One-tenth of the Earth's wilderness has disappeared since the 90s

Earth's untouched terrain has undergone a significant decline over the past two decades, finds new research.

In fact, a team, led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Australia's University of Queensland, has found that "since the 1990s, one-tenth of all global wilderness has vanished—an area twice the size of Alaska."

As a recent news release states, the team made this determination by mapping "biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance around the globe. The researchers then compared their current map of the wilderness to one produced by the same means in the early 1990s."

Their analysis showed that around 11.5 million square miles of wilderness area still exists, particularly in North America, Australia, North Asia, and North Africa.

However, about 1.2 million square miles was destroyed in the past 20 years; the hardest hit regions have been in "South America, which suffered a 30 percent loss of its wilderness, and Africa, which experienced a 14 percent loss."

As such, the team recommends that international policies be put in place to preserve the remaining areas before they decline even further.