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WORK TITLE: The Ends of the World
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://peterbrannen.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://peterbrannen.com/about/ * https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-124949/peter-brannen
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in MA.
EDUCATION:Boston College, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Vineyard Gazette, Edgartown, MA, reporter; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MA, ocean science journalism fellow, 2011; Duke University, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, journalist-in-residence, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Wired, Atlantic, and New York Times, and to the Slate website.
SIDELIGHTS
Peter Brannen is a journalist whose work is focused on the environment. He holds a degree from Boston College. Brannen began his journalism career at a small paper based in Edgartown, Massachusetts, the Vineyard Gazette. He has gone on to write articles that have appeared in publications, including the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Wired, Atlantic, and New York Times, and on the Slate website. Brannen held a fellowship at the Woods Hold Oceanographic Institution in 2011 and a residency at Duke University’s National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in 2015.
In 2017, Brannen released his first book, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions. In this volume, he analyzes the times in the history of the earth during which life has died off within a relatively short period of time. Brannen suggests that we may be facing another mass extinction, if we do not learn to better care for the planet. In an interview with Jeremy Hobson, an excerpt of which appeared on the WBUR website, Brannen defined the term mass extinction. He stated: “The mass extinctions are really five times where over 75 percent of complex life goes extinct in what geologically is a really quick period of time, so tens of thousands of years at the most, and maybe much quicker than that.” Regarding the way that scientists have examined mass extinctions, Brannen told Hobson: “I think there’s been, at least in the popular imagination, there’s this understanding that mass extinctions are what happens when asteroids hit the planet, and I think there’s been this really cool story over the past few decades from the paleontology and geology community where, they’ve looked for evidence of asteroid impacts at all the mass extinction levels, and except for the one we know about when the dinosaurs go extinct, all the mass extinctions seem to have a lot to do with these giant ocean and climate changes that are driven by carbon dioxide.” Brannen continued: “So, in the first mass extinction a long time ago, it seems like there was an ice age from falling CO2, and then in some of the other mass extinctions, it seems like there’s extreme global warming and ocean acidification, and some of the same stuff we see going on today, driven by carbon dioxide.” In the same interview with Hobson, Brannen discussed the current demise of some of the world’s major coral reefs. He stated: “That’s definitely one of the more alarming things, is that there have really only been these things called ‘reef collapses’ a few times in the entire history of animal life, and, often times they’re associated with these mass extinctions.”
Reviewing The Ends of the World on the PopMatters website, Jordan Penney commented: “Although the bibliography includes articles in journals with titles like Evolutionary Ecology and Biogeosciences, it is not a formal academic work. Brannen’s background as a science writer and journalist is key to its persuasiveness because his viewpoint is that of the intellectually curious general reader, permanently dazzled by the parade of almost mind-warping facts and theories carefully built up by scientists to characterize the planet’s most recent 500 million year history.” Penney added: “In The Ends of the World he variously assumes the roles of academic, journalist, and nature writer. The early pages are replete with amusing moments where Brannen seems to stop and think and wonder out loud about the ground beneath his feet and how it has changed over the last four billion years.” Penney also noted that Brannen “fills the book with conversational adjectives, images, and anecdotes that seem designed to help the reader negotiate the challenge of grasping the staggering depths of geological deep time. (Although a simple flow-chart would have helped too.)”
Christine Baleshta, critic on the Washington Independent Review of Books website, asserted: “The Ends of the World does not read like a science textbook. At times, it reads like a travelogue.” Baleshta concluded: “There is no way to hide that The Ends of the World has gloomy overtones. Readers interested in earth science and the history of lifeforms will appreciate Brannen’s thoughtful and provocative approach, but if you’re gravely disturbed by a crack in one of Antarctica’s largest ice shelves and the U.S.’ withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, you may want to pass. At least for a while.” “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,” remarked a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. A Publishers Weekly writer described the book as a “dense and revealing volume.” Jessie Hunnicutt, critic in the New Yorker, called it a “gripping survey of prehistory’s extinction.” Carl Hays, reviewer in Booklist, predicted: “Everyone from climatologists to general science buffs will enjoy this well-written, closely focused, if somewhat grim look.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Carl Hays, review of The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, p. 45.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of The Ends of the World.
