And Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

I purchased this from Barnes & Noble the other day. As a former biology student and dinosaur fan who's gotten a little rusty on the finer points of scientific terminology, I was very happy with the writing style. Many scientific works are written solely for the working members of the scientific community. This, however, was a science book written for everyone else to enjoy. The writing style is clear, and simple, but not watered down to the point of being patronizing/insulting the reader's intelligence. The subject matter was very interesting: if you still enjoy natural history museums and have seen all the Jurassic Park films, no matter how awful, for the dinosaurs, you'll love this book. The pop stars of the prehistoric world do not take center stage here, however. They are part of the show, but not the main act. the author delves into the lesser known time periods before the dinosaurs, including the "Boring Billion" era when life was still only at the cellular level. You receive an excellent explanation for the conditions required for fossilization, and the other does a great job of explaining other markers in the fossil records as well as their significance in terms of geological events. What is also interesting is the ending, where the changes occurring in the past are related to what we are doing to the environment now: human activity is on scale with a massive global volcanic event in terms of emissions, apparently. It goes into the topic of human accelerated climate change without being annoyingly preachy about the issue, which is refreshing.

Overall, this is an enjoyable read if you ever liked science, if you enjoy dystopian fiction, or if you just want a little break and some perspective about your place in the universe.

Outstanding. Clearly written, indeed lyric and accessible to non-specialist audience. (I am a professional scientist.)
One of the best popular-science books I've read this year. I do not think I will ever drive through the Connecticut River sandstones or the Permian Basin out in west Texas again without reflecting on The Ends of the World.
This is Brannen's first book. Let us hope we have many more such works to which to look forward.
A minor quibble, the author sometimes refers to papers or books in the text that do not appear in the bibliography, but it's easy enough to track them down with a Google Scholar Search.

This caught my eye because of the pithy book jacket and high praise from other authors whose work I enjoy and respect. I’m a climate scientist trained as a geologist but I’m not often drawn in by non-fiction in those subject areas. This book was a standout exception.

Brannen’s writing is vivid but not verbose and poetic without succumbing to cliché. He has clearly exerted significant effort to research and become fluent in his subject matter, and to weave a story whose characters are not merely scientists but engaging and often humorous personalities. The science is solid, explanations are light-handed, and the prose eloquently captures the same breathtaking awe I felt when first discovering geology’s window into the past.

The book is woven through with entertainingly dry humor and witty commentary that light the reader’s path through the causes and casualties of earth's darkest chapters, but ultimately it finds sincere reason for hope. Brannen provides a compelling and cautiously optimistic perspective on modern climate instability not provided by superficially similar titles like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction. I’m delighted to have stumbled across this one and would recommend it to casual readers and students of Earth history alike.

Loved the way he put mass extinctions into perspective including are current damage to the environment. Covers all 5 mass extinctions quite well with lots of scientific support as well as interesting personal stories. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the fate of the planet. Definitely worth the read.

Very well written recapitulation of the five great extinction events, and a thoughtful discussion of the possibility that we in the middle of the sixth. I highly recommend it for anyone who is at all interested in life on earth. For many years I have subscribed to the "gaia hypothesis". This book makes me question my beliefs... That is a good thing.

I don't normally write reviews before finishing a book, but I was so surprised that a book about the history of extinctions, a book that constantly refers to periods and eras, such as the Ediacaran period, the Cambrian, the Triassic, etc., contains no timeline showing when these periods and eras occurred, no diagram for the reader to orient themselves. I find it hard to understand how one writes a book like this and leaves that out.

Edit 6/27/2017 - It's a very interesting topic, and the book is well-written and kept my interest. It really could use a diagram showing all the eras and periods, though, as well as more pictures. The author interviewed many scientists for the book, but there are passages where it is clear that the author himself is not a scientist, and the book could have used some additional editing by someone who is. For example, statements like the following made me wonder what other statements were also inaccurate:

"When the earth had cooled enough, about 2.6 million years ago, the wobble of the planet began to dominate the climate...When these periodic wobbles tilted the earth away from the sun in the summer, the ice could march across the continents..."

