Peter Brannen is a science journalist with particular interests in geology, ocean science, deep time, and the carbon cycle. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is also a visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Brannen's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Aeon, The Boston Globe, Slate, and The Guardian. His first book, "The Ends of the World," about the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history, was published in 2017.