Book review: The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions
Initially, I picked this book at random during one of Amazon Kindle’s discount offers as the title sounded interesting. It turns out that I was in for a treat.
What this book is about: This book gives an insight about the mass extinction events that has happened since 500 million years ago, when the first life form emerges on earth. The most popular one is arguably the mass extinction that ended the reign of dinosaurs on earth. However, in total five mass extinction has happened before, almost wiping the earth clean of life. This book gives the details of each extinction events, explored through the field of geology ,and to some extend, anthropology.
What I learned: As someone who is working in the field of material science and electrical engineering, I am used to a time scale down to the nanosecond range. However, in terms of geological time scale, everything is measured in millions of years. An accurate prediction of a geological period means being able to determine an event down to the scale of thousands of years — which might seem like an eternity for humans, but simply a blink of time when compared to the geological age. It can be hard to wrap my head around the idea.
Humbling: We are used to thinking that humanity is the center of the universe. However, compared to the age of the earth (4.5 billion years) and the total age of life on earth(500 million years), modern humans have existed for only about 200 thousand years. Merely a thin layer on top of the layers of geological history. While some faith may associate today’s natural disasters as divine wrath against human’s wrongdoings, crazier things have happened throughout earth’s history even with no humans involved. Russia covered with 10 kms of lava. A gigantic meteor that hits Mexico, evaporating everything in its wake and triggering massive volcanic activities in India, resulting in the demise of the dinosaurs.
Alarming: if there’s any similarity between the previous mass extinction events and our current state of planet earth, it’s that rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually leads to mass extinction events. When we are talking about rapid, we are talking in a geological time scale. And for humans, who have been pumping CO2 since the first industrial revolution only two and a half centuries ago, it is but a single moment. When humans’ economic activity is based on how fast we can burn carbon into the atmosphere, then you have a huge problem. In addition to the familiar temperature increase, ocean acidification will result in coral reefs damage. The effect will cascade, resulting in a collapse of the food chain.
The earth’s future: while the looming mass extinction due to human activity might sound alarming, the earth will be fine. The earth will recover, but civilization might collapse due to various ecological disasters, such as drought, temperature beyond human adaptability, dwindling food sources, etc.
I highly recommend this book, especially to someone with no prior knowledge regarding geology and anthropology to expand their horizon. The information will make you rethink the role of humans on earth, and how small we are when compared to the history of life, earth itself, and the universe. I also obtained a new respect for geologists who managed to construct a detailed story of the earth’s past from looking at fossils and mineral layers — something which I usually just dismiss when I see them.
