Animal life has been all but destroyed in sudden, planetwide exterminations five times in Earth’s history. These are the so-call
ed Big Five mass extinctions, commonly defined as any event in which more than half of the earth’s species go extinct in fewer than a million years or so. We now know that many of these mass extinctions seem to have happened much more quickly. Thanks to fine-scale geochronology,1 we know that some of the most extreme die-offs in earth history lasted only a few thousand years, at the very most, and may have been much quicker. A more qualitative way to describe something like this is Armageddon.2 The most famous member of this gloomy fraternity is the End-Cretaceous mass extinction, which notably took out the (nonbird) dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the End-Cretaceous is only the most recent mass extinction in the history of life. The volcanic doomsday whose stony embers I saw exposed in the cliffs next to Manhattan3—a disaster that brought down an alternate universe of distant crocodile relatives and global coral reef systems—struck 135 million years before the death of the dinosaurs. This disaster and the three other major mass extinctions that preceded it are invisible, for the most part, in the public imagination, long overshadowed by the downfall of T. rex. This isn’t entirely without reason. For one thing, dinosaurs are the most charismatic characters in the fossil record, celebrities of earth history that paleontologists who work on earlier, more neglected periods scoff at as preening oversized monsters. As such, dinosaurs hog most of the popular press spared for paleontology. In addition, the dinosaurs were wiped out in spectacular fashion, with their final moments punctuated by the impact of a 6-mile-long asteroid in Mexico. But if it was a space rock that did in the dinosaurs, it seems to have been a unique disaster. Some astronomers outside the field push the idea that periodic asteroid strikes caused each of the planet’s other four mass extinctions, but this hypothesis h
Perhaps the decisive innovation was the invention in 1925 of the stern slipway for factory ships (Tonnessen and Johnsen 1982). This enabled whalers to haul animals on deck and process them without a land-based whaling station. Ships now flourished in the whale-rich pelagic areas of the Antarctic.
