"It's witty, lyrical, and exciting like a crime story. Brannen is an amazing storyteller, and this is a story worth telling." Goodreads

Apocalypse now?

Five times in the history of the Earth, almost all living things have been destroyed in a single geological moment - less than a million years.
However, according to the latest scientific research, the mass extinctions were not caused by some external factor - for example, the impact of an asteroid; climate change may have played a key role in the megacatastrophes of Earth's history.
Science journalist Peter Brannen examines this claim in his book. Visiting the most important geohistorical sites, he travels deep in time, and then talks to the most renowned experts on the subject - paleontologists, geologists, geochemists, futurists - as a true detective, putting together the pieces of the puzzle of the past in order to outline the possible future of humanity and the Earth.

"When legions of well-coiffed bureaucrats sit around the conference table at international climate conferences with their graphs of emissions, temperature rise and sea level rise, they study simple functions that, moreover, end at an artificial date of 2100. If we increase it by a certain amount carbon dioxide, say the models, and temperature and sea level rise linearly accordingly. The fate of the world thus becomes an easily calculable cost-benefit analysis, about which economists can write complacent editorials. The cornfields will slide further north at such and such latitudes , accordingly, the GDP of certain countries changes this way and that, everything is very regular, everything can be accurately predicted.
Unfortunately, however, the planet did not operate according to such principles in the Earth's historical past."

Peter Brannen is a science journalist, a contributor to Atlantic magazine, and an acclaimed author of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and The Guardian. His main interests are geology, oceanography, geochronology, the carbon cycle and basketball. He lives in Boston.