Biggest natural threat to western civilisation?

[andyandy]

Which natural threat is most likely, and how much damage would it do to western society?

Off the top of my head I can think of:

1) Major volcanic eruption of the Krakatoa variety
2) Major Tokyo earthquake flattening large parts of the nation's capital
3) Coronal mass ejection/solar flares knocking out a transformer capacity or global satalites
4) Canary islands tsunami hitting the Americas' coast
5) meteor strike
6) Super volcano eruption in Yellowstone
7) major climate change - big sea rise/big global temp changes

I presume these have all been studied - any good books on natural disaster odds and impacts?

So, from the list (or add to it if you wish), what's most likely to have a significant impact on western civilisation over the next 100 years...?

Discuss :)

[andyandy]

From the wonderfully named [and rather nutty] Armageddon online:

Top 5 Natural Disaster Fears [for America]

Asteroid Impact wiping out a city or entire state


Of course scientists can't predict when the next devastating asteroid impact will occur - and especially not WHERE. The odds of it happening are remote, but in terms of history - people vs the planet, the planet has stomped us. Impacts have happened before and will happen LONG after we're gone.

Recent Example : Tunguska Event.

On the date of June 30th, 1908, at about a quarter after 7:00 a.m., a very mysterious explosion occurred in the skies over Tunguska, Siberia, located in Russia. This explosion happened at anywhere between six-to-eight kilometers from ground zero, and the resultant action in this was to lay waste to a vast region of pine forest of 2,150 square kilometers, felling more than 60 million trees. This was seen as a brilliant burst of light from the inhabitants of the region of 50 kilometers around. Witnesses claim that the explosion was so loud and powerful as to blow-out windows, temporarily blind and knock people to the ground, and sounded like a deafening roar.

[snip]


Future Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake
Ok - if that gibberish makes no sense, we can all just keep calling it "the big one".

All geologists know it is just a matter of time before a 9.0 or larger earthquake strikes somewhere between California and Canada. The shaking would be locally cataclysmic, but the biggest threat is the tsunami that would ensue from a fault line that is nearly identical to the one that caused the deadly 2004 tsunami in Indonesia.

A megathrust earthquake is an inter-plate earthquake where one tectonic plate slips beneath (sub-ducts) another.Just in case you were wondering how it differs from regular earthquakes :)

[snip]

East or West Coast Tsunami / Megatsunami
An earthquake fault joff of California (discussed above) could generate a major earthquake and a tsunami threat that would strike so fast - most coastal residents would not have any time to escape.The fault a deadly "1,2" punch, first the earthquake would level parts of the coast - and then with little to no time to act - the tsunami would already be there.


The Yellowstone Super Volcano


It probably won't happen for hundreds or possibly even millions of years - but there is one little scary fact : It's long overdue.

A supervolcano refers to a volcano that produces the largest and most voluminous kinds of eruptions on earth. The actual explosivity of these eruptions varies, but the sheer volume of extruded magma is immense enough to radically alter the landscape and severely impact global climate for years, with a cataclysmic effect on life . The term was originally coined by the producers of a BBC Popular Science programme in 2002 to refer to these types of eruptions.

Scientist have discovered that the ground in Yellowstone is over 70cm higher than in was in 1923 - indicating a massive swelling underneath the park. The reservoir is filling with magma at a staggering rate. The volcano erupts with a calendar-like cycle of every 600,000-650,000 years. The last eruption was more than 640,000 years ago - we are running late.

If Yellowstone were to erupt full blast - some estimates say half the country would be covered in ash... up to 3 feet deep. http://www.armageddononline.org/Top-5-Natural-Disaster-Threats.html

Given the other content on the site, i'm not sure it should necessarily be taken as 100% accurate :D

[andyandy]

CME:

As severe as the possible effects of global warming might be, many of the worst-case impacts are not likely to occur on timescales less than a decade or so. Of perhaps more immediate concern to civilization as we know it -- quite literally -- is the threat posed by the expected increase in solar activity starting around 2011, which could disrupt many aspects of life that societies now take for granted and depend heavily upon for their daily existence.

Electric power grids, communications and navigation systems (including GPS), and satellites (including weather) could be damaged beyond repair for many years. The consequences could be devastating for commerce, transportation, agriculture and food stocks, fuel and water supplies, human health and medical facilities, national security, and daily life in general.

Keep reading for more on the looming threat of increased solar activity...

A hypothetical scenario in New Scientist envisions the following the year after a violent storm on the surface of the sun:

...millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event...



