The Ends of the World

Posted on 27 June 2017 by Peter Brannen

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 futureOur 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. Free Read eBook The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen – kino-fada.fr What I expected a chronicle of major natural disasters through out known history, What I got a very frightening tale of the 5 major massive mass extinction Earth has gone through since life microbes ever emerged in this rock we call home The narrative of the book explains the causes of the massive extinctions and the effects it had on the survivors if there were any, it then tell us that we might be on the beginning stages of th...Daqueles livros bem escritos que o autor vai dando dicas da conclus o e voc fica todo orgulhoso de ter chego nela antes N o pq esperto, mas porque a linha de pensamento bem clara Uma passada muito boa pelo que cada grande extin o do passado foi, quais evid ncias temos delas, o papel de cada fator haja vulc es e o que controverso O livro vai crescendo na explica o e apontando os paralelos que far com ...Great science writing that reads like a mystery novelI loved this book It has everything I like about great science writing, including clear explanations of the science, personal anecdotes and a sense of humor Even , the way the story is structured, it reads like a mystery novel and among the suspects are volcanoes and asteroids This made the book hard to put down I also found that Peter Brannen seems to have paid a lot of attention to word choice and sentence structure and some of the w Great science writing that reads like a mystery novelI loved this book It has ...covers the five major extinction events in Earths past the ongoing Sixth extinction brought on by Homo Sapiens, and future extinction events Covers The Ordovician, The Devonian The Permian, The Triassic, The Cretaceous, the current...First, this is interesting and entertaining albeit in a perverse way , with a friendly tone but unapologetic specificity, about the five catastrophic massive extinction events and how life on earth emerged again each time, in weird and bizarre forms and in processes that took millions of years That is the point extinctions happen and these are incomprehensibly vast time spans a scale we cannot even fathom While this is ultimately a book about climate change, the grand perspective of the en First, this is interesting and entertaining albeit in a perverse way , with a friendly tone but unapologetic specificity, about the five catastrophic massive extinction events and how life on earth emerged again each time, in weird and bizarre forms and in processes that took millions of years That is the point extinctions happen and these are incomprehensibly vast time spans a scale we cannot even fathom While this is ultimately a book about climate change, the grand perspective of the entire book gave me a way to really grasp how short a time modern humans have been on Earth and how long these things truly take O...Thanks to 25 years of visits to Yellowstone, I have developed a fascination with geology This is one of the best books I ve read on the subject It includes the most detailed descriptions of the eras of Earth I have read in a book, other than a textbook Because Brannen includes his reactions to the things he learns as he visits important sites and interviews scientists, he s able to e...This book is written in a horrible style, and it is poorly organized Good stuff can be found at the paragraph level, but the author is incapable of stringing two good paragraphs together, let alone a whole chapter The worst aspect of the book is the way that Brannen weaves interviews with scientists into his narrative He makes...I came to this book because I was concerned about Climate Change, and hoping for some context And boy, does Peter Brannon give it Each chapter, as he explains the lead up to and then possible causes of the mass extinction, he takes time to show how it is similar or not to what we are doing to the planet today And make no mistake, our actions over the past couple hundred years are immense and long lasting People don t talk much about what happens after 2100 On the scale of a human lifetim I came to this book because I was concerned about Climate Change, and hoping for some context And boy, does Peter Brannon give it Each chapter, as he explains the lead up to and then possible causes of the mass extinction, he takes time to show how it is similar or not to what we are doing to the planet today And make no mistake, our actions over the past couple hundred years are immense and long lasting People don t talk much about what happens after 2100 On the scale of a human lifetime, the affairs of the next century remain hazy and remote fictions But since the scope of this book is geological, the year 2100 is an insignificant mile marker, and the passage of centuries and insignificant blur, unresolvable in the fossil record For tens of thousands of...I read this book so fast I have a warm spot for this type of book and the extinctions while not new to me were really brought to life The author has a gift the keep it both scientific and engaging.A curious comparison to The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History, in my opinion While Elizabeth Kolbert won a Pulitzer writing about humanity inevitably causing the next great extinction, Peter Brannen puts forward a very convincing evidence that renders this theory rather narcissistic There is no doubt that humans will eventually cause permanent change to earth s biosphere, altering our own quality of life and causing numerous species to disappear However, to equal this phenomenon to the p A curious comparison to The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History, in my opinion While Elizabeth Kolbert won a Pulitzer writing about humanity inevitably causing the next great extinction, Peter Brannen puts forward a very convincing evidence that renders this theory rather narcissistic There is no doubt that humans will eventually cause per...

27 June 2017

Peter Brannen