now compare the ecological impact of the Permian-Triassic extinction event with others. Media: Harvard Magazine ScienceDaily, The Wire

Image: The network of clusters. Credit: Knoll et al