AI rewrites Earth's history, revealing most mass extinctions were not sudden
AI reveals the truth about Earth's five biggest catastrophes (image: RBC-Ukraine)
A new study presented at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver found that most of the five known mass extinctions on Earth were not sudden catastrophes.
Scientists reached this conclusion thanks to a new AI model called OneStrata, according to the Geological Society of America study.
How did AI analyze Earth's history?
Professor Shuzhong Shen of Nanjing University in China, together with his colleagues, used the OneStrata foundation AI model, built on a transformer architecture.
The algorithm works on the principle of large language models (LLMs), which predict the next word in a sentence.
However, instead of text, OneStrata was trained on the OneStratigraphy paleontological dataset, which contains information about millions of fossils from tens of thousands of different locations on Earth.
Previously, scientists grouped fossils into categories spanning periods of several million years. As a result, changes that occurred over shorter intervals remained unnoticed.
The new model allowed for significantly more precise dating — the timescale can now be detailed with an accuracy of 1,000 years.
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What did scientists discover about mass extinctions?
Traditionally, Earth's history includes the "Big Five" mass extinctions — from the Ordovician-Silurian (440 million years ago) to the Cretaceous, when land-dwelling dinosaurs disappeared. They are usually perceived as abrupt turning points.
However, analysis using OneStrata revealed a different picture:
- Three of the five mass extinctions — the Late Devonian, Triassic, and Cretaceous — actually stretched over millions of years.
- The Late Devonian extinction, which occurred about 360 million years ago, unfolded gradually, with biodiversity declining over approximately 50 million years.
- In contrast, the Permian extinction was indeed rapid — most living organisms vanished in just 63,000 years.
At the same time, the study's lead author, Shuzhong Shen, notes that the model constructs a curve of overall biodiversity. According to him, it is entirely possible that some species were actively going extinct while new ones immediately took their place, which is why the overall picture "appears smooth."
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How many mass extinctions were there really?
Debates within the scientific community still continue over the very definition of a mass extinction. According to various estimates by researchers, there could have been anywhere from 3 to 20 such events throughout Earth's history.
Furthermore, many experts believe that our planet is currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, caused by anthropogenic climate change.
According to the authors of the publication, millions of years from now, the current crisis may also appear in geological layers as merely a "blurred episode" in Earth's history.
