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

by Peter Brannen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062364814
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	06/19/2018
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	33,279
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Washington Post, Slate, Boston Globe, Aeon, and others. A graduate of Boston College, he was a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the Duke University National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and a 2011 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellow. This is his first book.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Beginnings 13

2 The End-Ordovician Mass Extinction 23

3 The Late Devonian Mass Extinction 67

4 The End-Permian Mass Extinction 103

5 The End-Triassic Mass Extinction 141

6 The End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction 173

7 The End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction 219

8 The Near Future 249

9 The Last Extinction 277

Acknowledgments 291

Bibliography 293

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

Clear-eyed, urgent, and eloquent. . . . Brannen offers an important education, making an argument for how better understanding what’s happened can help us determine how to move forward.

Boston Globe

Gripping . . . Brannen excels at evoking lost worlds.

The New Yorker

Timely to say the least . . . with grace and wit, [Brannen] makes a compelling case that recognizing our fortune and coming to terms with our fragility means consciousness prevails in the universe. We are still capable of changing the way we live.

Paste Magazine

Masterful . . . might be just the book to give to that uncle of yours who still wants to argue about climate change (or even to your US Representative). But first, read it yourself. It’s a page turner.

Ars Technica

Want to know the future? Look to the past, the deep past. That’s one of the many insights you’ll glean from reading Brannen’s entertaining, engaging, elegant book.

David Biello

A vivid, fascinating story about all the past and future lives of our planet. Peter Brannen has the knack of opening up new worlds under our feet.

Michael Pye

A book about one apocalypse—much less five—could have been a daunting read, were it not for the wit, lyricism, and clarity that Peter Brannen brings to every page. He is a storyteller at the height of his powers, and he has found a story worth telling.

Ed Yong

Robert Frost only gave us two options to end the world: fire or ice. Peter Brannen informs us in this fun rollick through deep history that there are so many more interesting ways to go.

Paul Greenberg

Much-needed as a cautionary lesson and a hopeful demonstration of how life on Earth keeps rebounding from destruction.

Booklist

An exciting detective story venturing into the extraordinary worlds of our Earth’s past to discover what caused them to end. Brannen describes unimaginable floods, planet-scale catastrophes and incredible creatures that were once common. A cautionary tale for the future of our human age.

Gaia Vince

The Ends of the World recounts the breath-taking stories of the five mass extinctions that have punctuated the course of evolution. Its vertiginous sense of the fragility of living things will never leave you, not least because humanity may now be writing the end of Brannen’s riveting tale.

Stephen Curry

[Brannen] is a companionable guide, as good at breathing life into the fossilized prose of scientific papers as he is at conjuring the Ordovician reign of the nautiloids.

New York Times Book Review

In The Ends of the World, accompanying scientists and amateur fossil hunters into the field, seeking lost worlds at the edges of highways and parking lots, Peter Brannen takes readers on a time-traveling tour through all five [major mass extinctions], in chronological order. Throughout he is a companionable guide, as good at breathing life into the fossilized prose of scientific papers as he is at conjuring the Ordovician reign of the nautiloids.

The New York Times Book Review - Donovan Hohn

04/24/2017
Shedding light on hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s geological history, this dense and revealing volume by science journalist Brannen focuses on mass extinctions. He examines the so-called “big five” mass extinctions, various points over long stretches of time when animal life was “almost entirely wiped out in sudden, planet-wide exterminations.” He gradually works his way from the Ordovician period around 445 million years ago—before even the dinosaurs—toward the late Pleistocene, some 50,000 years ago. Brannen devotes a chapter to each extinction event and makes potentially dull fossil records accessible by talking with current researchers. In Cincinnati, Ohio, Brannen meets the Dry Dredgers, an amateur fossil-collecting group. Southwest Ohio “sits atop bedrock made of an old ocean seafloor,” allowing fossil hunters access and opportunities to study ancient sea life. He also speaks with Stanford University paleontologist Jonathan Payne, who offers insight on the Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago. According to Payne, it was caused primarily by ocean acidification, a problem that exists today when carbon dioxide reacts with seawater. Effectively linking past and present, Brannen winds down with projections for the future and a warning against inaction in the face of climate change. Color photos. (June)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/15/2017
Covering Earth's history since the planet's inception, this volume seeks to understand the past and shed light on the present. Science journalist Brannen (whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic) focuses on the Big Five extinctions in Earth's history, so-called because nearly everything that was alive at the time was almost wiped out. These five have garnered intense study lately as the scientific community attempts to figure out how these incidents might inform us about possible future events. While this title is very similar to Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, Brannen infuses his narrative with tongue-in-cheek humor that does not downplay the seriousness of his subject. In addition, his work is more comprehensive, addressing the controversies that have arisen both in the scientific community and the public sphere but never devolving into unproductive attacks. If readers have time for only one book on the subject, this wonderfully written, well-balanced, and intricately researched (though not too dense) selection is the one to choose. VERDICT Highly recommended for most public libraries.—Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO

Library Journal

2017-04-04
A simultaneously enlightening and cautionary tale of the deep history of our planet and the possible future, when conscious life may become extinct."Animal life has been almost entirely wiped out in sudden planet-wide exterminations five times in Earth's history," writes Brannen, who notes later, "life on Earth is resilient, but not infinitely so." An extinction event is defined as "any event in which more than half of the earth's species go extinct in fewer than a million years." The author provides an overview of the five major extinction events that have occurred over the last 300 million years, evidence of which are revealed by the fossil record and appear to be correlated with major geological shifts. The most recent event, the extinction of dinosaurs, provides a case in point. The dominant form of life on Earth for more than 200 million years, they were likely felled by two major catastrophes that occurred around 66 million years ago: "the largest asteroid known to have hit any planet in the solar system…hit Earth…[and] one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever smothered parts of India in lava more than 2 miles deep." Improbably, our planet has survived each of the five major extinctions. Fossils recovered in Ohio give evidence of what appears to have been the first mass extinction, around 450 million years ago, when "a vast tropical sea covered most of present-day North America." Why this occurred is debatable, but it appears to have been associated with a rapid increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, causing significant global warming. As the author warns, how we prepare for the possibility of a sixth major extinction event may be "existentially, even cosmologically, consequential." Though not as in-depth on the future possibilities as some readers may want, the book is entertaining and informative on the geological record and the researchers who study it. Brannen may not be Elizabeth Kolbert, but he provides a useful addition to the popular literature on climate change.

Kirkus Reviews