Timothy Birdnow

Vedddy Eeenterestink!

Nasa Discovers Mantle Plume Almost as Hot as Yellowstone that's Melting Antarctica from Below

The absolutely destroys AGW claims that Antarctica is melting because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And if true it's a disturbing thought; a supervoclcanic event has largely wiped life from this planet before.

250 million years ago the "Great Dying" of the Permian Triassic saw most life wiped from the Earth. It was far worse than the asteroid strike which killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It was caused not by a space rock but by a supervolcano erupting in Siberia over a period of years. It blotted the skies, poisoned the air and water, and made life nearly impossible.

It killed between 90 and 95% of all life on Earth.

So if we have a supervolcano in Antarctica melting the enormous ice sheet, and if it breaks out and erupts into the atmosphere, we are in big, big trouble. Not only is most of the worlds' ice tied up in the sheets of Antarctica, and thus sea levels will rise by an estimated 190 feet, completely inundating low-lying and even mid-lying land masses worldwide.

Of course, that is the absolute worst-case scenario. More likely this is a normal cyclical phenomenon and may lead to some ice melt in down there and maybe even some outgassing but little more than that.

Or not. It's happened in the past and it could happen again.

In the year 536 Icelandic volcanoes erupted, leading to the "year of darkness" in Europe and having lasting affects until 555. It destroyed the Irish civilization, which was as advanced as anybody at the time but wound up being a barbaric clan culture afterward. There was no tree ring growth at all in Ireland for three years - meaning near total darkness the entire time.

The affects could be seen as far away as Constantinople.

Is it any wonder the receding Roman empire completely fell apart by then? Or that barbarians were able to pillage at will?

That was a small eruption next to the one in Siberia at the Permian Triassic.

So who knows? It will probably not come to it, but at some point it will come to it. We live in a precarious world and are at the whims of fate much more than we realize. We like to think ourselves so powerful and wise, but one supervolcano, or major asteroid or comet strike, or giant solar flare, would lay us out flat.

That's when people turn to God. I would recommend we do that before Antarctica goes boom.

At any rate, the safest course of action is to settle the rest of the solar system, spreading out so a planetwide disaster doesn't strike everyone. But people are more interested in getting welfare checks and playing their stupid games (like Angry Birds or whatnot) than in planning for our fuure and pioneering new worlds. We aren't the same men who crossed the Atlantic.

A weak and corrupt Roman society was pushned into final extinction by one volcano in Iceland. How much worse will it be for us?

And we may help it along with nuclear weapons and biological agents and God only knows what else.

Maybe we've run our course? I'm sure the dinosaurs saw themselves as lords of creation too.

Or maybe God will just have had enough. If the Book of Genesis is any indicator, He did so once before.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:44 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 581 words, total size 4 kb.