Nobody kills like Mother Nature. She is the undisputed master of terror—inventor of the spider and the giant squid, producer of the parasite and the flesh-eating bacteria. If Gaia is the source of all life, she’s also the cause of all death. And while death is a natural, necessary part of the circle of life, some of her methods seem like downright overkill; if we’re all going to die of old age, having the Earth explode and then drown itself in fire just seems a bit mean spirited, doesn’t it?
But hey, love her or leave her, you owe your life to Mother Nature, and you live all of that life on her very body. And judging by the following examples, she really fucking hates you for it.
THINGS WITH THE prefix “super-” are almost always fantastic: Superman? So much better than a regular man. Where would we be without him? Crushed beneath the heel of Lex Luthor’s Angro-bots, that’s where. Stunt comedian Super Dave? Just like a regular Dave, but five times more hilarious. Supersize it? Fuck yes! What do I look like, a guy who eats regular-size meals? You add “super” before a word and it’s like marketing crack. Super anything is great!
Just all around fantastic.
Really.
No exceptions.
Well, maybe one exception: the supervolcano. That’s not so great. If you were hoping it was “super” like Superman—a regular volcano given superpowers to protect humanity—it’s not. But it is sort of like supersizing: It’s a volcanic eruption so big the whole world can share! Finally, something that touches all of mankind!
…and turns them into screaming ash.
A supervolcano occurs when magma builds up below the crust of the Earth, but can’t quite break through. All the heat, the gas, and the pressure—it all keeps building up until the Earth just can’t take the pressure anymore and bursts. So to sum up: A typical volcanic reaction is like a normal person throwing a fit—a little eruption just to vent the pressure, but generally keeping the devastation to reasonable levels. But sometimes the planet just holds all that fury inside until it snaps. Except by “fury,” I mean burning rock, and by “snaps,” I mean superexplodes.
There have been only a handful of these supervolcanoes in all of history, but just those few have been responsible for mass extinctions, global weather changes, and sometimes even small ice ages. Supervolcanoes must, at the minimum, consist of at least 1,000 cubic kilometers of magma. That’s basically a small country’s worth of material, and it’s all lit on fire and flung through the air. The eruption would trigger massive earthquakes, the lava would burn through everything for thousands of miles around, and the ash would choke out the light from the sky. They even keep destroying after they stop: Supervolcanoes don’t leave cones like a normal volcano; they create massive calderas more akin to an impact crater, because so much mass is ejected that the Earth simply collapses around it.
Maybe it can be of some small comfort to you if you consider that the last supervolcano was a long, long time ago. Why, over twenty-six thousand years ago as a matter of fact! I can barely remember starting to write this sentence, so twenty-six thousand years is a lot longer than I can even comprehend. And if you’re anything like me, that’s enough time to make you feel safe—shielded by the buffer of history. It matters little that the second-to-most-recent supervolcano, over seventy-five thousand years ago at Lake Toba in Indonesia, caused a volcanic winter, triggering an ice age that lasted for more than a thousand years, killed off between 70 and 90 percent of the human race (depending on which estimate you use), and formed sulfuric acid in the fucking atmosphere (you know, that thing you breathe in, and live inside of? That was acid). Hey, just as long as it’s not happening right now, you shouldn’t have to worry about history. Because let’s face it, if you paid attention to history you’d never leave the house; that shit is terrifying.
• Duck and cover
• Sit and spin
• Bump and grind
• Whatever else distracts you for a brief moment from the burning inferno that you now call home
Wait, sorry, I’m getting an imaginary note passed to me here.
One second while I pretend to read this…
Historians call this the “Ostrich Defense” and some observers[1] note that this method has a 100 percent success rate.
Oh, awesome! Says here that a supervolcano could actually be about to erupt right now—right fucking now, right in the United States of America.
You might know ground zero: Yellowstone National Park, home of postcards that your grandparents send you, scenic vistas, Old Faithful, and, apparently, terror. The single most potentially destructive volcano on Earth, the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming, is now showing strong signs of becoming active again. It’s not only a proven supervolcano—Yellowstone has had previous supervolcanic eruptions, 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago—but it’s also a “geothermal hot spot.” Supervolcanoes and geothermal hot spots are like a disastrous peanut butter and a devastating jelly: The two don’t always go together, but they’re exponentially improved when they do. The hot spot beneath Yellowstone refers to the end of a gargantuan plume of magma, the molten rock that swirls around in the Earth’s mantle below the solid rock of the surface. Under ideal circumstances, that plume would peter out about fifty miles underground, but not in this case: Just the tip of this mantle plume is several miles wide, and it’s been sitting down there for thousands of years, slowly melting the underside of the Earth’s surface away, until it has eventually encroached to within a few hundred meters of ground level. But while the tip of this mantle plume is scary enough, you actually have to worry about the entire thing if it bursts. Just like an overinsistent teenager, what starts with “just the tip” will inevitably end with a full-on shaft. If any part of the plume breeches, the vast pressures beneath will force all of it out. And all there is right now is the thinnest veneer, a sheer G-string of dirt, really, that’s keeping that entire hot, smoking shaft of fiery death from spurting all over the Earth like the devil’s money shot.
