num_pages: 256
description: 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 Earths 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 recordwhich is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fishand 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 Earths 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.
language: None
title: The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses
publisher: Ecco