"If You Were a Dinosaur in Canada When That Asteroid Hit the Yucatán, You Had Approximately Two Minutes to Live"

"Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula, leaving behind a crater 110 miles wide and twenty miles deep and a colossally larger hole in the tree of life. The impact and its after­effects wiped out an estimated 75 percent of species, including, most famously, all non-avian dinosaurs. That event, the end-­Cretaceous extinction, is one of six massive die-offs in the history of the planet. Five of them happened in the distant past: 450 million, 375 million, 252 million, 200 million, and 66 million years ago. The sixth one is happening right now."


Kathryn Schulz in New York reviews Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.

"Reducing Much of What Remained to Ashes"

"Yet it should also be remembered that pouring money and supplies into a stricken country or region is no guarantor of stability. The 1923 quake kicked off a national effort to rebuild Tokyo into a world-class city. Yet it also whipped up nationalist hysteria, with vigilante bands roving the lawless countryside, murdering thousands of Koreans. Xenophobic newspapers published accusations that American relief teams were trying to humiliate the Japanese, putting a quick end to the era of good feeling. The army declared martial law and began a steady erosion of democracy, culminating in its expansion into China and the outbreak of World War II."

Joshua Hammer at The New York Times recalls Japan's 1923 Great Kantō earthquake.

Also in The New York Times, James Glanz and Norimitsu Onishi credit building codes for saving lives during the recent Japanese quake.