The chief indicator that the Yellowstone Caldera might be becoming active again comes in the form of a recent “swarm” (worryingly enough, that’s actually the official term) of earthquakes registered there. At the end of 2008 there was a period of rapid-fire, low-level tremors in and around the Caldera—around eight hundred separate earthquakes in just under a week, which, if you’re counting, is 799 more earthquakes than it takes to scare the shit out of everybody under the best of circumstances, much less when they’re emanating from a giant organic time bomb like the Caldera. Robert B. Smith, an emeritus research professor of geology geophysics at the University of Utah, believes the unusually high earthquake activity could be a sign that the volcano is reawakening. Or, as Professor Smith himself puts it:
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah fuck fuck I wish I could run but there will be fire eeeverywheeere ahhhhhh.
Well, he was probably thinking that, anyway.
• Steamy Eruptions
• Sizzling Encounters
• Spurting Plumes
• Burning Love 3: Literal Edition
Considering that the minimum size for an eruption to be considered “supervolcanic” is 1,000 cubic kilometers, and the pool of magma beneath the Yellowstone Caldera is estimated to be 28 by 45 miles across, screaming panic seems like the most logical reaction. Now, I’m not exactly sure what those numbers translate to in kilometers, because I use God’s System of Measurement (which is pounds or ounces or, really, whatever we make up off-the-cuff here in America), but I’m pretty sure that’s equal to eight bazillion cubic kilometers of magma. And that, my friends, is eight bazillion more kilometers of flaming rock than anybody should be comfortable with.
Because volcanology is not an exact science, experts have little to no idea of what to expect from an active supervolcano. They believe that four signs, like metaphorical horsemen to the Rock Apocalypse (which would be the best metal band name ever) will herald its eruption. First, the ground will rise from the pressure of all that magma, then geyser activity will increase, swarms of earthquakes will register, and a large release of volcanic gases will occur before just before the eruption.
Database Error: Fart joke not found. Please insert Taco Bell reference for humor substitute.
So far, three of these four signs are present in the Yellowstone Caldera! It’s been named a High Threat for Volcanic Eruption by the U.S. Geological Survey, who went on record as stating that the eruption from Yellowstone would entail “global consequences that are beyond human experience and impossible to anticipate fully.”
That is without question the single most ominous quote ever to be issued from a government agency, and that’s coming from the Geological Survey Team! That’s the least threatening team that has ever been assembled short of the Super Friends, and if they’re issuing quotes so ominously epic that they’re almost biblical, well, I don’t want to say it’s time to panic… because that time probably passed about a year ago. This is more like “make your peace” time, if anything.
Volcanologists do say that, thanks to their advanced technology and years of study, they can give us something: About a week’s time to prepare. While that may seem an inadequate amount of time to try to figure out how to run away from an entire planet, at least you have a whole week to live in perpetual fear! An entire week! Why, that’s enough time to start a garden! That’s enough time to get over the flu! That’s enough time to buy and receive something from eBay! And hell, if you’re really lucky, that might be enough time to practice putting matches out all over your body in order to help brace yourself for the coming storms of fire that will consume all of your flesh, turn the air to poison, and kick off a nigh-eternal winter!
…
Or you could knit a scarf!
THE JAPANESE CALL it iminami, which means “the purifying wave.” They do this partly because it is a wave of such devastating strength that it completely erases the land of all impurities (impurities, in this case, being such blighting defects as your house, your car, and probably you, depending on how fast you can run and how well you float). But they also do this because they are much, much better at elegantly naming horrific events than the English-speaking world. We have a name for it too; we call it the megatsunami. Judging by the American tendency to just slap superlatives on existing terms, I guess we should just consider ourselves lucky that it’s not called the Biggie Wave or the Supersize Water Punch.
The concept behind the megatsunami is simple: If you throw a pebble into the water, you’ll see a reaction in the form of a rippling wave. If you threw 500 million tons of rock into the water, you’d be a total dick, but you would also see a wave of proportionate size… one so powerful that it jumps forests, snaps cities in half, and floods entire coastlines. But the phenomenon was predominantly thought to be a myth until just recently. See, scientists already know how tsunamis are triggered: Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other seismic events create waves that can crest at tens of meters high and hundreds of kilometers long that travel vast distances, surging onto land with unstoppable force. Conventional tsunamis, however, don’t really look like waves; they’re more akin to gargantuan tides, and the damage they do, though terrible, is mostly through flooding and not so much due to the impact of the water itself.
• Supervolcano
• Hypercane
• Megaquake
• Überdiarrhea
But in 1953 in Lituya Bay, Alaska, geologists searching for oil stumbled across something much, much worse. By taking measurements of the tree line along the coast, they came to realize that a cataclysmic wave had completely destroyed the area in recent history. Seeing as how the bay was mostly isolated from the open ocean, they were able to determine that a gargantuan landslide was the likely cause. Forty million tons of debris had to tumble into that bay in order to spawn a tsunami large enough to account for the destruction they were witnessing. This would be a wave unprecedented in recorded history. A wave with an initial surge height estimated at over 1,700 feet.