The earth cannot tilt towards or away from the sun; the northern or southern hemisphere can tilt towards or away, but when one hemisphere is tilting away the opposite hemisphere is tilting towards. And a hemisphere cannot tilt "away from the sun in the summer"; the hemisphere tilting away from the sun is by definition in winter. It would be summer in the opposite hemisphere that is tilting towards the sun at that time. Once a year each hemisphere experiences both summer and winter, regardless of changes or wobbles in the tilt of the earth. That's not to say that these changes or wobbles don't affect climate, but it's not because earth, or even one hemisphere, is tilting away from the sun during summer.

Still, three stars may be a bit too low, probably deserves at least three and a half, so I'm rounding up and increasing my rating to four.

A fashionably alarmist book tying global warming to past extinctions. I'm skeptical.

This book is about mass extinctions, which of course have only been possible over the last eighth of the Earth's 4 billion years – since the emergence of life. He writes "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)."

It was the last one, 66 million years ago, that gets the most press. It wiped out the dinosaurs, clearing the way for mammals and birds to emerge as the most advanced forms of animal life. There is general concurrence in the world of paleontologists that it was caused by a large meteor (perhaps 15 km in diameter) striking in what is now the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatán Peninsula. It threw up so much debris that it clouded out the sun, supposedly devastating plant life and depriving the herbaceous dinosaurs of their provender and of course the carnivorous dinosaurs of their prey.

Brannen says that this one was atypical. He writes "the most dependable and frequent administrators of global catastrophe, it turns out, are dramatic changes to the climate and the ocean given by the forces of geology itself." These turn out generally to be volcanic events, huge basalt flows that throw far more carbon into the air than is currently locked up in fossil fuels. Brannen associates the last three great extinctions with basalt flows in Siberia, New York and one India at the same time as the meteor.

Brannen quickly identifies himself as a climate change advocate, writing

"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."

I recently reviewed a much more balanced book on the subject, one which unfortunately will probably not sell nearly as well. It is by a true scientist rather than a science journalist. Among the other conclusions in that book is that there are simply not enough fossil fuels on earth to cause the kind of problem that Brannen foresees. Even if we burn them all, which of course we cannot ever hope to do, it would only quadruple the amount of CO2 in the air and raise temperatures by 5°C. While neither of these would be welcome outcomes, the fact is that CO2 was 20 times higher than today in the age of the trilobites and the earth's temperature has been as much as 9° higher than today. Brannen's outside figure of 18°C from human activity seems absurd. He offers no arithmetic to support the conjecture.

The other factor comes out in Brannen's opening chapter is the fact that geological events, the movement of tectonic plates and the resulting outgassing of CO2 from the Earth's mantle, has been far the most important factor in past warmings. He overrates humanity to assume that we have the power to duplicate these vast inorganic mechanisms.

This is an important book and I have attached my reading notes as comments. I note that despite my original four-star rating, most readers of this review find it "unhelpful," certainly because I find that Brannen consistently exaggerates when it comes to global warming. As a science reporter, and a writer, he is first-rate. When he switches from reportage to advocacy, he gets shrill.

I invite skeptics who don't care to read the book to at least look at the reading notes I have posted as comments and to discuss the situation. One of the most frightening aspects of the global warming situation is the religious tenacity with which people hold to the doctrine and their refusal to examine their beliefs. There is a vast divide between the supposedly educated elites, who are thoroughly convinced, and the "deplorables" who relish Trump's dumping the Paris accords. I would like to take a middle ground and discuss the matter, but zealots on the left do not seem up to it. Please prove me wrong.

Meanwhile, I would recommend that any reader of this book also read Paleoclimate (Princeton Primers in Climate), a more scholarly and balanced work from the Princeton University press. I add later, try as well The Emerald Planet: How plants changed Earth's history (Oxford Landmark Science) and How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants. Please also check out the bibliography in my brief video on global warming. Search on "graham seibert youtube global warming".

