What could be the end of the world
The last ten years of the XX century and the beginning of the XXI century have passed under our sign - the end of the world. Numerous publications in the media, documentaries and fiction films, books, TV shows created the impression that humanity simply dreams of perishing in fire, water, or some other element caused by the impending apocalypse.
Heavenly "Stones"
A particularly fashionable theme was asteroid hazard. 1979 - even then the movie "Meteor" was released, the plot of this film is simple to the point of banality: a giant piece of an asteroid that broke off after colliding with a comet flies to Earth; people are in a panic, a global catastrophe leads to chaos and only the strongest and most worthy survive. One of the last such film masterpieces was "Armageddon", the one in which a Russian cosmonaut in a hat with earflaps, with the help of a sledgehammer and such and such a mother, repairs the orbital station. In general, he is still a film …
All of this is pretty funny if it weren't so real. In the literal sense of the word, yearned (and what else explains the apocalypse in America and other countries?) At the end of the world, Western society began to take very active measures to survive after disasters.
Hundreds of Americans quit their jobs in cities, sell apartments and go to the mountains. They are called survivalists. In the mountains, they group together, forming communities, stocking up on food, water, seeds, livestock, medicine, fuel and whole arsenals of weapons.
Survival after the apocalypse has become a separate, albeit small, but stable business in the United States. Handbooks and manuals are being written on how to survive in the looming end of the world, courses and seminars are being held, training camps are being organized, and the sale of equipment and "safety stock" products is increasing.
Promotional video:
And to what extent is the asteroid threat really real? In fact, asteroids and meteorites occasionally arrive at Earth.
1490, February 3 - in the province of China Shanxi, a meteorite impact instantly killed 10,000 people. In the American state of Arizona there is a meteorite crater with a diameter of 1 240 m and a depth of 170 m. In addition, about 40 meteor craters have already been found on Earth, some of them more than 20 km in diameter, and the diameter of Sudbury crater in Canada is 200 km. Well, in the end, the well-known Tunguska meteorite, which in 1908 in Eastern Siberia "laid" the taiga on an area of 2,250 square meters. km. and its explosion was equivalent to the explosion of 500 nuclear bombs.
Researchers claim that if this monster arrived 4 hours later, it would wipe Petersburg from the face of the Earth. However, to this day, the scientific world has not come to an unambiguous conclusion that the Tunguska explosion was the result of the fall of a meteorite. And yet, for some reason, today they remembered the Tunguska meteorite, meteorites and asteroids and started talking about it. It was even hypothesized that 65 million years ago, an asteroid with a diameter of about 5 km was the cause of the death of the dinosaurs.
But the likelihood that a large asteroid will fall to Earth is rather low. First, in our time astronomy has a sufficient number of technical means to track such "space guests" even at the farthest approaches to our planet. Second, the scientific and technical potential of the developed countries of the planet today is such that with its help it is easy to destroy even a very large asteroid while still in space. Special international programs have already been developed; projects include asteroid safety systems. The matter, as they say, is small, with funding, which is still a bit tough, but it will be enough for astronomers to announce that a stone block of about a kilometer and a half in diameter is approaching our planet, as money is immediately found: everyone wants to live …
In general, asteroids do not need to be feared, especially since the asteroid cause, like the end of the world, does not quite suit scientists. Both dinosaurs at one time, and mammoths after tens of millions of years became extinct almost instantly (this is from a geological point of view). Giant cemeteries of fossil lizards around the world, mammoths frozen in permafrost with fresh grass in their stomachs do not quite fit into the consequences of an asteroid hitting our planet. A large celestial "stone" upon collision with the Earth would cause earthquakes, would raise millions of tons of dust, dirt, sand into the atmosphere. The sun's rays would not be able to heat the surface of the Earth, and the coming cold snap could actually freeze dinosaurs or mammoths with all sorts of pterodactyls and woolly rhinoceroses, but this would be done gradually, and not overnight.
But they died immediately, in huge masses, and with them tropical forests, insects, even microorganisms died. So it turns out that the reason for those prehistoric "ends of the world" is different?
Lithospheric apocalypse
Geologists and geophysicists believe that the apocalypse is … a natural process for our planet, repeating on average every 8-10,000 years. In short, their theory is as follows: the Earth consists of a heated semi-liquid body and a hard stone shell - the lithosphere, with a thickness of 50 - 70 km. This kind of watermelon maintains its axis of rotation until something unbalances the hard crust, and then it turns. On Earth, the position of the equator and the poles changes: where there were cold weather, heat sets in, and vice versa.
