* * * * *
The end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
Today is turning out to be a good day, despite it being utterly destroyed by
2007 TU64 [1] that slammed into us at 3:33am Eastern.
Oh wait a second … I'm still here.
Okay, ripped the magnetosphere to shreds [2] as it passed by at 3:33am
Eastern …
Um … my cell phone is still working.
And so is this darned Intarweb thang.
So it apparently whizzed by at 334,000 miles [3] which is … well, the Moon is
only 250,000 miles away and it's managed to avoid slamming into us for
millions (or even a few billion) years.
So I guess the “Doomsday scenario” is bunk [4] and today really is A Good
Day™.
This is something I need to keep in mind as I read Bill Bryson's book _A
Short History of Nearly Everything_ [5]. The chapters about the Earth itself
make for some hair-raising reading, like the fact that the magnetic poles
flipflop on average every 500,000 years, and here it's been at least 750,000
since the last flip (or was it flop?). And then there's this bit about
Yellowstone National Park [6]:
> In the 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National
> Park, Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became
> puzzled about something that, oddly, had not troubled anyone before; he
> couldn't find the park's volcano. … In particular what he couldn't find was
> a structure known as a caldera …
>
> By coincidence just at this time NASA decided to test some new high-
> altitude cameras by taking photographs of Yellowstone, copies of which some
> thoughtful official passed on to the park authorities … as Christiansen saw
> the photos he realized why he had failed to spot the caldera: virtually the
> whole park—2.2 million acres—was caldera. The explosion had left a crater
> more than forty miles across—much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at
> ground level …
>
> Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano … the cycle of Yellowstone's
> eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one,
> interestingly enough, was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is
> due.
>
> “_A Short History of Nearly Everything_ [7]”
>
But I'm feeling optimistic today—I don't think we'll experience a magnetic
flip-flop or Yellowstone blowing up today.
Now tomorrow, on the other hand …
[1]
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2007%20TU24;orb=1
[2]
http://www.tu24.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=77
[3]
http://www.livescience.com/blogs/2008/01/25/end-of-month-asteroid-twofer-lessons-learned/
[4]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6fXpfE_D20&eurl=
http://www.randi.org/
[5]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076790818X/conmanlaborat-20
[6]
http://www.nps.gov/yell/
[7]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076790818X/conmanlaborat-20
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