Life in the world's oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world's leading marine scientists has warned.The researchers from Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Panama, Norway and the UK have compared events which drove massive extinctions of sea life in the past with what is observed to be taking place in the seas and oceans globally today. Three of the five largest extinctions of the past 500 million years were associated with global warming and acidification of the oceans -- trends which also apply today, the scientists say in a new article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

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