A team of researchers is using network analysis techniques – popularized through social media applications – to find patterns in Earth’s natural history, as detailed in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). By using network analysis to search for communities of marine life in the fossil records of the Paleobiology Database, the team, including researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was able to quantify the ecological impacts of major events like mass extinctions and may help us anticipate the consequences of a “sixth mass extinction.”