[snip]

It's been known for centuries that the sun goes through cycles whereby a new period of increasing activity begins about every 11 years. Sunspots -- dark spots on the surface of the sun -- are indicators of solar activity, with solar activity increasing as the number of sunspots increases. Sunspots are sources of huge, violently energetic flares that propel into space streams of charged particles known as the solar wind. The particles themselves can be harmful to astronauts as well as airline passengers, especially on flights over polar regions. More significant are the potentially disastrous effects of geomagnetic storms produced when the solar wind encounters the outer limits of Earth's atmosphere (perhaps some consolation are the brilliant light shows, or auroras, that accompany these encounters).

[snip]

While the impacts of past solar storms may see benign compared to the likes of Hurricane Katrina, the consequences of future spikes in solar activity could be much more extreme. Just as buildings and infrastructure along coastlines create increased vulnerability to hurricanes, our ever-increasing reliance on technology has made us more and more susceptible to the dangers of solar storms. For example, power grids have become more efficient in running electricity networks, but in doing so have become more vulnerable to the potential damages from space weather that might take many months to years to fix. Take a minute and think about how your life -- and everyone else's -- would be affected by an extended, indefinite period without electricity. Not a pleasant thought.

For additional context, according to the NAS report, the cost over just the first year following a severe geomagnetic storm could be as high as $2 trillion (the report doesn't discuss loss of life) -- and NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. In comparison, the costs to date of Hurricane Katrina are estimated at $81 billion to $120 billion.

The New Scientist article questions whether the U.S. would ever bounce back from a catastrophic solar storm. A related editorial notes that "politicians are unlikely to react to warnings of possible space weather catastrophes. Perhaps more traditional ways of catching their attention -- devastating loss of lives and money -- will do the trick." I find it difficult to disagree.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2009/04/do_solar_storms_threaten_civil.html

I think in the NS article i read on this it said that if US transformer capacity was knocked out, you'd be looking at months if not years to restore electricity - simply because there isn't the scope to repair/rebuild quicker....

[quarky]

Another major threat to western civilization is eastern civilization.



Oh yeah...and ticks.
Ticks are spreading fast, and pose a grave threat. Lymme disease is the tip of the iceberg.

[MG1962]

Another major threat to western civilization is eastern civilization.





So what does that make the southern civilisation...chopped liver :eek:

[shadron]

The Yellowstone Super Volcano

It probably won't happen for hundreds or possibly even millions of years - but there is one little scary fact : It's long overdue.

A supervolcano refers to a volcano that produces the largest and most voluminous kinds of eruptions on earth. The actual explosivity of these eruptions varies, but the sheer volume of extruded magma is immense enough to radically alter the landscape and severely impact global climate for years, with a cataclysmic effect on life . The term was originally coined by the producers of a BBC Popular Science programme in 2002 to refer to these types of eruptions.

Scientist have discovered that the ground in Yellowstone is over 70cm higher than in was in 1923 - indicating a massive swelling underneath the park. The reservoir is filling with magma at a staggering rate. The volcano erupts with a calendar-like cycle of every 600,000-650,000 years. The last eruption was more than 640,000 years ago - we are running late.

If Yellowstone were to erupt full blast - some estimates say half the country would be covered in ash... up to 3 feet deep.Let's debunk this one.

Tell me - if it happens from 600,000-650,000 years, is 640,000 really overdue? But even then...

The Y hotspot has been moving northeast from near the corner of NV, ID and OR for 17 million years now, and in about 20 million years it will have rototilled across Montana and start beating up on Canada - sayonara, Yellowstone. In that 17 million years it has had more then 140 eruptions, but only 12 of which are believed to be major caldera eruptions. That's an average of about one every 1.4 million years. It happens that the last three major eruptions happened at 2.1, 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago; that's on the average 700,000 years between eruptions, including the current slowly increasing quiet interval.

For some reason everyone thinks they happen at 600,000 year intervals; that is why they declare the time since the last one to be "overdue" It's a nice round number, easy to remember, I guess. But that doesn't cover the last non-violent eruption, which merely coated the floor of the caldera (most of the park) with that beautiful yellow rhyolitic lava. This long-term, oozing Hawaiian-style eruption occurred from 120,000 to 70,000 years ago. So all this squawking about "overdue" is a crock, and the most likely outcome of an eruption anyway is for the oozing type that happened in the near past.

Yes, the ground has risen in amount of single digits of feet. And sunk as well. Earthquake swarms happened the winter before last, and last winter, but many are also known in the past 100 years. In conclusion, nothing points to an imminent disaster.

The evidence for huge caldera explosions has only been gathering for the last 50 years or so, and didn't make it into the public awareness but for about 15 years now. In that time, 14 major documentaries and docu-dramas about Yellowstone blowing up have been produced, some good and some bad, but all based on the belief that it COULD happen in the next few years. They're right, it could. Changes are in the 1 to tens or hundreds of thousands per month with no way to predict a rising or falling number into the future.

