The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

by Peter Brannen

But to get to a mass extinction, first you need things to kill, and before the world could be destroyed again, it had to recover from the worst thing that ever happened.

In likely the most moving passage ever written about wading through shit, the late University of Arizona paleontologist Paul Martin described an expedition to the Grand Canyon’s Rampart Cave: Slowly proceeding deeper into the cave, we fell silent as in a cathedral. . . . In single file we walked into a trench, through sloth dung. When we stopped we stood chest deep in layers of stratified sloth dung. There was no perceptible airflow, but the deposit had lost any trace of ammonia or other odors of decaying manure; the air smelled resinous, like incense. No one spoke a word. In the stillness I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. One did not need to be a Sufi or a mystic to sense that this dimly lit, low-ceilinged chamber was a sacred sanctuary. More than a sepulcher for the dead, Rampart Cave venerated the extinct.

Throughout history, biology has continuously invented new ways of more efficiently using untapped reservoirs of energy, ultimately derived from sunlight hitting the earth. One way to capture this solar power is photosynthesis in plants. Another way to capture it is to eat the plants that store that solar power in their leaves as sugars. Still another way is to eat and digest the mouse that eats those plants, shunting the solar power even higher up the food chain. But at root, it’s all about capturing the energy from photons streaming off a star exploding 93 million miles away in outer space. Burning the carbon from ancient plants in coal and gasoline to power complex, energy-intensive societies is just the latest such biological innovation.