Jebus.
China Earthquake, Florida Fires, US Tornadoes, Burma Cyclone
The Angry Earth
When I was in college, I briefly flirted with the idea of majoring in geology. But since I have the math skills of a brain-damaged 4th Grader, the overwhelming amount of calculus involved made my half-assed curiosity about rock-formations in road cuts and land-forms insufficient motivation to overcome the mathematical threshold.
One thing I came away with from the few classes I struggled through, though (like Geology 101 or "Rocks for Jocks"), was the knowledge that every few thousand years or so, the earth more or less "freaks out" for various reasons. Minor fluctuations in the period of the earth's orbit or angle of rotation or even something like minor turbulence in the magma in the earth's mantle - which generates our magnetic field, something on the order of .001%, can result in massive changes that can manifest in any sort of ways. One way, experts postulate, is when the earth's polarity reverses itself every few thousand years. Nobody really understands why, but one thing geologists all agree on is that those flips coincide with periods of tremendous instability in the atmosphere and terrestrial violence. It has never flipped in recorded human history. It is, shall we say, without historical precedence.
Oh, and they all agree that we are overdue for another flip.
What all this means, I don't know, but there's a lot of people in the world today who weren't dead yesterday and that is a lot of suffering for those left behind. Because of politics, their suffering is only beginning and it could be a window nto the future for all of us.
China Earthquake, Florida Fires, US Tornadoes, Burma Cyclone
The Angry Earth
When I was in college, I briefly flirted with the idea of majoring in geology. But since I have the math skills of a brain-damaged 4th Grader, the overwhelming amount of calculus involved made my half-assed curiosity about rock-formations in road cuts and land-forms insufficient motivation to overcome the mathematical threshold.
One thing I came away with from the few classes I struggled through, though (like Geology 101 or "Rocks for Jocks"), was the knowledge that every few thousand years or so, the earth more or less "freaks out" for various reasons. Minor fluctuations in the period of the earth's orbit or angle of rotation or even something like minor turbulence in the magma in the earth's mantle - which generates our magnetic field, something on the order of .001%, can result in massive changes that can manifest in any sort of ways. One way, experts postulate, is when the earth's polarity reverses itself every few thousand years. Nobody really understands why, but one thing geologists all agree on is that those flips coincide with periods of tremendous instability in the atmosphere and terrestrial violence. It has never flipped in recorded human history. It is, shall we say, without historical precedence.
Oh, and they all agree that we are overdue for another flip.
What all this means, I don't know, but there's a lot of people in the world today who weren't dead yesterday and that is a lot of suffering for those left behind. Because of politics, their suffering is only beginning and it could be a window nto the future for all of us.
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