New Yorker, August 21, 2017, Jessie Hunnicutt, “Briefly Noted,” review of The Ends of the World, p. 74.
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of The Ends of the World, p. 80.
ONLINE
HarperCollins Website, https://www.harpercollins.com/ (January 10, 2018), author profile.
Peter Brannen Website, http://peterbrannen.com/ (January 10, 2018).
PopMatters, https://www.popmatters.com (August 23, 2017), Jordan Penney, review of The Ends of the World.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (July 7, 2017), Christine Baleshta, review of The Ends of the World.
WBUR Online, https://www.wbur.org/ (August 15, 2017), Jeremy Hobson, author interview.
Peter Brannen
Biography
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.
ABOUT
Standing in front of a 310 million year-old jungle from the Carboniferous period at the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in Nova Scotia
Standing in front of a 310 million year-old jungle from the Carboniferous period at the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in Nova Scotia
Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Wired, Aeon, The Boston Globe, Slate and The Guardian among other publications. His book, The Ends of the World, about the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history, will be published in June by Ecco.
Peter was a 2015 journalist-in-residence at Duke University's National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and a 2011 Ocean Science Journalism Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, MA. Peter got his start as a reporter for the Vineyard Gazette in Edgartown, MA.
Peter is particularly interested in ocean science, deep time, astrobiology, the carbon cycle and the Boston Celtics.
Peter was born and raised outside of Boston and graduated from Boston College. Peter is a placental mammal.
QUOTED: "I think there's been, at least in the popular imagination, there's this understanding that mass extinctions are what happens when asteroids hit the planet, and I think there's been this really cool story over the past few decades from the paleontology and geology community where, they've looked for evidence of asteroid impacts at all the mass extinction levels, and except for the one we know about when the dinosaurs go extinct, all the mass extinctions seem to have a lot to do with these giant ocean and climate changes that are driven by carbon dioxide."
"So, in the first mass extinction a long time ago, it seems like there was an ice age from falling CO2, and then in some of the other mass extinctions, it seems like there's extreme global warming and ocean acidification, and some of the same stuff we see going on today, driven by carbon dioxide."
"The mass extinctions are really five times where over 75 percent of complex life goes extinct in what geologically is a really quick period of time, so tens of thousands of years at the most, and maybe much quicker than that."
"That's definitely one of the more alarming things, is that there have really only been these things called 'reef collapses' a few times in the entire history of animal life, and, often times they're associated with these mass extinctions."
There have been five mass extinction events in the history of the Earth. In his book "The Ends of the World," author Peter Brannen looks at what happened to cause these crises — from massive volcanic eruptions to asteroids — and tries to determine what our future might bring.
Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson talks with Brannen (@PeterBrannen1) about how climate change and increasing levels of carbon dioxide could lead to another mass extinction, and what we can do to prevent it.
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Scroll down to read an excerpt from "The Ends of the World"
Interview Highlights
On how climate change relates to mass extinctions
"I think there's been, at least in the popular imagination, there's this understanding that mass extinctions are what happens when asteroids hit the planet, and I think there's been this really cool story over the past few decades from the paleontology and geology community where, they've looked for evidence of asteroid impacts at all the mass extinction levels, and except for the one we know about when the dinosaurs go extinct, all the mass extinctions seem to have a lot to do with these giant ocean and climate changes that are driven by carbon dioxide. So, in the first mass extinction a long time ago, it seems like there was an ice age from falling CO2, and then in some of the other mass extinctions, it seems like there's extreme global warming and ocean acidification, and some of the same stuff we see going on today, driven by carbon dioxide."
On what a mass extinction is
"The mass extinctions are really five times where over 75 percent of complex life goes extinct in what geologically is a really quick period of time, so tens of thousands of years at the most, and maybe much quicker than that."
