Deep-time fossil records reveal a narrow, three-generation window to address the escalating climate crisis.
Immediate Release | 25 August 2026
Humanity has three generations at most to mitigate the accelerating impacts of Earth’s sixth mass extinction. This is the stark assessment issued today by PAST (Palaeontological Scientific Trust), linking current climate disruptions, such as severe El Niño cycles and extreme weather, directly to deep-time patterns recorded in the fossil record, to contextualise accelerating global climate disruptions.
According to PAST, every child born today is entering a world undergoing a human-driven mass extinction event that mirrors prehistoric die-offs.
Deep-time evidence, the vast multi-million-year timeline of Earth’s history recorded in fossils and rock strata, demonstrates that when planetary systems heat rapidly, biodiversity collapses and entire branches of life vanish. While natural cycles like El Niño periodically alter weather patterns, human-driven climate warming is compounding these phenomena, driving unprecedented environmental pressure.
“Deep time provides the precise, long-term scale needed to understand this crisis,” says Emil Krupandan, Director at Past.
“In earlier mass extinctions, rapid shifts in temperature, ocean chemistry, and oxygen availability interacted to trigger cascading ecological failures across oceans, coastlines, and continental interiors. Recent research shows that 73 vertebrate genera have gone extinct since 1500, a rate that would have taken 18,000 years under normal background extinction levels. Today, identical processes are once again destabilising planetary systems.”
PAST stresses that current disruptions are not isolated weather anomalies, but interconnected signals of an accelerating extinction continuum in which humanity is among the vulnerable species.
Across Southern Africa, these warnings are becoming tangible realities through severe weather events, warming oceans, and expanding sea levels. In coastal centers like Cape Town, long-term models project that sea level rise and severe storms will lead to chronic flooding in low-lying coastal and riverine areas by 2150, putting infrastructure, homes, and vulnerable communities in informal settlements at severe risk.
However, PAST emphasises that the ultimate outcome is not predetermined. “Deep time shows us that once ecosystems begin to unravel, the consequences can persist for millions of years,” Krupandan says. “The difference today is that we understand what is happening while it is happening. Every fraction of a degree of avoided warming, every ecosystem protected, and every species retained can dramatically reduce the severity of future loss.”
By reading today’s environmental signals against the backdrop of ancient catastrophes, deep-time science turns abstract climate warnings into tangible stakes, showing that the choices made over the next three human generations will decide the trajectory of life on Earth.
Help PAST continue this critical work and safeguard Africa’s global archive.
As the largest independent funder of paleosciences in Africa, PAST provides crucial funds for cutting edge research, bursaries, and technical support to postgraduate students and senior researchers advancing African origin sciences.
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Media Enquiries:
Anneke Burns
Past Public Relations
071 423 0079
anneke@abpr.co.za
About PAST (Palaeontological Scientific Trust)
PAST (Palaeontological Scientific Trust) is the largest independent funder of palaeosciences in Africa. Dedicated to supporting those unearthing and exploring Africa’s rich fossil heritage and advancing origin sciences. PAST harnesses the lessons of deep time, the multi-million-year timeline of Earth’s biological and geological history, to inform answers to modern challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and social cohesion.
Through our research grants, academic bursaries, and technical support, PAST actively builds scientific capacity across the continent. By bridging ancient scientific insight with public engagement and education, PAST believes in Africa’s importance as a global archive of life’s origins and a keystone in the fight for a resilient, sustainable future.
Learn more or support Africa’s origin sciences at www.past.org.za.