By Durand Appuhamy
Many commentators have written about the above subject. A few have accepted it as a fact that because the world calendar devised by the South American Indians did stop at 2012, therefore those Indians believed that the world would then come to an end. We do not know the intentions of those who composed the calendar and therefore imputing undeclared vision into their work cannot be accepted. As for now, we need to accept the best scientific estimate that our planet has existed for 4,550 million years (Caltec’s Clair Patterson’s widely accepted estimate), and according to NASA’s declaration of 2003 the universe itself is 13.7 billion years old and is expanding. There are some who believe that there was a universe even before the Big Bang! Such a world would suddenly fold up is just one speculation amongst many. The fact is that we live in a world whose exact age is really beyond our calculation. The sparkling stars that delight our sights too are beyond our comprehension and we are surrounded by matter whose properties are beyond our identification and comprehension other than the fact that this matter appears to be operating in conformance with physical laws we happen to know. My intuition is that this world will go on to exist in the same way as it had done for billions of years more.
This does not mean that we will not be visited by world shattering disasters almost equivalent to partial destruction of the world. We have had plenty of such nasty events in 2010. It has been estimated that more than 260,000 people were killed in 2010, by earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts. To this must be added the potential danger of melting polar ice caps due to man-made global warming and the disappearance of many islands in the south Pacific as well as in the Maldives. We do live in a dangerous world and the wonder is that the world does exist even though "it is hard to sneak a look at God’s cards" as Einstein observed when confronted with Quantum theory.
Taking a purely secular view of our geophysical world, here are a few potential forces and known events that could cause catastrophe to some areas if not the entire planet.
Recent magnetic studies have revealed that the sea floors have been spreading and that the continents have been in motion. This science is known as plate tectonics. According to these scientists the earth’s surface is made up of eight to twelve big plates and many smaller ones and they all are on the move in different directions and at different speeds. This constant turmoil prevents the plates from fusing into a single immobile plate. This perpetual motion below our feet is expected to expand the Atlantic Ocean, float away Baha California into an island, Africa, moving north, would close off the entire Mediterranean Ocean and thrust up Himalayan mountains, and Australia too is said to be moving north and is expected to swallow up many of the Indonesian islands. Global Positioning Systems have already established that America and Europe are drifting apart about two meters per seventy years. This by itself could affect our climate and the chemistry of the sea and our food in the sea. In short, ultimately it would have disastrous effect on all life on earth.
The next expected danger to earth comes from the billion odd asteroids tumbling about Mars and Jupiter in the Kuiper Belt. Any extra terrestrial strike by a large meteorite could have a cataclysmic effect on earth. The evidence is there today in the Chicxulub crater in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsular This crater is 193 km wide and 48km deep. The sudden disappearance of dinosaurs and many other ancient life forms have been attributed to this impact from space. The scientists who observed the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter in July 1994 were amazed beyond expectation. They reported that one fragment about the size of a small mountain struck Jupiter "with a force of sixty million megatons, seventy-five times all the nuclear weaponry in existence". It had left earth size craters on the surface of Jupiter. These asteroids travel at cosmic velocities. They would heat up the underside temperatures to ten times that of the sun and would incinerate everything to pulp before one could even count to one! It is estimated that such a strike would kill every living being within 250 km of the impact site. Shock waves would travel up to 1,500 km beyond wreaking disaster all the way.
This impact could activate earthquakes, light up slumbering volcanoes, and engender devastating Tsunamis all over the globe. Black cloud of soot and floating ash would cover the earth for months and debris from the burning planet could pelt down everywhere and set the whole planet ablaze. On the first day itself one to two billion people would perish almost instantaneously while the others might have to endure a lingering death as the earth’s ability to support life would be severely affected.
Could man do anything to prevent this cataclysmic bolt from the blue sky? The frightening answer is we are helpless. First we need to spot the danger and that is nearly impossible. Even if we spot one heading our way, it is unlikely we will have enough time to do anything about it. Our missiles and nuclear warheads are not designed for smashing up asteroids but would also be ineffective and nearly impossible to target. At best if we mange to smash up an approaching asteroid, then we will turn it into a shower of intensely radioactive rocks that would pelt us for weeks!
Keeping in mind that a three bedroom size asteroid impact could destroy the whole of greater Colombo, it is very scary to note that there are literally thousands of them crossing our path without colliding. One was spotted in 1991 (named 1991B) after it had passed us by at a distance of 170,000km. In 1994 another larger one missed us by mere 65,000 miles, equivalent in cosmic terms, to a rifle bullet passing your ear at less than an inch! We should have had a party to celebrate this narrow escape.
Earthquakes and volcanoes are said to be caused by the huge cauldron of magma, colossal volcanic hot spots, which erupts cataclysmically due to the pressure build-up as the tectonic plates push against one another. The devastation caused is usually confined to the locality except when a Tsunami accompanies the quake in its wake as in 1994. The Haitian earthquake in January 2010 killed over 200,000 and left injured 300,000 more. There are others waiting to happen. Tokyo with its thirty million citizens is said to be floating above the confluence of three tectonic plates making it seismically unstable. In 1923 it suffered the Great Kanto quake which killed an estimated 200,000, but then, Tokyo had only about three million citizens. San Francisco too is standing on San Andreas Fault-line and big quake is expected there too. We can only hope that the underground pressure will be released in other ways than via an earthquake.
In October we saw the Merapi volcano in Indonesia. It dislodged nearly 300,000 people from their homes. In Iceland the ash cloud from a volcano disrupted air traffic and grounded nearly seven million travelers in April. Yellowstone park rangers have known that they lived and worked above an active volcano with no visible open mouth cone or caldera. NASA photographs from space established that the whole park—9,000 square km was the caldera. The explosion of this volcano some 600,000 years ago had left a crater nearly 65 km across and obliterated nearly sixty miles of the nearby Gallatins mountain. There are many warning signs that it is getting ready for its big show. Many small earthquakes occur frequently in the park, the big one was in 1959 at Hebgen lake just outside the park. Unpredictable geyser eruptions are another. In 1973 there was an ominous bulge tilting the Yellowstone Lake so that the water drained out of the south side of the lake. The park surveyors concluded that this swelling followed by subsidence has been caused by the restless magma underneath the park. Yellowstone is a super volcano and is significant because any eruption would result in the destruction of a large part of USA.
Man is really helpless against the geophysical forces outlined above. A nuclear war by him in the middle- east and/or in Korea could also plunge the planet into unimaginable disaster. Let us cast away these morbid thoughts and appreciate the wonder of life and existence amidst all these inimical forces and live our lives with hope and expectation that we would be spared at least in our lifetime.
Courtesy - The Island
