Wednesday, December 29, 2004

tell 'em how your pleasure's set up on slow release

Due to the calamitous circumstances in the areas affected by the tsunami and my own morbid curiosity, I've been reading a lot of news articles lately related to the massive suffering and loss in the region. It really is impossible to imagine what's happening there, how much higher the death toll will rise, and how the survivors will ever be able to rebuild when the vast majority of them were uninsured and were already below the poverty level.

Of course, because I like to know as much as possible about everything, I started reading more about other possible geological catastrophes. In fact, this entire vacation has revolved around talk off apocalyptic events; when my parents took me out for lunch after I arrived in Des Moines, my brother and I told our father that he could engage in schemes where he borrowed money and promised to pay it back in 2013--the ancient Mayans had a 'long count' of 1,366,560 days, and archaeologists have determined that the ending of the current (fourth) cycle corresponds to the winter solstice in 2012. The Mayans had highly developed calendars, accurately predicting solar and lunar eclipses for hundreds of years, etc., and so there are some apocalyptic theorists who feel that the end of their long count (and the abrupt ending of all their calendars at the projected end of this age) indicates some cataclysmic change. So, this conversation eventually evolved to a hysterical image of my father saying 'Mayans!' to the banker after obtaining a loan, and then walking out without explaining his enigmatic comment.

So anyway, 'Mayans!' has become the punchline of my entire break, and I was doing some reading tonight and verified a rumor I had heard that Yellowstone National Park is sitting on top of a massive supervolcano that has erupted 1.2 million and 600,000 years ago, covering the western half of the United States in thick layers of ash and resulting in a worldwide 'volcanic winter'. The fact that it still has so much geothermal and seismic activity is somewhat worrisome, and scientists estimate that a vast magma chamber extends under almost all of the present boundaries of the park. Scary!

Even better, a supervolcano of some sort has erupted approximately every 50-70,000 years somewhere on earth, and the last one was ~70,000 years ago on Sumatra in Indonesia. Geneticists, working independently, discovered that human mitochondrial DNA has much less diversity than they expected based on the several-million-year history of our species--and they had determined that a 'bottleneck' had occurred in the past that narrowed our genetic pool to perhaps 5000 or 10000 individuals, before the expansion that led to our current billions. That bottleneck is estimated to be 70-80,000 years ago...coinciding perfectly with the eruption on Sumatra, which lowered global temperatures by 5 degrees Celsius and triggered a major ice age.

Now, isn't that all fascinating? I'm thinking I need to get out of the west coast; the two most likely sites for a supervolcano eruption in North America are apparently Yellowstone...and Long Valley, California (near Mammoth Lake/Yosemite), where a supervolcano erupted 760,000 years ago and volcanic eruptions continue. Then you have the Cascades, and of course all the earthquakes that California should just assume will come eventually, not to mention the freaking crazy people who inhabit California and are dangerous in their own right.

However, Iowa isn't exactly safe either--the New Madrid fault (in Missouri) had three 8+ magnitude quakes in the early 1800s, and because of the different geologic composition east of the Rockies, shockwaves from a quake of that size can travel much farther--the quakes in the 1800s were centered in Missouri, but damage was reported in Washington D.C., and church bells rang in Boston (1000 miles away!) As far as the human factor here, there is less crime, but the crime that does occur is often more bizarre--just across the line in Missouri, a body was recently found, decomposed to the point that only bones remained, and local speculation is that it was a gang hit from some criminals in Kansas City. However, it turns out that the guy was the brother or cousin (stories change frequently here) of another dude whom the Des Moines police shot earlier this year when he pulled a gun on them during a high-speed car chase...and *that* guy was later discovered to have been an arsonist who burned down a Des Moines church and several other buildings. To top it off, when the police investigated his house in Missouri, they found a stock tank in the garage with a heat lamp over it and three live alligators, which may have been used to dispose of other bodies. Weird!

So between tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, alligators, and the Mayans, I think we're all pretty much fucked. Life sure is interesting, though.

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