On reef collapse as a warning sign of mass extinction
"So, that's definitely one of the more alarming things, is that there have really only been these things called 'reef collapses' a few times in the entire history of animal life, and, often times they're associated with these mass extinctions. There's this time, the end-Triassic mass extinction, where 75 percent of life went extinct, and coral reefs had this amazing sort of blossoming in the end of the Triassic. They make up a lot of the Austrian Alps, if you hike up those mountains you can kind of see they're just made of coral reefs. And at the end of the Triassic, coral reefs basically disappear completely for millions of years. Too much CO2, when it reacts with sea water, it makes the water more acidic, it makes it warmer, and it makes it really difficult for things like coral reefs to stick around. And so when we plot out what humans are doing for the next few decades, coral reefs are really gonna have a hard time sticking around in the second half of this century. Given that that's only happened a few times in Earth's history, that's really pretty amazing that humans have that influence."
"The mass extinctions are really five times where over 75 percent of complex life goes extinct in what geologically is a really quick period of time, so tens of thousands of years at the most, and maybe much quicker than that." Peter Brannen
On whether mass extinctions happen quickly, or take hundreds, thousands or millions of years
"I think this is kind of an urgent question to address, because it's hard to sort of see with high resolution in the fossil record things that happened hundreds of millions of years ago. So, maybe these are good analogs for the near future, or maybe these things really do take thousands of years. I think that's something we're trying to figure out. Some people will tell you that the dinosaurs were wiped out in 15 minutes in a really bad day, and other people would say that it was sort of this more prolonged thing, where ecosystems were stressed by a lot of things, and the asteroid, and these crazy volcanoes in India — it might have been a more prolonged episode that lasted thousands of years, so I think we need to get a better handle of how quickly these things can happen."
On whether humans have the capacity to fix the current problems
"Certainly we need to transform our energy system in the next decade or two. There's an incredible challenge that there's reason to be skeptical whether humans can do that, but there's other steps we can take. We know that if you just let life sort of have a chance to bounce back, it's incredibly resilient. A couple decades ago, you weren't supposed to eat swordfish, because we almost fished it to extinction, and now we've let swordfish rebound, and their stocks are healthy again, and there is a movement towards setting aside more of nature for protected areas, [former President] George W. Bush notably set aside the biggest marine protected area at the time. It shouldn't be a political issue, it hasn't always been a political issue, and I think it's a shame that environmentalism and stewardship of the planet has become one, and hopefully we can move away from that."
On if we can avoid another mass extinction
"I think we can, unless we just stick our head in the sand and do things the same way we've been doing it for the last 50 to 100 years, I think we can. In my better moods, I'm hopeful about humanity's ability to learn and adapt to the changing world around them."
Book Excerpt: 'The Ends Of The World'
By Peter Brannen
Introduction
Animal life has been all but destroyed in sudden, planetwide exterminations five times in Earth’s history. These are the so-called Big Five mass extinctions, commonly defined as any event in which more than half of the earth’s species go extinct in fewer than a million years or so. We now know that many of these mass extinctions seem to have happened much more quickly. Thanks to fine-scale geochronology, we know that some of the most extreme die-offs in earth history lasted only a few thousand years, at the very most, and may have been much quicker. A more qualitative way to describe something like this is Armageddon.
The most famous member of this gloomy fraternity is the End-Cretaceous mass extinction, which notably took out the (nonbird) dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the End-Cretaceous is only the most recent mass extinction in the history of life. The volcanic doomsday whose stony embers I saw exposed in the cliffs next to Manhattan— a disaster that brought down an alternate universe of distant crocodile relatives and global coral reef systems— struck 135 million years before the death of the dinosaurs. This disaster and the three other major mass extinctions that preceded it are invisible, for the most part, in the public imagination, long overshadowed by the downfall of T. rex. This isn’t entirely without reason. For one thing, dinosaurs are the most charismatic characters in the fossil record, celebrities of earth history that paleontologists who work on earlier, more neglected periods scoff at as preening oversized monsters. As such, dinosaurs hog most of the popular press spared for paleontology. In addition, the dinosaurs were wiped out in spectacular fashion, with their final moments punctuated by the impact of a 6-mile-long asteroid in Mexico.