[nimzov]

Brane collision. :boxedin:

[MattTheTubaGuy]

what about Lake Taupo, which has an eruption every 1,000 years or so, and the last eruption was 1,800 years ago. (the biggest eruption in the world in the last 5,000 years). I would call that a little bit overdue, and much more worrying than Yellowstone.:)


What about Lake Taupo in New Zealand?
Taupo is a supervolcano (for those who don't know, there is other supervolcanoes), that had a massive eruption about 27,000 years ago, covering a lot of the North Island with 200m of ignimbrite!

since then there has been 28 eruptions, with one roughly every 1,000 years.
the last eruption happened 1,800 year ago, and was the biggest volcanic eruption on earth in the last 5,000 years.

eruptions every 1,000 years, and last one 1,800 years ago, that sounds like it is horribly overdue for another eruption!:)

[shadron]

East or West Coast Tsunami / Megatsunami
An earthquake fault joff of California (discussed above) could generate a major earthquake and a tsunami threat that would strike so fast - most coastal residents would not have any time to escape.The fault a deadly "1,2" punch, first the earthquake would level parts of the coast - and then with little to no time to act - the tsunami would already be there. The possibility of a west coast tsunami (in Washington/Oregon mainly) is not to be dismissed. The Pacific plate is subducting under the NA plate

off the coast of WA/OR, building up the Cascades, and is a danger area for earthquakes. Subduction zones are very positive for tsunamis; the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia was just such a quake. This is a "not if but when" situation; records in Oregon and Japan note that one happened just 400 years ago which uplifted the Oregon coast some 8 meters, and caused a 4-6 meter tsunami in Japan.

The "supertsunami" that has been predicted for the American west coast is more problematic. The Discovery channel has coined the term supertsunami to be a tsunami caused not by plate movement as with an earthquake, but rather one caused by a landslide either underwater or entering the water. It is a "super" because these can be disastrous; 500 meter waves from a landslide in Lituya Bay in Alaska swept the shores clean to that height.Note, however, that Lituya is a closely enclosed compound. So far so good, except for "supertsunami".

The thought is that the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of Las Palma in the Canaries provides just such an opportunity for an Atlantic ST. The volcano is a strato-volcano, meaning its flanks have been built up over time and eruptions with layers of weakly consolidated ash, cinder and some lava deposits. There is a nice westward facing slope that suffered a transverse slippage of some 12 feet during an earthquake 50 years ago. It is held in place by thin igneous intrusion dikes, but those same dikes are trapping hot water that may provide lubrication when liquefaction occurs during some future quake. The Discovery channel's disaster epic about this predicts a supertsunami spreading across the Atlantic, and Florida, like Banda Aceh, being rolled over by a 30 meter wave. It could devastate from Nova Scotia down into Brazil.

Another possibility for such a supertsunami occurs in Hawaii, where a slope of Mt Kilauea could collapse and send a tsunami into Honolulu.

There are several problems with this. The best energy transfer occurs when the impedances between the source and the medium match. This happens very well for earthquakes; their periods and those of tsunami waves are roughly equivalent. Landslides don't match as well, so not as much energy gets transferred, more goes into turbulence. It is not clear that waves of the size could traverse the relatively open Atlantic Ocean as easily as they could the Pacific. The geology of the volcano is disputed; in particular, the site www.laspalmatsunami.com (http://www.laspalmatsunami.com) and Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis at www.drgeorgepc.com (http://www.drgeorgepc.com) beg to differ. There are even some accusations of conflict of interest among some of the scientists interviewed for the show.

[macdoc]

I have an issue with the title as it's vague....

An earth buster meteor or a nova / super nova going off nearby are clearly the "biggest" in terms of scale next to say the end of the universe ( the big bounce)

There are two parts to the premise....

Scale.....what represents a sizeable threat
Frequency ....what represents a realistically / statistically likely event.

A 1 KM bollide has a certain destructive power and a certain frequency.

A Super volcano as well.....

A massive tsunami ( East or West Coast US )

Without some sense of scale or frequency I think it's all idle chit chat.

For instance....a West Coast big one in earthquake / Tsunami is for sure a matter of when not if.

The scale ? Does 9+ represent a threat to local civilization??

Santori to name one potential super/v is also a matter of when not if....it certainly threatens a good chunk of European civilization and world weather..

None of these are extinction events or even unrecoverable.

Bollides the size of the dinosaur event certainly could be the latter....
smaller ones would not.

