The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

addition to its two main arms, had little side-arms that stuck out like thumbs. Only a handful of gr ...

years, passed through the Oort cloud, producing comet showers that rained destruction on the earth. Th ...

that the elevated iridium levels were more plausibly—if less spectacularly —attributed to the vagaries of ...

scientists, the whole episode lasted no more than two hundred thousand years, and perhaps less than a hundred ...

humans to just about every corner of the globe, and it is Zalasiewicz’s professional opinion that one day th ...

left their bones scattered everywhere, including on islands so remote that humans never bothered to settle ...

diversion and monoculture farming and ocean acidification. For all of these reasons, Zalasiewicz believes that w ...

topic of conversation. Someone came up to Crutzen and suggested that he patent the term. Crutzen wrote up his i ...

from 2004 in the Journal of Soils and Sediments. When Zalasiewicz came across the term, he was intrigued. H ...

commission recently moved that epoch’s start date back from 1.8 to 2.6 million years ago.) Zalasiewicz ...

CHAPTER VI THE SEA AROUND US Patella caerulea Castello Aragonese is a tiny island that rises straight ...

runs all the way around the base of the island, except above the vents, where the barnacles are missing. “Barnacl ...

percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little ...

increasingly acidified. Under what’s known as a “business as usual” emissions scenario, surface ocean pH ...

Spencer gathered from around Castello Aragonese at first appear inert— to my untrained eye, possibly e ...

At the time, marine biologists were just beginning to recognize the hazards posed by acidification. Some ...

seaweed that grows in the shape of a series of connecting disks. (The census was limited to creatures large ...

by rising CO 2 . While many species will apparently do fine, even thrive in an acidified ocean, lots o ...

The coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi. Ulf Riebesell is a biological oceanographer at the GEOMAR-Helmholtz Centre fo ...

acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein functio ...