But if it was a space rock that did in the dinosaurs, it seems to have been a unique disaster. Some astronomers outside the field push the idea that periodic asteroid strikes caused each of the planet’s other four mass extinctions, but this hypothesis has virtually no support in the fossil record. In the past three decades, geologists have scoured the fossil record looking for evidence of devastating asteroid impacts at those mass extinctions, and have come up empty. The most dependable and frequent administrators of global catastrophe, it turns out, are dramatic changes to the climate and the ocean, driven by the forces of geology itself. The three biggest mass extinctions in the past 300 million years are all associated with giant floods of lava on a continental scale— the sorts of eruptions that beggar the imagination. Life on earth is resilient, but not infinitely so: the same volcanoes that are capable of turning whole continents inside out can also produce climatic and oceanic chaos worthy of the apocalypse. In these rare eruptive cataclysms the atmosphere becomes supercharged with volcanic carbon dioxide, and during the worst mass extinction of all time, the planet was rendered a hellish, rotting sepulcher, with hot, acidifying oceans starved of oxygen.
But in other earlier mass extinctions, it might have been neither volcanoes nor asteroids at fault. Instead, some geologists say that plate tectonics, and perhaps even biology itself, conspired to suck up CO2 and poison the oceans. While continental-scale volcanism sends CO2 soaring, in these earlier, somewhat more mysterious extinctions, carbon dioxide might have instead plummeted, imprisoning the earth in an icy crypt. Rather than spectacular collisions with other heavenly bodies, it has been these internal shocks to the earth system that have most frequently knocked the planet off course. Much of the planet’s misfortune, it seems, is homegrown.
Luckily, these uber-catastrophes are comfortingly rare, having struck only five times in the more than half a billion years since complex life emerged (occurring, roughly, 445, 374, 252, 201, and 66 million years ago). But it’s a history that has frightening echoes in our own world— which is undergoing changes not seen for tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions, of years. “[It’s] pretty clear that times of high carbon dioxide— and especially times when carbon dioxide levels rapidly rose— coincided with the mass extinctions,” writes University of Washington paleontologist and End- Permian mass extinction expert Peter Ward. “Here is the driver of extinction.”
As civilization is busy demonstrating, supervolcanoes aren’t the only way to get lots of carbon buried in the rocks out into the atmosphere in a hurry. Today humanity busies itself by digging up hundreds of millions of years of carbon buried by ancient life and ignites it all at once at the surface, in pistons and power plants— the vast, diffuse metabolism of modern civilization. If we see this task to completion and burn it all— supercharging the atmosphere with carbon like an artificial supervolcano— it will indeed get very hot, as it has before. The hottest heat waves experienced today will become the average, while future heat waves will push many parts of the world into uncharted territory, taking on a new menace that will surpass the hard limits of human physiology.
If this comes to pass, the planet will return to a condition that, though utterly alien to us, has made many appearances in the fossil record. But warm times aren’t necessarily a bad thing. The dinosaur- haunted Cretaceous was significantly richer in atmospheric CO2, and that period was consequently much warmer than today. But when climate change or ocean chemistry changes have been sudden, the result has been devastating for life. In the worst of times, the earth has been all but ruined by these climate paroxysms as lethally hot continental interiors, acidifying, anoxic oceans, and mass death swept over the planet.
This is the revelation of geology in recent years that presents the most worrying prospect for modern society. The five worst episodes in earth history have all been associated with violent changes to the planet’s carbon cycle. Over time, this fundamental element moves back and forth between the reservoirs of biology and geology: volcanic carbon dioxide in the air is captured by carbon- based life in the sea, which dies and becomes carbonate limestone on the seafloor. When that limestone is thrust down into the earth, it’s cooked and the carbon dioxide is spit out by volcanoes into the air once more. And on and on. This is why it’s a cycle. But events like sudden, extraordinarily huge injections of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and oceans can short-circuit this chemistry of life. This prospect is one reason why past mass extinctions have become such a vogue topic of late in the research community. Most of the scientists I spoke with over the course of reporting this book were interested in the planet’s history of near-death experiences, not just to answer an academic question, but also to learn, by studying the past, how the planet responds to exactly the sorts of shocks we’re currently inflicting on it.