A volcanic episode that endured in wide spread regions for centuries or millenia ( Siberian traps etc ) might alter the atmosphere and hydrosphere in such a way we could not survive in any numbers if at all. ( 95% of life was gone if I recall )

So I think you need a scale....

World buster ( super nova etc )

Life buster ( big enough bollide, long enough volcanism )

Continent buster ( either of those on a smaller scale including the likes of Yosemite or the Chicxulub crater tho the latter could be in category 2 )

Then down the scale massively destructive but survivable as species
etc down as far as the Siberian comet/meteor
- the events noted like east or west coast NA tsunami, single big volcanic events of limited duration.
etc.

I think the lower end is something in the Hiroshima destruction scale so perhaps the Indonesian quake/Tsunami falls into that category.

Where human intervention in the planet falls?? :boggled::confused:

[andyandy]

I have an issue with the title as it's vague....
So I think you need a scale....

World buster ( super nova etc )

Life buster ( big enough bollide, long enough volcanism )

Continent buster ( either of those on a smaller scale including the likes of Yosemite or the Chicxulub crater tho the latter could be in category 2 )

Then down the scale massively destructive but survivable as species
etc down as far as the Siberian comet/meteor
- the events noted like east or west coast NA tsunami, single big volcanic events of limited duration.
etc.

I think the lower end is something in the Hiroshima destruction scale so perhaps the Indonesian quake/Tsunami falls into that category.


True. I'd be interested in the probability estimates for all of them...
It's also interesting to speculate how robust western civilisation is to various shocks - as we get ever more inter-connected, something that significantly affects the US or Japan will have massive ramifications globally.

Just restricting speculation to the high likelihood events - (ie. quite possibily going to happen in the next 100 years) - both the solar flare/CME threat and big volcano threat seem to have the potential to really significantly affect global civilisation. A massive Tokyo earthquake is also likely. And then of course the slower effect of climate change over a hundred years also presents a pretty big impact threat....

[DC]

western lifestiyle, but i guess that goes into globalwarming.

[macdoc]

western lifestiyle

infestation of a super bug.....Homo destructis :rolleyes:

6th great extinction event in progress...

[Delvo]

Earthquakes, tsunamis, and (super)volcanoes are too local and temporary to have a real effect overall. Meteorites can have a more generalized/widespread effect, but the bigger they are, the less likely they are. Global warming, although certainly wider in geographic scope, is too slow to matter in the big picture. (Yes, it's depressing to me, personally, to think of losing real winters like I've always known, but people in the future will be doing just fine in a slightly warmer world and wondering how in the world people of our era could ever have thought that the creation of the warm world THEY have always lived in was supposed to be a bad thing.)

The real problem which is pretty much sure to strike us eventually is worldwide damage to soils and fresh water supplies, reducing the land's ability to support life, combined with the fact that we tend to expand the population until whatever resources we can get are expended (same as any other species, except that we can get our hands on more resources and cause greater environmental harm in the process of doing so). Most of the modern Occident might not have it as bad as the poorer, less "developed" countries with higher population densities and reproduction rates, but even if they're the first to reach the point of "the land just can't support all these people anymore", it will still happen to us eventually... and in the mean time, their problem will become our problem.

The worse things get there, the more our countries will feel obligated to try to help, but that will drain our resources even faster while only making the problem in those other countries even bigger and deeper anyway (because it's population-based and we'd be "helping" them prop up their populations).

Or if we somehow refuse to contribute to their problems like that, we'll face an ever-growing swarm of humans relocating from their eroded, salt-sown, dessicated homelands to ours, which will artificially inflate our countries' populations and thus hasten the same fate for our own lands. And if we want to keep them out to keep our countries' populations under control (so we can either destroy our lands more slowly ourselves or maybe even straighten out our act and avoid doing so), we'll have to build huge weaponized walls over the land between our their countries and ours and man them with armed people who are willing to shoot, and sink their boats and rafts on sight anywhere near our coasts (or at least capture them and boot them back to their home countries, knowing what doing so means for them). And that's just not going to happen because we don't have the will to do it.

Even if it did, it could still mean we'd end up destroying our own lands eventually anyway, just like theirs, only more slowly. It can be avoided, but it almost certainly won't be, because it requires doing all three of these things, each one of which is pretty unlikely individually and is currently not being done yet:
1. Any country that's destroying itself, leave it alone to do so; no attempts at charity
2. Completely lock out the immense stream of people that will then try to get in here
3. Improve our own environmental management and quietly shrink our own populations to avoid ending up the same as them later on

What will happen otherwise? The same as for any other overpopulated species when the resources start running out: a sudden and painful crash down to a more sustainable population level. But for us, that level is about the level that we had when we were all hunter-gatherers. Compared to our current population, that's a pretty big downward change, so I'd say the uncontrolled process of getting there counts pretty well as a disaster.

