Have you ever actually thought about mass extinction? You know, those times when damn near everything dies and lots of species simply go away forever? It's been on my mind a lot, for almost a year now.
Since last May, I've been working as a consulting producer and lead writer on "Animal Armageddon," a series for Animal Planet about mass extinctions. It's been like going back to college and having to take all the courses I dodged the first time around, plus a few I probably couldn't even spell properly. In terms of being a mind-boggling head-trip, it's been both a treat and a brain puzzle. I don't say this about every project I work on but this one has truly changed the way I look at the world.
"Animal Armageddon" is an eight-part miniseries that begins airing this Thursday, February 12 with a show about the first mass extinction, the Ordivician ("Death Rays"). The first four episodes are scheduled to air between now and the first week of March, and the final four will air sometime this summer.
One thing I can tell you is that if you only catch two of them, they should be the ones on February 26 ("Doomsday") and March 5 ("Panic in the Sky"). That's a two-parter dealing with the death of the Dinosaurs. Let's just put it this way. The comet or asteroid that hit the Earth 65-million years ago was about the size of Mt. Everest. It was traveling at about five miles per second. When it hit in the waters near what's now the Yucatan, the energy it released was the equivalent of all the nuclear weapons that have ever existed, exploded at the same time, exploded in the same place (are you ready for this?) TIMES 10-thousand. Yeah, it was a big one. Part one deals with the first 24 hours or, as I called them in my script, the Worst Day on Earth Ever. Part two deals with the first year. By the end of it, the Dinosaurs were pretty much gone.
"Animal Armageddon" is produced by Digital Ranch. The executives for Animal Planet are Marc Etkind and Martha Ripp. This fascinating project reunited me with a great friend going back to my days as a director at "Eye on LA" here in Los Angeles, Rob Kirk, the executive producer. And it introduced me to the indefatigable supervising producer Abe Scheuermann, plus Tony Alunni, Brian Ulrich, Morgan Delany and a whole building full of talent that pulled it together.
And I made a great new friend. I got to work with one of the most fascinating scientists on the planet, an expert on mass extinction, paleontologist Peter Ward, professor of biology at the University of Washington. Peter is the on-going on-camera presence to the series but he's also the Carl Sagan of our time, only he talks about our planet, not other planets. He's not around to read this right now because he's in Antarctica looking for dinosaurs. Yep...
The only drawback to working on this has been that the more you know about mass extinctions, the more likely it seems to be that we are in the middle of one ourselves. That's a sobering thought, something I'll be writing more about later.
Meantime, I'll leave you with this. It's estimated that 99.9% of all species of animal life that has ever existed is now extinct. I'm not making this up. It should make you feel lucky and afraid simultaneously...