This ongoing conversation in the research community is strikingly at odds with the one taking place in the broader culture. Today much of the discussion about carbon dioxide’s role in driving climate change makes it seem as though the link exists only in theory, or in computer models. But our current experiment— quickly injecting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere— has in fact been run many times before in the geological past, and it never ends well. In addition to the unanimous and terrifying projections of climate models, we also have a case history of carbon dioxide– driven climate change in the planet’s geologic past that we would be well advised to consult. These events can be instructive, even diagnostic, for our modern crises, like the patient who presents to his doctor with chest pains after a history of heart attacks.
But there’s a risk of stretching the analogy too far: Earth has been many different planets over its lifetime, and though in some salient and worrying ways our modern planet and its future prospects echo some of the most frightening chapters in its history, in many other ways our modern biocrises represent a one-off— a unique disruption in the history of life. And thankfully, we still have time. Though we’ve proven to be a destructive species, we have not produced anything even close to the levels of wanton destruction and carnage seen in previous planetary cataclysms. These are absolute worst-case scenarios. The epitaph for humanity does not yet have to include the tragic indictment of having engineered the sixth major mass extinction in earth history. In a world sometimes short on it, this is good news.
Excerpted From THE ENDS OF THE WORLD by Peter Brannen. Copyright ©2017 Peter Brannen. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
This segment aired on August 15, 2017.
QUOTED: "gripping survey of prehistory's extinction."
Briefly Noted
Jessie Hunnicutt
The New Yorker. 93.24 (Aug. 21, 2017): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
[...]
The Ends of the World, by Peter Brannen (Ecco). This gripping survey of prehistory's extinction events (the death of the dinosaurs was only the most recent) is motivated by the fear that we are on the brink of another such cataclysm. Brannen excels at evoking lost worlds, from the global coral reefs of the Devonian period to the Pangaean crocodilians of the late Triassic-both of which were, in part, snuffed out by shifting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the ensuing climate change. Today, the ever-increasing demand for dirty energy threatens not only human civilization but, in the long run, all life on earth. As Brannen demonstrates, fossils are useful for more than just fuel: they can teach us how not to die.
QUOTED: "Everyone from climatologists to general science buffs will enjoy this well-written, closely focused, if somewhat grim look."
The Ends of the World: Volcanic
Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest
to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
Carl Hays
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p45+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past
Mass Extinctions. By Peter Brannen. June 2017.320p. Ecco, $27.99 (9780062364807). 576.8.
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 sciencejournalist
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 pale-on-to-logical history.--Carl Hays
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hays, Carl. "The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand
Earth's Past Mass Extinctions." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 45+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034996/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d51d49ee.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495034996
QUOTED: "dense and revealing volume."
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514134260389 2/3
The Ends of the World: Volcanic
Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest
to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
Publishers Weekly.
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p80.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past
Mass Extinctions
Peter Brannen. Ecco, $27.99 (320p) ISBN 9780-06-236480-7
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 fossilcollecting
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)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past
Mass Extinctions." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 80. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250855/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=195a3a4b.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250855
QUOTED: "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."
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514134260389 3/3
Brannen, Peter: THE ENDS OF THE
WORLD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Brannen, Peter THE ENDS OF THE WORLD Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 6, 13 ISBN:
978-0-06-236480-7
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 planetwide
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Brannen, Peter: THE ENDS OF THE WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A489268398/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8babc01e.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A489268398
QUOTED: "The Ends of the World does not read like a science textbook. At times, it reads like a travelogue."
"There is no way to hide that The Ends of the World has gloomy overtones. Readers interested in earth science and the history of lifeforms will appreciate Brannen’s thoughtful and provocative approach, but if you’re gravely disturbed by a crack in one of Antarctica’s largest ice shelves and the U.S.’ withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, you may want to pass. At least for a while."
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
By Peter Brannen Ecco 336 pp.
Reviewed by Christine Baleshta
July 7, 2017
A science journalist offers up a passionately researched book on a gloomy topic, but leaves space for hope.
Do we really need another book about mass extinction?
Global warming and climate change have been topics in the news for decades. After The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert and Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilson, one might wonder what new lessons there are to learn.
Peter Brannen is convinced there is still more to the story. In The Ends of the World, the award-winning science journalist explores the five major mass extinctions, searching for the causes behind each one and how they relate to our environment today.
