Apocalyptic Planet Quotes

“This is the yin and yang of the earth, an energetic feedback. What happens below relates directly to what is happening on the surface and in the atmosphere and vice versa. Tectonics does not end at the ground beneath your feet. It is a dynamic system from the earth's interior all the way into the sky and back.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“They may not become extinct immediately, but being pushed out of decaying or destroyed habitats eventually takes its toll. The concept is known as extinction debt, the delay between the stress on species and the final dwindling of the last survivors until the organisms disappear and are never seen again.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“The moon is the better storyteller for this event. Our ancient craters are smoothed over by erosion and tectonic motion. With no erosion, no wind, and no liquid water on the moon, craters can remain perfectly visible for billions of years, an orbiting catalog of impacts.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“This much scientists agree on: Five times in the history of the earth, most life has winked out. Five times, one species after the next disappeared, the chain collapsed, grazers died as the plants they depended on were lost, and predators disappeared shortly after, life on earth reaching as close to zero as you'd ever care to get.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“In the Atacama, I saw the future, when the sun eats up the last of its hydrogen and burns into its red-giant phase, big enough to cook life and clouds and oceans off this naked orb. It wouldn't be a fast process, not by our standards. Millions of years in the execution, our sky would finally be half filled by a sun the color of a red-hot moonrise. After that, the sun would probably collapse into a white dwarf, meanwhile blasting away its outer shells of gas into an explosive planetary nebula. I imagine that all of our minerals will pay off as we make a rainbow streak flaring off into space. We will be beautiful.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“When a planet is born from interstellar dust it has about twelve refractory minerals, those resistant to decomposition by heat, pressure, or chemical attack. By the time it is complete with asteroid accretion and finally volcanic activity, about 1,500 different minerals are present. The earth has at least 4,300 species of mineral. This high number is unique in the solar system, a function of biological processes such as photosynthesis that releases oxygen which chemically bonds with almost every element, creating new minerals.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“Gravity, Craig," Old Pola said to me. "Now, there's a force to match tectonics. What goes up must come down.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth