Game
Over Quakes, asteroids, mass extinction —
when the end comes, will it come from below, above
or within? By GENDY ALIMURUNG
No matter how you work out the endgame in your
head, humans are destined for extinction: Apocalypse
is built in to the human condition. Science, which
defines and quantifies the heft of that apocalypse,
is all about control — in naming the beast,
it suggests, we gain power over it. So how do
we prevent it? And what does apocalypse actuallymean
in a real-world context?
In Los Angeles, partly, it means earthquakes.
It means the fear of The Big One that will shake
the land until the entire West Coast breaks off
like a cracker into the ocean. Luckily, in California
we have not just one but two motherly, reassuring
“Earthquake Lady” scientists to chase
the nightmare scenario away. “Southern California
will certainly experience more earthquakes similar
to the 1857 Fort Tejon and 1906 San Francisco
earthquakes,” says Caltech seismologist
Kate Hutton. “Those quakes both had magnitudes
in the upper 7s, probably 7.8 or 7.9.” If
the big quake happens during a Santa Ana wind
season, she says, fires are inevitable, and the
response will not be as fast as it normally is.
If it happens during the rainy season, mudslides
will complicate matters. But the biggest problems
may come from disruption of the infrastructure:
roads, water mains, power lines.
In her office at Caltech, Lucy Jones of the U.S.
Geological Survey talks about the possibility
of an earthquake causing damage of the magnitude
that occurred in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, “we can
be a lot worse than that. Our worst-case scenario
doesn’t happen very often, but if we put
a magnitude 7.5 under downtown L.A., which will
happen at some point geologically speaking, you
can imagine the damage.” There are 300 faults
running through Southern California capable of
a magnitude 6. Of those, a hundred run through
the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The longest
single fault we have, the San Andreas, is capable
of producing a magnitude 8. (Northridge was a
6.7.) Earthquakes can even start on one fault
and jump to another. The largest quake ever recorded
was a 9.5, in Chile.
Jones, whose messy desk looks as if an earthquake
has just hit, has run chains of seismometers up
and down the Los Angeles River and set off explosions
to see the geological structures below. Deaths
result from the magnitude of the quake, the proximity
of people to it, and the age of the buildings
in the area. In Los Angeles, we model what will
happen only to the biggest buildings in an earthquake.
And we definitely don’t do full-size “shake
tables” in L.A., in which an entire building
is put on a table that shakes. It costs too much.
The Japanese spent $600 million on theirs. “Will
the perfect storm happen in my lifetime?”
Jones says. “It’s hard to say. I’m
getting older, so chances are it won’t.
By definition the perfect storm is something that
doesn’t happen very often. I’m over
50. I could live another 50 years, but that’s
not that long in geologic years.” Given
that at some point a big earthquake has to happen,
and she’s studied it her whole life, Jones
says she’d like to live to see it.
Death comes from above as well as from below.
The ancient Mayans, who knew what they were doing
sky-wise, kept a long-form calendar based on the
movement of the planets. The calendar stops abruptly
at the date December 21, 2012, the winter solstice,
as if they couldn’t be bothered to track
out the remaining days because there would be
none. With that in mind, I visit NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to seek
wisdom from Don Yeomans, director of the Near-Earth
Object Program, which monitors the comets and
asteroids that enter Earth’s neighborhood.
It is a sunny September morning — September
11, by coincidence, the anniversary of that day
when the end of the world seemed a grave possibility.
Yeomans is a tall, smiling, professorial fellow,
and I ask him what the probability is that a large
asteroid will hit Earth and kill us all.
“Slim to none,” says Yeomans, who
has been studying comets and asteroids for more
than 40 years. “When you say ‘large’
asteroid, you’re talking about something
that’s a mile wide in diameter. Those events
don’t occur but every several million years.
We get hit by basketball-size asteroids daily.
Volkswagen-size asteroids come in twice a year.
None of those make it through Earth’s atmosphere.
They would have to be half the size of a football
field before they can make it through, and you
don’t expect those objects but about every
600 to 700 years or so.” Nevertheless, he
is keeping an eye on a short list of objects for
which he can’t rule out an impact, but only
because he hasn’t observed them enough to
be able to refine their orbit.