“In researching these ancient disasters, I expected to find a story as neat and tidy as the one about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. What I found instead was a frontier of discovery with much left to be unearthed, and a story still largely obscured by the fog of deep time.”
The author walks us through the End-Ordovician to the End-Cretaceous, describing flora and fauna and debating catastrophic events which contributed to the end of each. Through interviews with prominent geologists and paleontologists like Columbia University’s Paul Olsen, the University of Buffalo’s Charles Mitchell, and Princeton’s Lauren Sallan, and visits to fossil sites from Quebec to Cincinnati, the author carefully considers the effects of the carbon-silicate cycle, volcanic eruptions, asteroids, and the evolution of land plants. The book recounts over and over the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions while illustrating that it’s not just one thing that brings about mass extinctions.
Although Brannen’s initial focus is on past apocalyptic events, he does not dismiss the contention that we are presently in the midst of a sixth extinction. He has a keen interest in astrobiology, the study of life in the universe which investigates how life originates and evolves, and explores the environmental range necessary for life to continue. By studying the Big Five, Brannen attempts to discover how past events connect to the environmental changes we witness today.
The Ends of the World does not read like a science textbook. At times, it reads like a travelogue as Brannen imagines the lava flow that covered India and continents breaking apart and piecing back together like a puzzle. The writing has a certain lightness, a “Let’s see what we can find” about it. It is, after all, a “quest,” and Brannen’s childhood fascination with dinosaurs is clearly evident.
It is this enthusiasm for all creatures and his passionate curiosity that diminishes the book’s sobering tone. With pages filled with mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and the charismatic T. rex, it felt like reading Jurassic Park. Still, readers with little or no background in geology or paleontology might get lost in the maze of creatures and chronology of tectonic events — I did.
Photos and vivid illustrations of dinosaurs and fossils at the center of the book are both helpful and welcome. Who wouldn’t want to see what Dunkleosteus looked like, the killer placoderm “the length of a Winnebago”? Brannen’s colorful descriptions of visits to small-town museums and junkyard fossil sites also help lift us out of mass-destruction mode.
The final chapters of the book center on the End-Pleistocene, when humans enter the scene. The author quotes George Perkins Marsh, considered by some to be America’s first environmentalist: “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”
Here lies both a warning and a prediction of how the planet might look in the next hundred years.
Still, the author remains open to possibilities and is hopeful for humanity’s future on Earth and the galaxies beyond, a suggestion Trekkies will find exciting. If there is some comfort to be found, Brannen makes the point that geologic time is, well, a long, long time. So, if Earth is on the downswing, it’s going to take a while.
“Hundreds of millions of years still stretch before us on this planet, and the fact that we’ve survived all five major mass extinctions — that the earth has managed to support life for billions of years without being destroyed — might be an almost miraculous circumstance.”
The final pages of The Ends of the World take a surprisingly poignant turn. “I wrote a book about the mortality of the planet at the same time that someone I deeply loved died. My mom. This loss colored for me what was becoming a more and more gloomy evaluation of the prospects for humanity.”
There is no way to hide that The Ends of the World has gloomy overtones. Readers interested in earth science and the history of lifeforms will appreciate Brannen’s thoughtful and provocative approach, but if you’re gravely disturbed by a crack in one of Antarctica’s largest ice shelves and the U.S.’ withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, you may want to pass. At least for a while.
Christine Baleshta is a writer living in Austin, Texas, who focuses on wildlife and the natural world. Find her on the Internet at www.christinebaleshta.com.
QUOTED: "although the bibliography includes articles in journals with titles like Evolutionary Ecology and Biogeosciences, it is not a formal academic work. Brannen's background as a science writer and journalist is key to its persuasiveness because his viewpoint is that of the intellectually curious general reader, permanently dazzled by the parade of almost mind-warping facts and theories carefully built up by scientists to characterize the planet's most recent 500 million year history."
"In The Ends of the World he variously assumes the roles of academic, journalist, and nature writer. The early pages are replete with amusing moments where Brannen seems to stop and think and wonder out loud about the ground beneath his feet and how it has changed over the last four billion years."
"fills the book with conversational adjectives, images, and anecdotes that seem designed to help the reader negotiate the challenge of grasping the staggering depths of geological deep time. (Although a simple flow-chart would have helped too.)"
