What on Earth is going on? Are those Doomsday wackos right?
Tsunami pounds Japan. Quake pummels New Zealand. Floods drown Australia. Haiti in ruins. Chile, China rocked. Pakistan under water. An Icelandic volcano halts air travel. Catastrophes kill nearly 300,000 people in 2010.
The 8.8 Chile quake shifts the earthโs axis three inches. Perhaps you noticed, a day is now 1.26 millionths of a second shorter.
From Arkansas to Italy, over a few days in January, thousands of birds fall dead from the sky. They call it Aflockalypse. Millions of fish go belly up. Letโs not even mention Moammar Gadhafi and Charlie Sheen. What a mess 2011 is shaping up to be.
But the images from Japan are especially gobsmacking, like something out of
Battle: Los Angeles, the new alien invasion flick. But more unsettling, more apocalyptic, more real. Those tidal waves full of cars and houses. The floating infernos. The vanished trains and boats. Smoke billowing from a nuclear plant. Ungodly sights.
Who needs Hollywood to scare the bejeezus out of us, when Mother Nature is in the directorโs chair?. Why is all hell breaking loose? Depends who you ask.
The global warming industry blames us โ you, me, our cars, our houses and our employers โ though itโs pretty busy these days explaining away fraud and fuzzy facts. Who cares what Al Gore says anymore? And how does car exhaust cause earthquakes, exactly?
The doomsayers, god bless โem, say itโs the end. Or the beginning of the end. Dec. 21, 2012 is a popular bet, according to those who believe that when it comes to planetary demise, whatโs Mayan is yours. But pick a date. Someone somewhere is sure it will be our last. This May, October or November, for instance. Oh, and the stock market will collapse on March 31. My, my, and weโre still recovering from the Y2K Armageddon.
Pick your poison. Solar eruption, black hole, meteor, supervolcano, megatsunami, supervirus, alien conquest. Nuclear war seems so lame and passe. A close relative of the doomsayer is the astrologer. My soothsaying friend, Anthony Carr, in his book Stargazer last year predicted โcatastrophic underwater earthquakes, giant tsunamis and inundations ... including Japan and Hawaii, the likes of which we have not seen in recent history.โ
This, he says, will grip us for 14 years because Neptune, which rules water, is in Pisces and Uranus, which rules upheaval, is in Aries. This alignment was in place in 1883 when Krakatoa, Indonesia, erupted with a force four times that of the biggest nuclear bomb and killed 40,000 people, mostly in tsunamis.
Believe what you want. But three days before Japan got whacked, astrologers fretted about the โlunar perigeeโ March 19, when the moonโs orbit will be its closest to Earth in 19 years.
On Wednesday, Britainโs Daily Mail reported, โthe web was yesterday awash with apocalyptic warnings that the movement of the moon will trigger tidal waves, volcanic eruptions and even earthquakes next week.โ
Well, Japan may have jumped the gun a bit. But, yikes. Scientists scoff. โThereโs nothing going on out of the ordinary,โ U.S. seismologist Dr. Daniel McNamara tells Reuters about the string of killer quakes in the past year, and now in Japan.
The planetโs plates grind all the time, he says, with tens of thousands of tremors each year.
Adds Florida geoscientist Grenville Draper: โWeโve just had bad luck, theyโve occurred in places near to centres of population and then it becomes news.โ
Makes sense, I guess.
If a calamity falls in a forest, and CNNโs not there to report it, does it make any sound?
Tragedy is worse because weโre more tuned in to it. And itโs our nature to seek patterns, kooky and otherwise, even where none exist.
Maybe. But this flyspeck floating in space sure seems a lot more fragile these days.
http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/mike_strobel/2011/03/12/17593401.html