Subject matter is interesting, but Brannen’s verbose and overly flowery style is exhausting. Brannen spends a paragraph introducing a scientist to have him deliver one quote. The story should be about the history, not his research to write the story.

Didn't even get past the introduction. Not going to pay someone to give me a hysterical lecture on why we should cripple the world's economy because Leftists found another way to scare people about the planet's climate. I wouldn't trust another word he says in the book, and that doesn't leave any more reason to buy it.

A fashionably alarmist book tying global warming to past extinctions. I'm skeptical.

This book is about mass extinctions, which of course have only been possible over the last eighth of the Earth's 4 billion years – since the emergence of life. He writes "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)."

It was the last one, 66 million years ago, that gets the most press. It wiped out the dinosaurs, clearing the way for mammals and birds to emerge as the most advanced forms of animal life. There is general concurrence in the world of paleontologists that it was caused by a large meteor (perhaps 15 km in diameter) striking in what is now the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatán Peninsula. It threw up so much debris that it clouded out the sun, supposedly devastating plant life and depriving the herbaceous dinosaurs of their provender and of course the carnivorous dinosaurs of their prey.

Brannen says that this one was atypical. He writes "the most dependable and frequent administrators of global catastrophe, it turns out, are dramatic changes to the climate and the ocean given by the forces of geology itself." These turn out generally to be volcanic events, huge basalt flows that throw far more carbon into the air than is currently locked up in fossil fuels. Brannen associates the last three great extinctions with basalt flows in Siberia, New York and one India at the same time as the meteor.

Brannen quickly identifies himself as a climate change advocate, writing

"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."

I recently reviewed a much more balanced book on the subject, one which unfortunately will probably not sell nearly as well. It is by a true scientist rather than a science journalist. Among the other conclusions in that book is that there are simply not enough fossil fuels on earth to cause the kind of problem that Brannen foresees. Even if we burn them all, which of course we cannot ever hope to do, it would only quadruple the amount of CO2 in the air and raise temperatures by 5°C. While neither of these would be welcome outcomes, the fact is that CO2 was 20 times higher than today in the age of the trilobites and the earth's temperature has been as much as 9° higher than today. Brannen's outside figure of 18°C from human activity seems absurd. He offers no arithmetic to support the conjecture.

The other factor comes out in Brannen's opening chapter is the fact that geological events, the movement of tectonic plates and the resulting outgassing of CO2 from the Earth's mantle, has been far the most important factor in past warmings. He overrates humanity to assume that we have the power to duplicate these vast inorganic mechanisms.

This is an important book and I have attached my reading notes as comments. I note that despite my original four-star rating, most readers of this review find it "unhelpful," certainly because I find that Brannen consistently exaggerates when it comes to global warming. As a science reporter, and a writer, he is first-rate. When he switches from reportage to advocacy, he gets shrill.

I invite skeptics who don't care to read the book to at least look at the reading notes I have posted as comments and to discuss the situation. One of the most frightening aspects of the global warming situation is the religious tenacity with which people hold to the doctrine and their refusal to examine their beliefs. There is a vast divide between the supposedly educated elites, who are thoroughly convinced, and the "deplorables" who relish Trump's dumping the Paris accords. I would like to take a middle ground and discuss the matter, but zealots on the left do not seem up to it. Please prove me wrong.

Meanwhile, I would recommend that any reader of this book also read Paleoclimate (Princeton Primers in Climate), a more scholarly and balanced work from the Princeton University press. I add later, try as well The Emerald Planet: How plants changed Earth's history (Oxford Landmark Science) and How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants. Please also check out the bibliography in my brief video on global warming. Search on "graham seibert youtube global warming".

Subject matter is interesting, but Brannen’s verbose and overly flowery style is exhausting. Brannen spends a paragraph introducing a scientist to have him deliver one quote. The story should be about the history, not his research to write the story.

Didn't even get past the introduction. Not going to pay someone to give me a hysterical lecture on why we should cripple the world's economy because Leftists found another way to scare people about the planet's climate. I wouldn't trust another word he says in the book, and that doesn't leave any more reason to buy it.