[Complexity]

andyandy - Please list the unnatural threats that you are aware of.

[andyandy]

andyandy - Please list the unnatural threats that you are aware of.

Is this a pedantry on the idea that all man-made threats are also "natural" - insofar as they have an organic origin (ie us)? Or just a question to extend the debate? ;)

Some man made threats - well, the big ones are all aggression related - cyber warfare, terrorism, nuclear war etc etc....

[Complexity]

Is this a pedantry on the idea that all man-made threats are also "natural" - insofar as they have an organic origin (ie us)? Or just a question to extend the debate? ;)

Some man made threats - well, the big ones are all aggression related - cyber warfare, terrorism, nuclear war etc etc....


I'm objecting to your unnecessary use of the term 'natural', since there is nothing apart from nature, nothing that is not natural.

Your use of the term implies a distinction that does not exist.

[andyandy]

I'm objecting to your unnecessary use of the term 'natural', since there is nothing apart from nature, nothing that is not natural.

Your use of the term implies a distinction that does not exist.

So, should i have ammended the title to read

"Biggest natural (in the commonly understood usage of the term and not including specific short term man-made threats such as nuclear war etc) threat to western civilisation?

Might have been a mouthful...;)

[Complexity]

So, should i have ammended the title to read

"Biggest natural (in the commonly understood usage of the term and not including specific short term man-made threats such as nuclear war etc) threat to western civilisation?

Might have been a mouthful...;)


Sorry, I'm being snarky today. I'd just as soon 'nature' and 'natural' be stricken from the language, they have so been taken over by the delusional, nasty, and just-plain-wrong.

[Cainkane1]

Another major threat to western civilization is eastern civilization.



Oh yeah...and ticks.
Ticks are spreading fast, and pose a grave threat. Lymme disease is the tip of the iceberg.
Karl Edward Wagner died of Lime disease.

[Xephyr]

The biggest natural threat to civilization ?

People.

We are our own worst enemies.

[quarky]

Earthquakes, tsunamis, and (super)volcanoes are too local and temporary to have a real effect overall. Meteorites can have a more generalized/widespread effect, but the bigger they are, the less likely they are. Global warming, although certainly wider in geographic scope, is too slow to matter in the big picture. (Yes, it's depressing to me, personally, to think of losing real winters like I've always known, but people in the future will be doing just fine in a slightly warmer world and wondering how in the world people of our era could ever have thought that the creation of the warm world THEY have always lived in was supposed to be a bad thing.)

The real problem which is pretty much sure to strike us eventually is worldwide damage to soils and fresh water supplies, reducing the land's ability to support life, combined with the fact that we tend to expand the population until whatever resources we can get are expended (same as any other species, except that we can get our hands on more resources and cause greater environmental harm in the process of doing so). Most of the modern Occident might not have it as bad as the poorer, less "developed" countries with higher population densities and reproduction rates, but even if they're the first to reach the point of "the land just can't support all these people anymore", it will still happen to us eventually... and in the mean time, their problem will become our problem.

The worse things get there, the more our countries will feel obligated to try to help, but that will drain our resources even faster while only making the problem in those other countries even bigger and deeper anyway (because it's population-based and we'd be "helping" them prop up their populations).

Or if we somehow refuse to contribute to their problems like that, we'll face an ever-growing swarm of humans relocating from their eroded, salt-sown, dessicated homelands to ours, which will artificially inflate our countries' populations and thus hasten the same fate for our own lands. And if we want to keep them out to keep our countries' populations under control (so we can either destroy our lands more slowly ourselves or maybe even straighten out our act and avoid doing so), we'll have to build huge weaponized walls over the land between our their countries and ours and man them with armed people who are willing to shoot, and sink their boats and rafts on sight anywhere near our coasts (or at least capture them and boot them back to their home countries, knowing what doing so means for them). And that's just not going to happen because we don't have the will to do it.

Even if it did, it could still mean we'd end up destroying our own lands eventually anyway, just like theirs, only more slowly. It can be avoided, but it almost certainly won't be, because it requires doing all three of these things, each one of which is pretty unlikely individually and is currently not being done yet:
1. Any country that's destroying itself, leave it alone to do so; no attempts at charity
2. Completely lock out the immense stream of people that will then try to get in here
3. Improve our own environmental management and quietly shrink our own populations to avoid ending up the same as them later on

What will happen otherwise? The same as for any other overpopulated species when the resources start running out: a sudden and painful crash down to a more sustainable population level. But for us, that level is about the level that we had when we were all hunter-gatherers. Compared to our current population, that's a pretty big downward change, so I'd say the uncontrolled process of getting there counts pretty well as a disaster.



I must object to the "us and them-ness" of your post.

The U.S., for instance has lost its topsoil faster than any other country on Earth. Our assured productivity is suspect. We make few steps to ensure it. We're on the same path as all the other, older civilizations that have squandered their resources...only faster.

We might look better now, but that's because we aren't as old, and we have more land to destroy.

We're all in the same boat.

The biggest threat to western civilization might well be that we think our threats are independent from the threats to all civilization.


(Oops. That was more profound than I intended.)

[Third Eye Open]

Islam.

[macdoc]

Back on topic :rolleyes:

Timely article

Ash cloud reminds us that we should all be afraid of volcanoes

Eyjafjallajökull's giant cloud of ash is a nuisance, but a supervolcano's catastrophic eruption could threaten the fabric of civilisation, says Kate Ravilious.



By Kate Ravilious
Published: 7:31AM BST 16 Apr 2010


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7596395/Ash-cloud-reminds-us-that-we-should-all-be-afraid-of-volcanoes.html

[Safe-Keeper]

Norwegian airliners are suffering badly as a result of the ash. As far as I understand, air traffic is soon to reopen, but according to an expert, the airliners would go bankrupt if grounded for two or three more weeks.

Think then of a cloud of ash paralysing air traffic for months.

[Soapy Sam]

Time.

[Foolmewunz]

Norwegian airliners are suffering badly as a result of the ash. As far as I understand, air traffic is soon to reopen, but according to an expert, the airliners would go bankrupt if grounded for two or three more weeks.

Think then of a cloud of ash paralysing air traffic for months.

I don't think "airlines going broke" is really of that calamitous a nature. Sure, it's not a pleasant thought, and there'd be a ripple effect in other industries on both the up and down sides of the supply chain and business spectrum, but it's not quite the same as the 100,000,000 people who'd be effected by, say, a Super Typhoon taking a sharp turn up the Pearl River Delta. (I'm using 100,000,000 as a low figure, as the UN has pegged the area as the world's first mega-mega-city, with a population of 170 million.)

Tsunamis are unlikely here, but something north of Java could cause one, and the Pearl Delta is widw open, with tens of millions living along the coast at or below sea level.

But even that is a localized, if huge and catastrophic, event. A super-volcano or asteroid/meteor/comet strike is a much more likely culprit if we're talking about Hollywood style disasters (unless, of course, there really are Giant Killer Tomatoes, in which case I vote for GKT). A dinosaur-comet, darkening the earth for a single growing cycle might be sufficient to irreversibly harm the planet. There'd be survivors, but we'd be in a dystopia of the Mad Max or Waterworld sort.

[Rolfe]

I think we have to distinguish between an event which would be catastrophic for a particular localised area, no matter how large or populous, and an event that would lead to the breakdown of civilisation across the planet. Yellowstone erupting, for example, would be a huge tragedy for the USA, and no doubt other countries would pitch in to help, but if that was all it did, it would be a mere ripple. However, if the resulting global cooling caused a catastrophic drop om temperatures and worldwide failure of harvests, the result could be the end of civilisation as we know it.

"The year without a summer" was, what, 1816? What was the population of the globe then? How many large cities totally dependent on produce being shipped in did we have? What percentage of the population was engaged in work unrelated to food production?

What would happen now if we had a repeat of these crop failures, or worse?

Rolfe.

[gobnait]

Can I swap Clive Cussler books with you lot please. You seem to have read them all and there's stll a few I'm missing. :D

[Foolmewunz]

Can I swap Clive Cussler books with you lot please. You seem to have read them all and there's stll a few I'm missing. :D

Oooh, another squirrel for the stew! Hey, everyone,... Fresh Meat!



Naaah, we can't read. We just all watch The Discovery Channel and its ongoing series called, OMG, We're All Gonna Die, No Really, This Time We Mean It


Oh and Welcome aboard. Drop into the "Welcome" thread and introduce yourself. Tell 'em I sent you.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=5837386#post5837386

[Dats]

Drop bears

[CORed]

The possibility of a west coast tsunami (in Washington/Oregon mainly) is not to be dismissed. The Pacific plate is subducting under the NA plate

off the coast of WA/OR, building up the Cascades, and is a danger area for earthquakes. Subduction zones are very positive for tsunamis; the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia was just such a quake. This is a "not if but when" situation; records in Oregon and Japan note that one happened just 400 years ago which uplifted the Oregon coast some 8 meters, and caused a 4-6 meter tsunami in Japan.

The "supertsunami" that has been predicted for the American west coast is more problematic. The Discovery channel has coined the term supertsunami to be a tsunami caused not by plate movement as with an earthquake, but rather one caused by a landslide either underwater or entering the water. It is a "super" because these can be disastrous; 500 meter waves from a landslide in Lituya Bay in Alaska swept the shores clean to that height.Note, however, that Lituya is a closely enclosed compound. So far so good, except for "supertsunami".

The thought is that the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of Las Palma in the Canaries provides just such an opportunity for an Atlantic ST. The volcano is a strato-volcano, meaning its flanks have been built up over time and eruptions with layers of weakly consolidated ash, cinder and some lava deposits. There is a nice westward facing slope that suffered a transverse slippage of some 12 feet during an earthquake 50 years ago. It is held in place by thin igneous intrusion dikes, but those same dikes are trapping hot water that may provide lubrication when liquefaction occurs during some future quake. The Discovery channel's disaster epic about this predicts a supertsunami spreading across the Atlantic, and Florida, like Banda Aceh, being rolled over by a 30 meter wave. It could devastate from Nova Scotia down into Brazil.

Another possibility for such a supertsunami occurs in Hawaii, where a slope of Mt Kilauea could collapse and send a tsunami into Honolulu.

There are several problems with this. The best energy transfer occurs when the impedances between the source and the medium match. This happens very well for earthquakes; their periods and those of tsunami waves are roughly equivalent. Landslides don't match as well, so not as much energy gets transferred, more goes into turbulence. It is not clear that waves of the size could traverse the relatively open Atlantic Ocean as easily as they could the Pacific. The geology of the volcano is disputed; in particular, the site www.laspalmatsunami.com (http://www.laspalmatsunami.com) and Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis at www.drgeorgepc.com (http://www.drgeorgepc.com) beg to differ. There are even some accusations of conflict of interest among some of the scientists interviewed for the show.

A tsunami hitting the east coast and/or Gulf coast of the US would be pretty bad, because there are so many people living on barrier islands. It would be just about impossible to evacuate these people on the few hours notice (at best) we would get for a tsunami. fortunately, the Atlantic is not nearly as seismically active as the Pacific, but there is that Canary islands volcano, as well as possible earthquakes and volcanoes in the Caribbean as possible initiators. While the probability of a large tsunami on the Pacific coast is much higher, evacuation is a lot easier, because there are no barrier islands, and most of the US Pacific coast has a pretty steep gradient, so for many people, it would just be a matter of walking or driving uphill a short distance to get out of the way. Of course, the property damage could be staggering.

[macdoc]

I think Canary Island represents the most dangerous near term threat - far higher than the Indonesian quake/tsunami due to the US seaboard vulnerability..New York's funnel shaped river system in particular. Lower Manhattan is only 3m above sea level and is way vulnerable to tsunami and hurricanes ( it's overdue on the latter ).

The other is the West Coast US/Canada for earthquake/tsunami combo.

Down the scale for near term is a super volcano in Europe,

Bolides sized large ?? :jaw-dropp:boxedin::scared:

[Miss_Kitt]

I seem to be thinking in a different direction than most. I look at the speed of travel, the movement of produce, raw materials and manufactured items across the globe, and the disruption of long-existing biomes,and I come up with: Devastating pest, either macro or micro -scopic. Perhaps its a plant blight introduced into the world's largest producers of a staple crop; perhaps it's an insect-borne disease that spreads through the world's tropical cities; maybe it's a new, more virulent and contagious form of fungus that can cause lethal lung and brain infections.

We already have that starting up here--BC has a variant of a usually-tropical fungus that is killing otherwise healthy young people. We don't know exactly how or where people get exposed, because of the long incubation period; but it's not showing up as far south as northern CA. Google on "deadly fungus Northwest" and read up: it has gotten a lot more common and more dangerous in the 4 years I've been following it.

That, like avian influenza, seems to still be limited to "primary" infections--that is, the person who becomes ill was exposed to the source contaminant. Diseases, however, have a long history of adapting to become contagious person-to-person. Once that happens with something with a long incubation period and high lethality, we are in big trouble! The loss of life and productivity from those who are ill will be high; the resulting panic and draconian restriction of trade, travel, and normal life will do even more damage.

Then let's assume that, say, the senior Chinese government / party officials start dying. What kind of political instability will that produce? What if North Korea decides that this is all part of some Sinister Plot to kill the Divine Ruler? What if Iran decides that the only way to stop this plague is to destroy Israel with a nuclear strike? There is an historically demonstrated point at which the population of a plague zone comes off its collective rocker.

It is hard for us to even grasp the level of devastation that Europe suffered after the arrival of the Black Death. What kept it from wiping out the entirety of Western Civilization was that travel was relatively infrequent and invariably slow. That let the most virulent forms "burn itself out" in smaller pockets of population. We do have improved medical care; but we are also more able to generate resistant organism than ever before.

