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    The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
    The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
    The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
    Ebook459 pages7 hours

    The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

    By Peter Brannen

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    One of Vox’s Most Important Books of the Decade

    New York Times Editors' Choice 2017

    Forbes Top 10 Best Environment, Climate, and Conservation Book of 2017

    As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future

    Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future.

    Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits.

    Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.

    Editor's Note

    Before life as we know it…

    Everyone knows about the tragic end of the dinosaurs, but do you know what happened in the other four mass extinctions? Peter Brannen walks through Earth’s history of death and destruction, pointing out parallels between carbon dioxide releases then and now. It’s a warning for what apocalyptic ends could befall us, and a beacon of hope that we can still stop the destruction of life as we know it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 13, 2017
    ISBN9780062364821
    Author

    Peter Brannen

    Peter Brannen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Ends of the World, about the biggest mass extinctions in Earth’s history. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications.

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    Reviews for The Ends of the World

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    • 4/5
      Essential read for the Fall!
      Mass extinction and the End.
      Really uplifting if you ask me.

      Read this astonishing and terrifying description of the end of the dinosaurs:

      “The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”

      These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.

      “The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Them when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.”

      Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact.

      “So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked.

      “Yeah, probably.”

      As I said, uplifting.

    • 5/5
      As humans, it is hard to not dream of the end of the world. What will it look like? To get examples we look at the past, namely extinctions. Peter Brannen, with intriguing prose and a witty tongue, presents the five main extinctions in a conversational tone. His eyes are wide open and work to benefit the reader. Although the future looks grim, knowledge is power.
    • 4/5
      A fantastic journey through worlds wonderful, strange -- and dead. Like the universe itself, deep geological time is vastly difficult to imagine so it's a gift when a writer can offer glimpses. Even when the focus is on mass extinctions. One is left with something of an existential crisis - what is the meaning of life? What is all for? We like to think of ourselves as the end product advancing forward the ultimate expression of consciousness standing on the shoulders of those who came before. Bur this is untrue. We are the product of an accidental disaster that happens ever couple hundred million years. Every mass extinction was largely caused by the same thing: CO2 released by super volcanoes. Even the asteroid dinosaur extinction was probably caused by the subsequent volcanoes not the immediate impact event. This is a really great book, detailed and accessible with the latest science, but be prepared to battle your inner nihilism.
    • 3/5
      There’s a really excellent, even beautifully written book here, but it’s buried under:
      strange bursts of thinly veiled classism,
      disorienting overuse of adjectives (especially where describing the magnitude of each calamity. It felt a bit like the progression of power levels on DBZ- which, were some of them worse precisely because there was more life around to die? This goes mostly unaddressed),
      and a strange commitment to anthropocentrism, as though the author did not think that an audience curious about deep time might have different priorities at least for the duration of the book,
      Constant interruptions in flow due to footnotes that were usually not all that informative or funny. Most of them could have been avoided with judicious use of parentheses, and after a while I just stopped reading them.

