Monday, April 21, 2008

Terra Firma, Our Solid Earth

We humans live and play out the drama of our singular lives amidst the other creatures with which we share this planet, alongside the abundance of flora and insect life, on a globe that is itself a living, breathing entity. The Earth doesn't really need us for anything, we just happen to be there, thanks to Nature which has permitted us to evolve within earth's atmosphere, and to reside upon its geographic presence.

We need the Earth and everything it provides for us, the raw resources for our nurturance, our shelter, our technologies.

We not only take what we need, but we develop reasons - through our emerging technologies as we spread our presence exponentially upon the earth's surface - to delve deeper and exploit ever more of the raw resources available to us. Earth passively permits our depredations of her sovereign territory, a kindly host to the querulous, never-satisfied dependents upon her mantle.

She, or Nature, looks upon our exploitation of all the other creatures with neutral disinterest.

And we agonize, we thinking, planning, theorizing, implementing beings, about the havoc we cause on the crust of the earth, on the atmosphere surrounding it, on the disappearing creatures whose homes we impinge upon, destroying their ability to survive. But as it happens, humankind proposes, while Nature disposes.

Our solid, dependable, long-suffering Earth may reel under the toll of humankind's persistent manipulation of the abode offered us. But she, in tandem with Nature, is otherwise engaged, busy with her own very particular agenda of neutral and ongoing entropy. We are the living chaos on Earth's mantle, Nature visits upon both Earth and humankind her impassive deliveries of hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions.

And oh yes, extraterrestrial visitors of occasional impact. Our solidly dependable sanctuary which we, as egotistical children of Nature impose our needs upon, is a living, breathing, ever changing object to which we cling, as an infinitesimally minute portion of the immense and unknowable Universe.

Our Earth is vulnerable, not only to our demands, but the happenstance of gravity, weather, alien imponderables. Our continents are adrift on a changing oceanscape; change as ready to occur as those great tectonic plates beneath the oceans and the continents and time will allow.
  • Earth's crust is capable of dipping a few centimeters under heavy regional snowfall - or the change of water levels in the Amazon - or post-torrential monsoon rains.
  • The deep thrumming tonal values of a thunderclap can trigger small seismic shocks to encourage quivering in the earth's upper crust.
  • The moon's gravitational pull cause soceanic tides, and is capable too of sucking the Earth's crust upward twice each day, by up to 10 centimetres.
  • The 2004 tsunami that wrought dreadful havoc in the Indian Ocean altered the Earth's rotation by a fraction of a second.
  • El Nino, which causes droughts in the southern hemisphere and warmer winters on the eastern seaboard of North America also alters the length of the day.
  • The development of the Three Gorges Dam in China altered the rotational period of the Earth sufficiently to enable amateur astronomers to measure the difference.
  • If that huge dam burst the result would be the deaths of hundreds of thousands Chinese, and the Earth itself would wobble, and slow its rotation slightly.
  • An actuarial assessment conducted in 2005 concluded we can anticipate 3 to 4 major calamities yearly, resulting in 50,000 or greater casualties.
  • Seismologists are confident that a million-victim earthquake is a virtual certainty in the next several decades: Central Asia, Tokyo, or California the most likely venues.
  • Approximately 8,000 mini-earthquakes occur daily, amounting to some three million annually.
  • Over 1,500 active volcanoes have been identified; 10 to 20 eruptions occurring at any one time. The largest three of the last half-century occurring on mountains not held to be volcanic.
  • The journal Science, in 2006, reported on research by Maria Pareschi with Italy's National Institute of Geology and Volcanology: "A massive collapse of Cumbre Veija, a volcano in the Canary Islands, would trigger a towering tsunami that would pummel both sides of the Atlantic. Such a collapse - quite probable because it is very unstable - would be ten times larger than the Etna slide. It would overwhelm New York, Miami and Lisbon."
  • NASA has been tasked with cataloguing billions of asteroid fragments spinning between Jupiter and Mars. In March 2007 a planetary defense conference was summoned by the U.S. Congress; attention had been caught by the spectacle, seen live on TV, of a comet wreaking havoc on Jupiter - shades of 2010: Odyssey Two.
  • If a kilometre-sized rock hit the Atlantic Ocean 500 miles off the U.S. coast at the speed of 61,000 kilometres an hour (an actual near-miss of the Earth observed in 1950), the 60,000-megaton impact would vaporize the asteroid and displace an area of ocean 17 kilometres across, right to the sea floor. The rushing sea would spread waves in all directions. Two hours post-impact, 120-metre waves would reach from Nova Scotia to Cape Hatteras. Two hours later, 60-metre waves would hit the entire east coast, wiping out much of the Caribbean. Eight hours after impact, waves would reach Europe, coming ashore at heights of about 10 to 15 metres.
Aren't we, humankind, in the face of these potentially adverse lethalities truly puerile? Wouldn't it make sense to value what we have, and make all attempts possible to ensure the Earth's safety and with it our longevity? We just don't know how to make nice with one another, how to prioritize and recognize our needs and responsibilities.

It is, after all, Nature's fault; she has imbued us with these critically faulty attitudes and neuroses about one another.

And since the Earth, the atmosphere, the universe and all it contains are Nature's preserve at her disciplined/undisciplined disposal, unnervingly objective in their very nature, existence of any kind at her disposal, we cannot influence what she ultimately does, but we do have the free will to influence ourselves.

For the time we have on this planet Earth, in comfort and security, don't we owe it to ourselves and to one another to place value where it is due?

Nature has her own nuclear devices with which to implode all that we hold dear. Must we really challenge her with our own puny devices?

Thanks to Marq de Villiers, author of Dangerous World.

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posted by Pieface @ Monday, April 21, 2008

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