One strength of the book is that it’s informed by the dozens of interviews Brannen conducted with scientists in the course of his research. But if the oceans go stagnant, expect things to get lethally stinky.īrannen is a journalist who is passionate about finding out the whole scientific story and explaining it in measured, accessible language. Earth’s oceans play a huge role too: If continental shelf environments remain well-oxygenated, all is well. And isolated continental fragments reduce escape routes, which can also cause the demise of species.
The formation of supercontinents facilitates competitive extinctions by mixing species whose ecological niches overlap. For example, Brannen looks at the role plate tectonics plays in extinction. These were hard times on the third rock from the sun, sometimes due to extreme cold or heat, and sometimes due to more complex causes. The 50-percent criterion is arbitrary, but it’s pretty severe - more so than what we’ve seen so far in the current episode of environmental diminution. There have been five “big” mass extinctions in geologic history - times when at least half of the species on the planet died out permanently in a relatively short span of time. A great way to satisfy that interest is with “ The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions” by Peter Brannen, a well-paced, well-sourced and well-written guide to mass extinctions. How organisms came to perish in these events should interest all conscious, intelligent forms of multicellular life lucky enough to still be alive - you and I included.
Our planet has been through some harrowing episodes, particularly in the form of mass extinctions since the advent of multicellular life. "The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions," by Peter Brannen, Ecco/Harper-Collins, 2017, ISBN 9780062364807 paperback published 2018, ISBN 9780062364814
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