There’s a lot less life than there once was
Cris Bouroncle / AFP / Getty Images
The amount of living matter on Earth has fallen by half since the beginning of human civilisation. This is one of the staggering facts from the most comprehensive global census of the mass of living organisms yet done.
“Many things did surprise us,” says Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, whose team carried out the analysis.
The team define biomass as the mass of carbon in living organisms. This reflects the mass of the molecules of …
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