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" by Peter Brannen is a detailed exploration of the Earth's history through the lens of mass extinctions. Brannen connects past environmental cataclysms with our current climate crisis, highlighting the role of carbon dioxide in driving these events. The book delves into the causes and outcomes of major extinctions, offering a thought-provoking narrative that intertwines scientific evidence with personal reflections on humanity's impact on the planet.
Brannen's writing style in "The Ends of the World" has been described as accessible and engaging, presenting complex scientific concepts in a readable manner. The book offers a travelogue-like experience through the Earth's prehistory, weaving together the stories of past extinctions with insights into our future. While exploring the five great extinction events, Brannen's narrative evokes a sense of urgency regarding the consequences of climate change and the need for environmental stewardship.
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From The Publisher:
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.
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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.
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