Everything Was Fine Until It Wasn't: 'The Ends of the World'
JORDAN PENNEY 23. Aug, 2017.
CONNECTING DEEP TIME WITH HUMAN TIME AND THE PICTURESQUE WITH THE DISASTROUS, THE ENDS OF THE WORLD SHOWS THAT THERE MAY BE INESCAPABLE CONSEQUENCES FOR OUR HISTORY AND HABIT OF IMPROVIDENT BEHAVIOR.
THE ENDS OF THE WORLD: VOLCANIC APOCALYPSES, LETHAL OCEANS, AND OUR QUEST TO UNDERSTAND EARTH'S PAST MASS EXTINCTIONS
Publisher: Ecco
Length: 322 pages
Author: Peter Brannen
Format: Hardcover
PUBLICATION DATE: 2017-06
AMAZON
"A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque," Lord Macaulay wrote in an influential essay in the Edinburgh Review in 1828. Macaulay was intervening in a debate on methods for the writing of history, praising Thucydides for his practice of conjoining evidence with artful literary adornment and criticizing Herodotus for his practice of interweaving fact and fiction.
The distinction may seem obvious. But if the historical imagination so described by Macaulay is to be deployed rightly by the historian and thus provoked in the mind of the reader, at least two conditions need meeting. The writer must, first, exhibit control over the evidence, and second, possess some skill in shaping the evidence into a narrative that is understood and in some sense felt by the reader.
Brannen meets both conditions in The Ends of the World. The book foregrounds a history of the earth's five mass extinctions in broad research in geology and paleontology, and although the bibliography includes articles in journals with titles like Evolutionary Ecology and Biogeosciences, it is not a formal academic work. Brannen's background as a science writer and journalist is key to its persuasiveness because his viewpoint is that of the intellectually curious general reader, permanently dazzled by the parade of almost mind-warping facts and theories carefully built up by scientists to characterize the planet's most recent 500 million year history.
Brannen's approach as a journalist matters because geology has a public relations problem. Despite the deep presence of geology in the history and practice of the physical sciences and its conspicuousness in our everyday lives -- its subject matter, after all, is under our feet, visible and tangible -- historically it has lacked emissaries into the popular imagination. Certainly, the subject has its share of practitioners and proponents producing well-regarded work for targets outside academia -- John McPhee, Simon Winchester, and Peter Ward come to mind -- but take astronomy as a case study in contrasts. A quick Youtube search on astrophysics will turn up reams of content on the mass of a photon, the moons of Saturn, or the rotation of pulsars. There will be comparatively fewer videos explaining, for example, the principles and implications of stratigraphy and petrology. It must be said that Carl Sagan, Neil Degrasse-Tyson, and Janna Levin, to name only a few, are part of a special tradition of communicators with an eye for guiding metaphors and a capacity for conveying the wonders of astronomy.
In other words, the affecting and the picturesque are among the tools at their disposal as public intellectuals. So too are they available to Brannen and in The Ends of the World he variously assumes the roles of academic, journalist, and nature writer. The early pages are replete with amusing moments where Brannen seems to stop and think and wonder out loud about the ground beneath his feet and how it has changed over the last four billion years. "Rising out of the deserts of West Texas are the Guadalupe Mountains," he writes, "a haunted monument built almost entirely from ancient sea animals in the full bloom of life before the single worst chapter in the planet's history." He describes columns of basalt and cliffs, "monuments to an ancient apocalypse", made of magma that at one time "smothered the planet from Nova Scotia to Brazil."
The wreckage of the five extinctions chronicled in the book are still with us and Brannen appreciates that it strains the imagination to really grasp the magnitude of tectonic changes, climate shifts, and the extent of biodiversity that characterizes the whole of the earth's history. So he assumes the role of journalist and popular science writer and fills the book with conversational adjectives, images, and anecdotes that seem designed to help the reader negotiate the challenge of grasping the staggering depths of geological deep time. (Although a simple flow-chart would have helped too. I returned again and again to a dashed off remark in an early footnote to help keep timelines straight in my head.)