The lithosphere of our planet, according to the generally accepted theory of Wegener today, consists of huge lithospheric plates, as if floating in the plastic magma of the Earth's subcrustal layer. Various earthquakes are a result of local shifts of such plates, but a global shift is also quite probable, altering the face of the planet beyond recognition. What could be the reason for this shift?
A. Einstein once wrote: “In the lithospheric polar region, there is a constant accumulation of ice, located around the pole asymmetrically. The rotation of the planet affects these masses, creating a centrifugal moment, which is transmitted to the rigid earth's crust. When the magnitude of such a moment exceeds a certain critical value, it causes a movement of the earth's crust relative to the part of the Earth's body located inside … "Most of the scientific world considers the change in the ice mass at the poles to be the trigger of the lithospheric shift: the" ice dumbbell "under the influence of centrifugal forces tends to take a position perpendicular axis of rotation, putting tremendous pressure on the earth's crust. As soon as the ice mass at the poles exceeds a certain critical value, the lithosphere turns.
As it will be
The Flood, described in the Bible and other sources of almost all the peoples of the world, the one in which only Noah and his family were able to survive, occurred, according to archaeologists, about 9.5 thousand years ago. That is, there is a possibility that the next lithospheric crank is “not far off”. It should be noted that the change in the poles and, as a consequence, the climate on Earth will turn into a flood for earthlings.
The scenario of the impending apocalypse calculated on powerful computers is approximately the following.
Immediately after the shift, the ice of the Arctic Ocean and Greenland, under the influence of centrifugal forces, will begin to creep southward, at the same time melting intensively, and a giant wave will arise in the North Atlantic that will flood the densely populated east coast of America.
Meanwhile, powerful forces of inertia will begin to drive the water of the Atlantic from south to north along the coast of Europe. Warm ocean water will cause significant warming in northern, eastern and Russian parts of Europe, thick fogs and prolonged torrential rains. The water level in the Mediterranean Sea is catastrophically increasing: Mediterranean ports are being swept away by inertial tsunamis. Storms and floods will destroy the entire infrastructure of European civilization. Then the wave breaks into the Arctic Ocean and, deviating to the east due to the rotation of the planet, crashes into the West Siberian lowland, through the Turgai hollow floods the Aral Sea, the lowlands of Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, along the Kumo-Manych ravine it overflows into the Azov and the Black Sea …
Meanwhile, in the former east, the waters of the Atlantic through the Bering Strait will flood the lowlands of Eastern Siberia and the Far East, and the Atlantic will begin to overflow into the Pacific Ocean.
A terrible picture will appear before the gaze of the surviving humanity: the east coast of America is flooded, the midwest - also, only the Rocky Mountains and the Cordillera remain above the water. In the same way, under the water and lowlands of South America, severe frosts are raging throughout the southern part of the continent, because the south pole of the planet has shifted to the south Atlantic. All of North Africa and the Middle East is covered with water, above the surface of which only the Atlas Mountains rise.
Only the island ridges of the Alps, Pyrenees and Carpathians will remain from Europe. The Benelux countries, the north of France, Germany, the whole of Eastern Europe to the Urals will disappear, there is water, which theorists of the litho-catastrophe dubbed the "Russian Sea". The Atlantic extends to the islands of the Ural Mountains, through flooded Central Asia and the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates, it connects with the Indian Ocean.
In the region of Japan, there is a new North Pole, where Arctic frosts are raging. The equator passes approximately along the line of the Ural Mountains, which have now become islands, and it is 10 km smaller than before, since the Earth is not a perfect ball. The speed of rotation of the Earth increases due to the redistribution of mass, the day is shortened. All over the planet storms, storms, earthquakes and eruptions of old and new volcanoes shake the firmament. A catastrophically reduced humanity on the verge of death …
There will be no end of the world
To what extent is this entire catastrophic scenario real in the near future? Here the opinions of scientists are not unambiguous. Some claim that the apocalypse is about to come and there is no escape from it. Others, on the contrary, are convinced that the catastrophe can be prevented and can help in this, oddly enough, human pollution! Let us explain: global warming due to anthropogenic impact does not allow the ice of the Arctic and Antarctic to gain the very "critical mass" that is necessary to turn the lithosphere. But it is also unsafe to pollute nature, a compromise is needed, a kind of parity. Whether people will be able to maintain this parity, we will find out in this XXI century. Anyway, according to Taoist monks, the best way to sleep well is to hope for the best.