      At first I found myself eager to recommend it, but the more I read it the more I realized I couldn’t tell who exactly it was written for. Especially since so much time was spent either hammering home that climate change is bad or arguing against points or questions that didn’t make all that much sense and weren’t really as obvious as they were given credit for being.
    • 4/5
      If I were to describe this book in a word it would be "chastening," as the author does a fine job of linking our current environmental mega-crisis involving the excessive burning of fossil fuels with past mass extinctions, most of which involved carbon dioxide driven environmental disruption on a massive scale. This is a very personal book in which Brannen makes no bones of linking his sour outlook on the worth of humanity as being too stupid to live with the recent demise of his mother (I can so relate), and that personal anger contributes to the value of this piece of journalism as an exercise in witness.
    • 5/5
      In The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, science journalist Peter Brannen examines the scientific community's understandings of and evidence for the five mass extinctions that characterize Earth's history. He notices that a common thread linking all of them is the Earth's carbon cycle and draws apt comparisons to events going on in the Industrial and Post-industrial Ages of the past couple hundred years.Brannen travels to meet with geologists, paleontologists, oceanographers, and chemists to better recreate the truly bizarre worlds that preceded "our" Earth, explaining how water temperatures, continental arrangement, and even the air itself were different. He also explores the remnants of the upheavals that ended these ages, from the Palisades in New Jersey to the Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. He engages with the competing theories for some of these changes, such as the role basaltic eruptions in India may have played in the End-Cretaceous extinction, so that he can fairly report on the state of the academic community. One realizes that some of the disciplines have become so specialized that it takes an outsider like Brannen to connect some of the dots.While the book does offer a word of caution about our current tampering with the carbon cycle, Brannen makes it clear that the planet and life won't disappear; only our current civilization, which developed in an oddly-prolonged interglacial period. He also explains how creationists and climate change deniers are actively harming not just individual sciences, but our ability to interpret the significance of that data. This is a must-read for those interested in geology, deep-time, and climate change.
    • 5/5
      Vivid, stunning revelationThe five mass extinctions are such a cliché, we actually have no understanding of what really happened. Peter Brannen has written a remarkable and extremely readable book (his first) to fill in the voids. The result is thought-provoking, gripping, and more than a little worrisome.There were different reasons for the extinctions. We all know about the asteroid hit, because it was only proven in the 1980s. But volcanic eruptions – the likes of which we have fortunately never seen – were the cause of another. As well, the planet keeps tipping in and out of ice ages as it wobbles its way along. When mass extinctions occur, they tend to be really fast – same day in the case of the asteroid hit, very few years in other cases. It’s not a gradual decline; it’s a vanishing. Few species make it to the next era; we start over every time.The mechanics are remarkably similar. The level of carbon dioxide soars, crippling the oceans from doing their job, and they return the favor to the air, crippling everything else. The weather turns unimaginably violent. Everything gets wiped out. It takes the oceans a good hundred thousand years to regain balance, and then a hundred million years for a new world of plants and animals to evolve and populate the barren Earth. In the interim, Earth is Hell.Brannen assembles the wisdom of renowned paleontologists to put the scenes together. There isn’t much disagreement on the mechanics or the major events. As CO2 rises, so do temperatures, and very few beings are capable of functioning in higher temperature bands. They falter and die. For survivors, there would be nothing to live on. Today we are in remarkably pleasant pause between ice ages, in which the continents have very fortuitously aligned north-south. That allows for migration and survival as different climates take hold. It also keeps the oceans pumping. There is a nice, benign balance to the weather, and the horrific volcanic flows that can deposit literally miles thick lava over entire countries, have ceased. Unfortunately, one species has seen fit to take command, and it is working to throw the balance the Earth has achieved into another era of chaos. We are imposing change at a rate “ten times faster” than the worst events in Earth’s history, say the paleontologists. When temperatures rise just one degree, the balance is upset. We are (laughably) attempting to hold it at another two. That will not support life as we know it. “The entire global economy depends on how quickly we can get carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere,” says one. And we’re doing it bigger and better than our volcanoes. As for rising oceans, paleontologists snicker at estimates of .5 to 2m. Every time this happened before, it was more like 15-20m for this kind of temperature rise. Considering all the factors that make a mass extinction, “We are the perfect storm.”One key takeaway is that we cannot learn from the events of the past. Every mass extinction was different. There are so many variables, life forms, different configurations of land and sea, there is no way of predicting numeric outcomes with certainty. Past performance does not guarantee future results. But the overall picture is grim and coming up fast, and Brannen found no paleontologists who say different.The Ends of the World fills in huge gaps, put things in perspective and (cough) clears the air about how the Earth works. It is an extraordinary, valuable insight, colorfully written and also frightening. Maybe nothing is forever, but we’re not helping.David Wineberg

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Organization felt really jumbled and there was a lot of repetition (or maybe different events kept getting described in the same way, I lost track). The killer for me was that I got very bored.

    Book preview

    The Ends of the World - Peter Brannen

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