Wow, now I want to eat ice cream, sing sad songs, and drink heavily while Awaiting the End!

[bit_pattern]

See Rockstrom et al, Nature 461, 472-475 (24 Sept 2009)

You can read about Ray Pierrehumbert's take on it at Stevve Easterbrooks blog

Can't post links but check out 3w dot easterbrook dot ca/steve/?p=1638

The imag there is quite telling imo

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Zombies.

[macdoc]

smart assed felines :garfield:

[Shadowdweller]

smart assed felines :garfield:
Catastrophe! (Subdivide as appropriate)

[bit_pattern]

Since I can post links now

Humans are a form of life, and are altering the climate in a major way. Some people talk about humans now having an impact of “geological proportions” on the planet. But in fact, we’re a force of far greater than geological proportions: we’re releasing around 20 times as much carbon per year than what nature can do (for example via volcanoes). We may cause a major catastrophe. And we need to consider not just CO2, but many other planetary boundaries – all biogeochemical boundaries.

But this is nothing new – this is what life does – it alters the planet. The mother of all planet altering lifeforms is blue-green algae. It radically changed atmospheric chemistry, even affecting composition of rocks. If the IPCC had been around at the end of the Archean Eon (2500 million years ago) to consider how much photosynthesis should be allowed, it would have been a much bigger question than we face today. The biosphere (eventually!) recovers from such catastrophes. There are plenty of examples: oxygenation by cyanobacteria, snowball earth, permo-triassic mass extinction (90% of species died out) and the KT dinosaur killer astreroid (although the latter wasn’t biogeochemically driven). So the earth does just fine in the long run, and such catastrophes often cause interesting things to happen, eg. opening up new niches for new species to evolve (e.g. humans!).

But normally these changes take tens of millions of years, and whichever species were at the top of the heap before usually lose out: the new kind of planet favours new kinds of species.

http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=1638

Click for image (http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/wp-content/planetary-boundaries.jpg)
Figure 1 from Rockstrom et al, Nature 461, 472-475 (24 Sept 2009). Original caption: The inner green shading represents the proposed safe operating space for nine planetary systems. The red wedges represent an estimate of the current position for each variable. The boundaries in three systems (rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and human interference with the nitrogen cycle), have already been exceeded.

[h.g.Whiz]

I think Canary Island represents the most dangerous near term threat - far higher than the Indonesian quake/tsunami due to the US seaboard vulnerability..New York's funnel shaped river system in particular. Lower Manhattan is only 3m above sea level and is way vulnerable to tsunami and hurricanes ( it's overdue on the latter ).

The other is the West Coast US/Canada for earthquake/tsunami combo.

Down the scale for near term is a super volcano in Europe,

Bolides sized large ?? :jaw-dropp:boxedin::scared:

I agree

[andyandy]

2) Major Tokyo earthquake flattening large parts of the nation's capital


seeing as this thread has been resurrected from the dead, it's probably possible to cross this one off the initial list (at least for the next few decades....) For all the destruction it doesn't seem to have had a massive impact on global markets or western civilisation....

[lomiller]

The biggest threat to western civilization is the growing disregard for science, legitimate experts and higher education.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7312/full/467133a.html

[Lothian]

Simon Cowell

[jayh]

I'd say the only one that is a serious overall threat to civilization is asteroid strike. Or possibly a radical disease epidemic.

Earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes are devastating but local, not a threat to civilization.

Climate change over the course of hundreds of years will alter civilization, but not destroy it. Some coastal cities might have problems or be abandoned (consider that the effective sea level in NYC has risen about 18" due to various factors including land sinkage in the past century or so without drastic effect). Some croplands will be lost, others will open up. Humans are very adaptable.

[Lukraak_Sisser]

I doubt even mega tsunami's are ever a threat to western civilisation. Be it pacific or atlantic, the damage will be both local and its main result will be the destruction of a number of cities and the people living there.
While emotionally horrifying and a humanitarian disaster, the end result is a small culling of a population that does not actually produce anything vital to our lifestyle.
There might be some industrial production dip, but our industries are often to deep inland to be truly disturbed and too widespread.
Our agriculture will be barely touched and since a large number of cities just vanished food shortages will actually be less likely.
I'd say that natural disasters hitting our ability to produce enough food are far more problematic.
Look at what happened when the oil prices rose and an utter luxury product like private gasoline cost more. Western budgets, especially in the US, could not handle that increase in costs and whole neighbourhoods suddenly could not afford their mortgages.
Now imagine what would happen if within a year all food prices would double (or more) due to a worldwide harvest failure.