For instance, there’s a big chance (“About
3 percent,” says Yeomans, “which is
huge!”) we’ll get hit by the asteroid
Apophis, named after the Egyptian god of doom,
who lives in the eternally dark underground and
tries, nightly, to destroy the sun. Apophis will
more likely make a very close approach to Earth
— lower than some geosynchronous communications
satellites — on April 13, 2029. If it sneaks
through a region of space 600 miles across, a
“keyhole,” then it will return in
seven years to hit Earth. But the chances of that
happening are only one in 45,000, and as they
refine the asteroid’s orbit, the chances
will be even lower. Apophis will simply be visible
to the naked eye as a graceful point of light
moving across the night sky.
In fact, if scientists find these Earth-impacting
objects early enough, 20 or 30 years prior to
impact, say, they can slow them down or speed
them up a tiny bit by hitting them with nukes
or by “running into” them to change
their trajectory. In 2005, NASA smashed the spacecraft
Deep Impact into a comet, basically to get a closer
look at the thing when it blew up.
Right now, five NASA-funded telescopes scan the
entire sky every two months. “We can find
the objects, we can track them, we can predict
where they’ll be in space and time,”
Yeomans says, “but if an object is found
on an Earth-threatening trajectory, it’s
not currently NASA’s responsibility to deal
with it. In fact, it hasn’t been determined
whose responsibility it is to deal with it. But
that’s being worked out.” Yeomans
leads the group of astronomers who compute impact
probabilities. “There’s four in the
group,” he counts on his fingers, “and
about two of us who work full time.”
“That seems like... not enough,”
I say. Yeomans laughs heartily.
Extinction is a natural phenomenon and occurs
at all levels. University of Michigan physicist
Mark Newman, who created a mathematical model
for mass extinction, tells us that the vast majority
of species become extinct within 10 million years
of their first appearance on the planet. We humans,
as a species, have been on the planet for about
200,000 years. So, all things being equal, we’ve
got a way to go.
But all things are not equal. There have been
five previous mass extinctions on the planet (205
million, 250 million, 375 million and 440 million
years ago) caused by big geophysical events —
supervolcanoes exploding, asteroids hitting, major
climate shifts. The dinosaurs were the most recent
of these mass die-offs. Dinosaurs were extremely
abundant and successful, dominating the land ecosystem
for 150 million years. Then they disappeared.
They are now icons of extinction and evolution.
I have always loved going to the Natural History
Museum and gazing up in awe at the “Dueling
Dinosaurs” in the grand foyer, at a tyrannosaurus
locked in battle with a triceratops. An asteroid
had the last say on those guys. These days, humans
are causing the sixth wave of mass extinction,
the only species-driven — as opposed to
natural-phenomenon-driven — extinction in
the history of the planet. And we’re not
even trying to stop the extinction. At this point,
we’re just trying to slow it down.
Harvard naturalist Edward O. Wilson estimated
a current extinction rate of about three species
an hour. Cheetahs, coral reefs, gorillas, tigers,
killer whales, rhinos, salamanders, sharks, sea
horses, you name it: If it’s cool and it’s
alive, it is probably going extinct. As last year’s
Biodiversity Summit in Australia put it, “Life
is ticking away.” There are those in the
scientific community who feel there is a kind
of snowball effect to extinction, that once you
head down that path, there is no return. For each
species, there is a point at which it can never
recover, when the numbers of animals in a population
are too few to sustain it. I tried to look at
the online Red List, the official tally of threatened
species published by the World Conservation Union,
just to get a feel for what’s going on;
finally gave up because there were 41,415 entries.
Literally translated from the Greek, “apocalypse”
means “lifting the veil.” Or, the
progress from one phase of existence to another.
Apocalypse in that nomenclature signifies not
so much the end of the world as the end of an
era. When the veil is lifted for us, Homo sapiens
will perhaps have evolved into some new form of
life that will study us and be fascinated by us,
in much the same way that we study and are fascinated
by our ancestors Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis.
Now they are even getting their own TV show soon
by way of their popular Geico commercials. Is
the Zeitgeist trying to tell us something?
I wonder, if this video holds proof,
what force we are giving off in the universe by
getting larger?
I mean,.. think about it.
Game
Over