![]() ![]() He has set himself the ambitious target to give an overview of what we currently know of the Big Five mass extinctions (end-Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous respectively) by interviewing scores of scientists. The Ends of the World is science journalist Peter Brannen’s first foray into book writing. If the concept of extinction didn’t really exist until Cuvier put it forward in 1796, the idea of sudden mass extinctions didn’t really catch on until Walter Alvarez and his team published their idea of death by comet in 1980 (Elizabeth Kolbert gives an excellent overview of the intellectual history in The Sixth Extinction). ![]() But the geological record reveals there are episodes when species diversity, again geologically speaking, suddenly plunges, and a significant proportion of life forms disappear around the globe. ![]() ![]() You may have come across the term “background extinction rates”. “ The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions”, written by Peter Brannen, published in Europe by Oneworld Publications in September 2017 (hardback, 330 pages)Įxtinction and speciation happen, geologically speaking, continuously. ![]()
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