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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
With projections about the disastrous consequences of climate change becoming more dire with every new geological survey, some scientists have begun sounding a warning that Earth may be facing a sixth extinction event every bit as final as the demise of the dinosaurs. This time, of course, the animal species they're referring to is humankind. To put this sobering prospect into context, award-winning science-journalist Brannen provides a much-needed overview here of those previous five extinctions, both as a cautionary lesson and a hopeful demonstration of how life on Earth keeps rebounding from destruction. Using an engaging travelogue format, Brannen introduces each era's major species in successive chapters, beginning at 445 and ending at 66 million years ago, covering the End Ordovician (graptolites), Late Devonian (trilobites), End Permian (tabulate coral), End Triassic (conodonts), and End Cretaceous (dinosaurs). Brannen doesn't hesitate to underscore the unsettling common factor in these extinction events: too much atmospheric carbon dioxide. Everyone from climatologists to general science buffs will enjoy this well-written, closely focused, if somewhat grim look at our planet's paleontological history.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NO APPARENT DISTRESS: A Doctor's Comingof-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine, by Rachel Pearson. (Norton, $16.95.) On the heels of Hurricane Ike, in 2008, Pearson headed to Galveston, Tex., for medical school, where she witnessed firsthand how health care consistently fails lower-income patients. A huge segment of society has been cast aside by medical providers, she writes, and not by accident. THE DESTROYERS, by Christopher Bollen. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) In this crisp, taut thriller centered on a Greek island, the heir to a construction fortune goes missing. Bollen pairs all the pleasures of a literary thriller (dazzling coves, a string of murders, champagne on yachts) with uneasy moral questions. Our reviewer, Thad Ziólkowski, praised the novel's "seductive mood of longing mixed with regret." THE ENDS OF THE WORLD: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.) The earth has undergone five mass extinctions in the history of the planet, and Brannen, a science journalist, explains them all in gruesome detail. A glimmer of bright news? The extinction rate we've seen in the past 400 years doesn't come close to rivaling the Big Five - at least not yet. THE DARK NET, by Benjamin Percy. (Mariner, $14.99.) A gang of misfits in Portland, Ore. - a disgruntled journalist, his blind niece, a former child evangelist, a homeless man and others - must band together against satanic online groups from the darkest corners of the internet. Percy's thrilling story delivers on the setup's promise for action and horror: As our reviewer, Terrence Rafferty, put it, "It's one of the best Stephen King novels not written by the master himself." THE BOY WHO LOVED TOO MUCH: A True Story of Pathological Friendliness, by Jennifer Latson. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) Roughly one in 10,000 people have Williams syndrome, a genetic condition that wipes out the skepticism and social caution that seem hard-wired into most other humans. Latson follows one, 12year-old Eli, and his mother's attempts to shield him from the disease's most wrenching side effects. STAY WITH ME, by Ayobami Adebayo. (Vintage, $16.) It's 1980s Nigeria, and the childless marriage between Yejide and her husband, Akin, is unraveling, as his secrets and betrayals come to light. This heartbreaking debut novel considers questions of fidelity and commitment; the tensions between tradition and modernity; and the break between society's expectations and a woman's own.
Choice Review
As the level of carbon dioxide continues to rise, scientists and lay people wonder what transformations will take place on Earth as outcomes of this increase. Renowned science journalist Brannen suggests that we examine the past to predict the future. In this book, he describes possible extinction causes, such as massive lava eruptions, asteroids striking the Earth, the advent of land vegetation, and the arrival of human species to new locations. He interweaves possible features occurring on today's Earth, most of which are related to the upsurge in carbon dioxide and the outcomes that such increases have had on past extinctions. There are no in-text references, but there are chapter bibliographies where the reader will easily find sources. Much of the information derives from meetings and field work with the folks who have researched the science. The illustrations consist of four double-sided pages with colored photos associated with ideas mentioned in the text. Two related works among the plethora of books dealing with geologic extinctions are Norman MacLeod's The Great Extinctions (CH, May'14, 51-5034) and Peter D. Ward's Under a Green Sky (CH, Oct'07, 45-0891). Brannen's book is an interesting read and will be of value to scientists and non-scientists alike. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Larry Thomas Spencer, Plymouth State University
Kirkus Review
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 systemhit 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Beginnings | p. 13 |
| 2 The End-Ordovician Mass Extinction | p. 23 |
| 3 The Late Devonian Mass Extinction | p. 67 |
| 4 The End-Permian Mass Extinction | p. 103 |
| 5 The End-Triassic Mass Extinction | p. 141 |
| 6 The End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction | p. 173 |
| 7 The End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction | p. 219 |
| 8 The Near Future | p. 249 |
| 9 The Last Extinction | p. 277 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 291 |
| Bibliography | p. 293 |
| Index | p. 309 |