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The Ends of the World audiobook

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The Ends of the World Audiobook Summary

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 future.

Our 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.

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The Ends of the World Audiobook Narrator

Adam Verner is the narrator of The Ends of the World audiobook that was written by Peter Brannen

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Washington Post, Slate, Boston Globe, Aeon, and others. A graduate of Boston College, he was a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the Duke University National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and a 2011 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellow. This is his first book.

About the Author(s) of The Ends of the World

Peter Brannen is the author of The Ends of the World

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The Ends of the World Full Details

Narrator Adam Verner
Length 9 hours 57 minutes
Author Peter Brannen
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date June 13, 2017
ISBN 9780062676863

Subjects

The publisher of the The Ends of the World is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Environmental Science, Science

Additional info

The publisher of the The Ends of the World is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062676863.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Carlos

October 01, 2017

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 the massive 6th extinction which would come about because of our disregard for earth and our ravenous appetite for fossil fuels. If that sounds like something you would enjoy I recommend you read it but don’t expect for a positive ending ....because everything that is coming climate wise is not good at all , not good at all...let the book expand on it ....

Steve

June 06, 2017

Great science writing that reads like a mystery novel I 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 more, 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 writing had a poetic quality to it. I would even reread certain passages because they were so well written. I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in science.Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Edelweiss+ for review purposes.

Atila

September 20, 2017

Daqueles livros bem escritos que o autor vai dando dicas da conclusão e você fica todo orgulhoso de ter chego nela antes. Não pq é esperto, mas porque a linha de pensamento é bem clara. Uma passada muito boa pelo que cada grande extinção do passado foi, quais evidências temos delas, o papel de cada fator (haja vulcões) e o que é controverso. O livro vai crescendo na explicação e apontando os paralelos que fará com o momento em que vivemos. Com direito a mega fatos surpreendentes e bem legais, como hiper furacões, terremotos de escala 12 (sim, mais do que a crosta terrestre pode gerar), bichos se ferrando e tudo mais.Termina com uma discussão bem sensata das mudanças que estamos causando, das extinções de animais (que ele não consegue equiparar às do passado) às mudanças climáticas e a variação de CO2 induzida. Gostei bastante.

Charlene

July 02, 2019

What is not to love about this book? The author masterfully takes the reader on a tour of the five major past extinctions while highlighting the role of (what seemed like magical) geology. With each page, I could visualize the different areas of which he wrote. At the end of the book, I thought about a walking tour I had done in Florence. I wished this author would put together a driving tour that included all the sites mentioned in this book. Being from PA, I could easily get to the PA, NJ, MD sites he about at length. I might read this again and actually take good notes and take the tour myself. Beautiful book.

Philip

October 06, 2022

(UPDATE:) OOH NOOOO!!So probably should have quit while I was ahead (see below), but while I couldn't focus on this as an audiobook, I picked up the physical book at the library just to read the last two shorter chapters on "The Near Future" (present through the next few - and possibly final - human generations), and "The Final Extinction" (800 million years from now)…and they are HORRIFYING in the first case, and just all around depressing in the second.Great science writing though, and so now want to go back and read the previous chapter on "The End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction" which covers from around 50,000 years ago until today - i.e., the mass die off of all those big monster mammals - as I'm curious to see how Brannen's take compares to that of Ross MacPhee in his excellent End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals.But then…enough for now; will certainly come back to again sometime later to cover those middle extinctions - but I can only handle so many "ends of the world" at once!BTW, this book is an excellent - if soul crushing - companion to Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, as this focuses on the earlier extinctions rather than our current/looming self-destruction, while Kolbert does just the reverse. Wind and solar, people! WIND AND SOLAR!! Oh, and waves... (ORIGINAL COMMENT): Lots of stars here, so the problem isn't you, book - it's me. Thought I could listen on my commute, but too dense to focus on in traffic, and not sure when it would ever rise high enough again in my TBR pile of paper books to get the attention it deserves. If Brannen ever does an "Ends of the World for Dummies" version, I'm there - but otherwise, afraid this is another case of TMBTLT.** Too Many Books, Too Little Time______________________________________________Some unfortunately victims of the late Devonian extinction, found less than a mile from my old apartment in Binghamton, NY - when that whole are was covered by the Kaskasia Sea

Andrea

September 02, 2017

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 past five disruptive events is comparing apples to oranges. Read it and expand your understanding of the subject beyond the black-and-white, simplified agenda that award committees prefer to endorse.

Becky

May 11, 2017

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 explain difficult concepts in a way that anyone can understand. I don't see why textbooks have to be so boring when a writer like Brannen can impart the same information in an interesting way.

L.G.

January 09, 2023

I was no fan of history in school with its biased, shortsighted focus predominantly on humanity, as if we were separate from the intricately connected natural world.This book though, presenting an up to date and broad spectrum understanding of the deep history of our little blue canoe, I found well-written and informative. It certainly broadens one's perspective of our present environmental dilemma, and I believe most anyone will learn a lot of value in these pages. A reoccurring aspect throughout previous mass extinctions of life on this planet is carbon cycle jackknifing, with life forms abetting often enough. Yes, all were precipitated by natural phenomena, not humans, but then again what is the difference between humans and say plants, both being natural evolved life forms — a trick question? What can be seen in this book, is what we're in for if a critical mass of humanity doesn't wake from our self-indulgent complacency stupor. And, unless you are a geochemist, some of it will surprise you. We should be thankful for the preceding thousands of years of a relatively stable climate conducive to human existence, that without the violent swings the earth has been through. How long this period lasts depends on natural phenomena, but we are at present seriously shortening it.

Satyajeet

October 17, 2018

Essential read for the Fall!Mass extinction and the End.Really uplifting if you ask me.Read this astonishing and terrifying description of the end of the dinosaurs:“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.“The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Them when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.”Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact.
“So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked.“Yeah, probably.” As I said, uplifting.

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