The Various Ends of the World (Winter Wonder Classic)

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Science writer Peter Brannen takes listeners on a tour of the world’s five major mass extinctions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy New Year!
0:05.0	Year!
0:06.0	Woop!
0:07.0	It sounded like things were going bad.
0:11.0	I don't know what that was.
0:12.0	That was a celebration.
0:13.5	Happy New Year.
0:14.5	Welcome to 2024.
0:17.6	And what better way to ring in this new year
0:21.0	than with a contemplation of time. And I mean deep geological time. Because in
0:28.2	geological time, why this year might as well be the same as every single year since humans have existed because our lives and in fact all of humanity is a
0:40.1	microsecond on the scale of the Earth's four and a half billion years.
0:45.4	Welcome to week two of our Atlas Obscura Advent calendar.
0:49.2	We have arrived on Earth.
0:51.8	If last week was all about space, this week is all about here.
0:56.9	Earth's extremes and how life formed on this often kind of terrifying planet.
1:02.8	In today's episode I'm speaking with author Peter Branen about his book The
1:07.0	Ends of the World, which catalogs the five maybe more great extinction events that radically changed life and nearly ended it altogether.
1:18.5	Nothing puts your various problems in New Year's resolutions into perspective,
1:24.4	like 2 million years of lava.
1:27.5	I hope you enjoy the conversation. The world has already ended, five times, maybe more.
1:46.0	Can we talk about just a few of Earth's worst moments?
	...

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