Supercomputer Says 27% of Life on Earth Will Be Dead by the End of This Century (2024)

• A European Commission study using a supercomputer scientifically modeled our Earth, showing mass extinction of animals and plants.
• Modeling shows 27 percent of plants and animals will disappear by 2100.
• The European supercomputer simulated food webs, co-extinctions, and a host of intricate possibilities.

No matter how scientists queued up one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, the results remained the same: Mass extinction of plants and animals isn’t slowing down. It’s only growing.

A new study from a European Commission scientist and a professor from Australia modeled climate and land use changes and their impact on plant and animal species. The results are bleak: the supercomputer says 10 percent of all plant and animal species will disappear by 2050, and 27 percent of vertebrate diversity will vanish by 2100. Yeah, that’s over a quarter of our animals gone in about 75 years.

The scientists loaded up models with 33,000 virtual species that could disperse and adapt, 15,000 adaptable food webs, and even the potential of invasive species. The simulations, with results published in Science Advances, measured the contribution of ecological interactions on the extinction toll, modeling how “primary” extinctions triggered directly by climate and land-use change led to additional extinctions.

The simulations observed a species’ response at monthly intervals between 2020 and 2100, finding a quick decline in diversity between 2020 and 2050 thereafter, suggesting the next few decades hold special importance on the future of biodiversity.

The key benefits of using the supercomputer allowed the scientists to create “virtual Earths,” with the lives of plants and animals directly connected to climate, land use, and other plants and animals. Thanks to this chain-reaction effect, biodiversity loss amplifies by up to 184 percent, the study says, showing how failing to account for ecological interactions leads to a severe underestimation of the current biodiversity crisis.

But losing out on animals isn’t the only thing coming, thanks to the modeling. “Communities will lose up to a half of ecological interactions,” the study says. “The model reveals that the extreme toll of global change for vertebrate diversity might be of secondary importance compared to the damages to ecological network structure.”

In some of the worst simulations, up to half of the connections in the food webs between species disappeared. The larger the species, the higher up the food chain and the more vulnerable they became to effects following extinctions.

“Unless conservation practitioners rapidly start to incorporate the complexity of ecological interactions and their role in extinction processes in their planning,” the study authors write, “averting the ongoing biodiversity crisis will become an unachievable target.”