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

By Peter Brannen

‘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.’ Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes

Apocalypse, now?

Death by fire, ice, poison gas, suffocation, asteroid. At five moments through history life on Earth was dragged to the very edge of extinction.

Now, armed with revolutionary technology, scientists are uncovering clues about what caused these catastrophes. Deep-diving into past worlds of dragonflies the size of seagulls and fishes with guillotines for mouths, they explore how – against all the odds – life survived and what these ominous chapters can tell us about our future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Release date: Sep 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786070081

Peter Brannen

Peter Brannen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Ends of the World, about the biggest mass extinctions in Earth’s history. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications.

Reviews for The Ends of the World

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[jaredorlando-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As humans, it is hard to not dream of the end of the world. What will it look like? To get examples we look at the past, namely extinctions. Peter Brannen, with intriguing prose and a witty tongue, presents the five main extinctions in a conversational tone. His eyes are wide open and work to benefit the reader. Although the future looks grim, knowledge is power.

[isatyajeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Essential read for the Fall!
Mass extinction and the End.
Really uplifting if you ask me.

Read this astonishing and terrifying description of the end of the dinosaurs:

“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”

These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.

“The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Them when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.”

Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact.

“So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked.

“Yeah, probably.”

As I said, uplifting.

[davidwineberg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Vivid, stunning revelationThe five mass extinctions are such a cliché, we actually have no understanding of what really happened. Peter Brannen has written a remarkable and extremely readable book (his first) to fill in the voids. The result is thought-provoking, gripping, and more than a little worrisome.There were different reasons for the extinctions. We all know about the asteroid hit, because it was only proven in the 1980s. But volcanic eruptions – the likes of which we have fortunately never seen – were the cause of another. As well, the planet keeps tipping in and out of ice ages as it wobbles its way along. When mass extinctions occur, they tend to be really fast – same day in the case of the asteroid hit, very few years in other cases. It’s not a gradual decline; it’s a vanishing. Few species make it to the next era; we start over every time.The mechanics are remarkably similar. The level of carbon dioxide soars, crippling the oceans from doing their job, and they return the favor to the air, crippling everything else. The weather turns unimaginably violent. Everything gets wiped out. It takes the oceans a good hundred thousand years to regain balance, and then a hundred million years for a new world of plants and animals to evolve and populate the barren Earth. In the interim, Earth is Hell.Brannen assembles the wisdom of renowned paleontologists to put the scenes together. There isn’t much disagreement on the mechanics or the major events. As CO2 rises, so do temperatures, and very few beings are capable of functioning in higher temperature bands. They falter and die. For survivors, there would be nothing to live on. Today we are in remarkably pleasant pause between ice ages, in which the continents have very fortuitously aligned north-south. That allows for migration and survival as different climates take hold. It also keeps the oceans pumping. There is a nice, benign balance to the weather, and the horrific volcanic flows that can deposit literally miles thick lava over entire countries, have ceased. Unfortunately, one species has seen fit to take command, and it is working to throw the balance the Earth has achieved into another era of chaos. We are imposing change at a rate “ten times faster” than the worst events in Earth’s history, say the paleontologists. When temperatures rise just one degree, the balance is upset. We are (laughably) attempting to hold it at another two. That will not support life as we know it. “The entire global economy depends on how quickly we can get carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere,” says one. And we’re doing it bigger and better than our volcanoes. As for rising oceans, paleontologists snicker at estimates of .5 to 2m. Every time this happened before, it was more like 15-20m for this kind of temperature rise. Considering all the factors that make a mass extinction, “We are the perfect storm.”One key takeaway is that we cannot learn from the events of the past. Every mass extinction was different. There are so many variables, life forms, different configurations of land and sea, there is no way of predicting numeric outcomes with certainty. Past performance does not guarantee future results. But the overall picture is grim and coming up fast, and Brannen found no paleontologists who say different.The Ends of the World fills in huge gaps, put things in perspective and (cough) clears the air about how the Earth works. It is an extraordinary, valuable insight, colorfully written and also frightening. Maybe nothing is forever, but we’re not helping.David Wineberg

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 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.