[ life:revisited 2010 + 1 ]

So, last night me and the GrrlyGrl were up late, snacking on some delicious toasted waffles (yum), and we were watching the Discovery Channel. I love the Discovery Channel, and I also highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn something, and also anyone who wants to see the about a million ways our planet can be destroyed in an apocalyptic event. Last night, the culprit was a mega-tsunami, created by a close to a trillion ton landslide from La Palma island, in the Canary Islands region. Its active volcano, Cumbre Vieja, would cause this landslide to break off from the island, and go crashing into the ocean. The resulting wave, as hypothesized by many scientists, would reach as high as 650 meters (thats 2132.55 feet) high, with an initial speed of 720 km/h (.....roughly 448 mph..omfg..). Yeah. Thats right. This wave would then rocket into the open sea towards, yep you guessed it, our east coast. In fact, it would reach us in about 8 hours. After that, we would still experience waves of 50km in height (about 32 ft) and the wave would move about 20km (about 12 miles) inland. Along the entire east coast. Ouch huh! I am just amazed at the dimensions of the disaster, let alone if its going to happen tomorrow. I went to bed amazed, and happy I live in the Midwest, with the New Madrid Faultline. :) Sooooo, at work today, I looked up what else was on the good ole' Discovery Channel, and I found that they should change their name to the Apocalypse Channel. Mega-tsunamis, Hypercanes, firestorms, floods, knives, sharp sticks...looks like Mother Nature is out to get us now. Guess we should have used hemp a little more then trees after all. The naked hippies were right! But in all seriousness, I really don't know what to think about the actual events these shows describe. I am amazed by the destructive power of nature, but honestly, what could we do? Katrina showed that some people we couldn't help, and others wouldn't let us help. If something like this happened, we would have like 6 hours to evacuate an area of roughly 24, 000 miles. Imagine trying to do just New York. New Orleans at least had a day or 2, ya know? I guess we would just go on, but we couldn't blame FEMA or the government of Louisiana, like some people are doing, we would just have to kinda shrug, and try to pick up the pieces I guess. All these shows have proven that as much as we know about technology and science, the movie was right. We don't know jack, and we are still helpless compared to forces of nature. Pretty humbling, huh.