The fern-like "pseudo-creatures" of the Ediacaran period 540 million years ago, for example, a weird attempt at life still entombed in the fossil record in southeast Newfoundland, are described in a good turn of phrase as resembling "graffiti left by alien". We are invited to pause to consider facts that might be well known but maybe not well appreciated in geological context, e.g., that while the earth may be teeming with life now, for its first 4,000 million years it was effectively barren. Or that the humble trilobyte wandered the planet for 300 million years, putting the modest 200,000 year run of homo sapiens in proper deep-time perspective. Or that the End-Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago was marked, first, by the largest asteroid impact known to have hit the planet in 500 million years, and second, by one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the planet's history covering present-day India in lava more than two miles deep. Disorienting, vast beyond comprehension, "marooned in time, between incomprehensible eternities" are among words and phrases Brannen deploys to characterize and illuminate this strangeness at the heart of geology.
But The Ends of the World is also about cultivating some basic science literacy on the subject. The main scientific thread Brannen carries throughout the book is around the carbon cycle, human destructiveness, and how to square such phenomena and behavior with the structures of long-term climate change. It is true that we are currently living in the midst of a window of relative warmth and stability called an interglacial period, a brief respite caused by a tilt in the Earth's orbit in and out of sunlight at 10,000 year intervals. But the crux of the book's science content consists of the small, large, and cumulative ways human beings have transformed the chemistry of oceans and atmosphere and the probable short and long-term consequences of our overwhelmingly poor stewardship of the environment.
It turns out that all five of the planet's mass extinction events (at approximately 445, 374, 252, 201, and 66 million years ago) have, in various ways, been associated with disruptions to the earth's carbon cycle. This, as one of Brannen's geologists remarks, is the driver of extinction. Normally the carbon cycle -- the process whereby excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is converted to rock and buried in the ocean -- acts as a kind of thermostat for regulating the Earth's climate. But the process takes place over the course of hundreds of thousands of years and the thermostat is vulnerable to breaking if the pace at which carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere suddenly increases. In terms of absolute volume, the amount of fossil fuels burned by human beings since the 18th century cannot compare to, for example, the 48,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide produced by the volcanic eruptions of the Siberian traps at end of Permian era. But at 40 gigatons per year, human beings are emitting carbon dioxide at the fastest pace of any point within the last 300 million years.
All things being equal, as carbon dioxide goes, so goes the climate. This has been an uncontroversial tenet of geoscience for more than a century and some consequences of short-circuiting the carbon cycle in such a manner are more well known in the popular imagination than others. One key goal of the 2015 Paris Accord was to implement a plan to prevent the planet from warming by two degrees by 2100. For perspective, if humanity was to burn through its entire reserves of fossil fuels it would warm the planet by as much as 18 degrees and elevate sea levels by hundreds of feet. Even one quarter of these worst-case figures would, in Brannen's words, "create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved, or on which civilization has been built."
Another relatively lesser known consequence is the acidification of the oceans and Brannen is strong on this point. Alongside rising temperatures and sea levels, a sharp increase in carbon dioxide has the effect of reacting with seawater in such a way that lowers the pH balance in the ocean, making it more acidic and reducing the amount of carbonate that corals, plankton, creatures with shells, and other forms of marine life need to survive and flourish. To quote Brannen: "The terrifying reality of ocean acidification has only fully dawned on the scientific community in the last decade or so. Even more so than global warming, ocean acidification is what people who understand the fossil record, and who think about the future of the oceans, are most distressed by." At this point we seem to have licence to use such an unambiguous term as "kill mechanism".
Human beings have never lived in harmony with nature -- not before the Industrial Revolution, not before European colonialization, not in the tens of thousands of years before that, not ever. The history of human expansion into Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago is a record of a single species equipped with consciousness, culture, and intelligence to dominate its environment and produce wave after of wave of extinction. The record of destruction that has followed human beings since their emergence is, in his words, "one of the stark and unsettling discoveries of science."
Brannen and his authorities believe that our predations have not yet brought us to the brink of a sixth mass extinction. But by connecting deep time with human time, the picturesque with the disastrous, and the micro with the macro, The Ends of the World shows that there may yet be inescapable consequences for our history and habit of improvident behavior.
Rating: 8/10