Peter Brannen (1) (1983–)

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 show more 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. show less

Thoroughly researched yet very readable

Puts ancient events of impossible scale into context and makes them almost comprehensible. As an ironic effect of reading this book, I became comforted about my sense of powerlessness to affect the slide into cataclysm in which our foolish leaders have placed us. Our world has belched and burped and shaken off its riders a few times before, and will probably do so again. Its life is very long, and ours are very short.

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more can so relate), and that personal anger contributes to the value of this piece of journalism as an exercise in witness. show less