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Planetary Disasters: It Could Happen One Night
Catastrophes from the past will strike again — we just do not know when.
ANDY POTTS
One hundred thousand years ago, a massive chunk of the Mauna Loa volcano cracked away from Hawaii and slid into the sea, launching a wave that rose as high as the Eiffel tower up the slopes of a nearby island. That mega-tsunami was not an isolated incident: the past 40,000 years have seen at least ten gigantic landslides of more than 100 cubic kilometres in the North Atlantic ocean alone, each capable of producing waves tens to hundreds of metres high. Another is bound to happen sometime — although whether it will strike tomorrow or 10,000 years from now is anyone’s guess.
This week, the World Economic Forum published its 2013 global risks report, which includes a section, produced in collaboration with Nature, on X factors: low-probability, high-impact risks resulting mainly from human activity (see go.nature.com/outhzr). But the natural world holds unpredictable threats as well. The geologic record is peppered with evidence of rare, monstrous disasters, ranging from asteroid impacts to supervolcanoes to γ-ray bursts. Nature looks into some of the life-shattering events that Earth and the broader Universe could throw our way.
Death by volcano
Earth is now in the middle of a flare-up of supervolcanic activity1. Over the past 13.5 million years, no fewer than 19 giant eruptions have each spewed more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of rock — enough to coat an entire continent in a few centimetres of ash and push the planet into ‘nuclear winter’. One of the most recent such eruptions, of Toba in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, was such a catastrophic event that some scientists have blamed it for starting the last ice age and slashing the human population to about 10,000 people. One estimate1 suggests that there is a 1% chance of a super-eruption in the next 460–7,200 years.
Cataclysmic doom will strike again some day ,that’s for sure.Whether it’s Yellowstone erupting or a mega tsunami,a massive solar flare, these things are certain,lets hope it’s not for a long,long time.2013 we will be reaching the solar maximum. NASA’s Warning.