Armed with this dire new information about a terrifying and impending threat, the geologists decided to issue absolutely no statement whatsoever, addressed to nobody, which would have probably just read “fuck it,” if they had even bothered to give it to anyone in the first place.
“My God, I’ve discovered evidence of an entirely new scale of disaster!”
“We must tell the world!”
“That sounds hard…”
“You’re right. Screw it. Wanna beer?”
“That also sounds hard. Will you pour it into my mouth for, me?”
As the geologists in question whiled away their time—presumably playing a few games of grab ass and maybe frolicking hand-in-hand through a sun-kissed meadow—Lituya Bay was busy preparing another watery jump kick to the throat of reason. And only five years later, in that exact same bay, it happened again. An earthquake that measured 7.7 on the Richter scale caused a chunk of the Lituya Glacier to drop three thousand feet into the bay waters below. After the initial surge that topped out at 1,700 feet (that’s taller than the Empire State Building), a much more modest, practically meager wave with an initial height of only 1,000 feet swept across the bay, and out to sea. A local fisherman, Howard Ulrich, and his son were not only caught up in the ensuing megatsunami, but even managed to survive it—presumably by virtue of their giant, grizzly bear–sized balls and maybe some sort of Eskimo Magic. They reported being carried just behind the crest of the wave, which surged dozens of meters above the bayside cliffs, and over the local forest… while still in their fishing boat! Another survivor, Bill Swanson, gave this description to the local papers:
The glacier had risen in the air and moved forward so it was in sight. It must have risen several hundred feet. I don’t mean it was just hanging in the air. It seems to be solid, but it was jumping and shaking like crazy. Big chunks of ice were falling off the face of it and down into the water.
What does that mean? Not hanging in the air solid but rising several hundred feet? How did it raise itself above the mountain? Did it grow temporarily? Was it raising its hackles, like some sort of giant, angry, mountainous dog? How can you be so calm?! THE DOG MOUNTAIN SHOT A SKYSCRAPER OF WATER AT YOU!
When asked to describe what happened next, Swanson says he is largely unsure, because “the wave started for us right after that and I was too busy to tell what else was happening up there.” While it normally might be safe to assume that Mr. Swanson was “busy” futilely sobbing in the fetal position and cursing the wicked God that unleashes such horrors upon the world, one must keep in mind that Bill Swanson was an Alaskan native, and Alaska in the 1950s was basically a nigh-unsurvivable land of extreme temperature, severe terrain, and all-night grizzly bear mauling orgies. So in this context, it’s pretty safe to assume that Bill Swanson’s laconic statement that he was “too busy” to properly witness the largest wave in recorded history means he was probably rabbit-punching a Sasquatch in the stomach because it owed him money.
But surely this particular phenomenon is too localized and too awful to occur anywhere else in the world but the harsh land of Lumberjack Wrestling and Salmon Cola?
Of course it is! Breathe a sigh of relief, friend!
Now hold that breath for the rest of your life, because that was a filthy lie. These things happen all the goddamn time:
• Eight thousand years ago, a rockslide on Sicily’s Mount Etna caused a megatsunami that swamped three continents.
• Eight thousand years ago, one of the world’s largest known rockslides caused a megatsunami originating in the Norwegian Sea. Scientists have found sediment from the slide as high as 65 feet above sea level, and as far as 50 miles inland… in fucking Scotland!
Though these intervals sound like vast periods of time, geologically speaking they’re like blinks of an eye. Nature has megatsunamis like you would change the channel—it’s just not a big deal anymore. But as human beings, it’s hard to see much beyond our own lifetimes, and events thousands of years ago just cannot be conceived of as threatening. So let’s skip right forward to another megatsunami in recent history.
In northeastern Italy in 1963, a landslide into a lake above the Vajont Dam triggered a small, localized megatsunami that completely destroyed five nearby villages, killing two thousand people (some sources say more). The dam, one of the highest in the world, stood 860 feet high and towered directly above the town of Longarone. When 270 million cubic meters of earth collapsed into the waters at a speed of roughly 70 mph, the resulting megatsunami was said to be over 800 feet high. This, when combined with the already massive height of the dam itself, led to a wall of water crashing down upon the quaint village of Longarone from nearly a quarter mile in the air. It is said that due to the particular location of Longarone—sandwiched between two towering cliffs, with the dam at the far end of the valley—if you stood in the town and faced the wave at its peak, it would have blocked out the entire eastern sky. It is also said that if you stood facing the wave at its peak height, you were both entirely fucked and totally dead, and therefore quite unlikely to tell anybody about this whole “blocking out the sky” thing in the first place, so you might want to take that story with a grain of salt.
1. Pray.
2. Cry.
3. Get a head start on dog-paddling.
4. Jump in the air and flap your arms on the off chance you have secretly had the power of flight all this time and were not truly motivated to use it until now.
5. Complete 1/16 of a crossword puzzle.
Though that knowledge certainly takes just a little of the joy out of life, it’s not exactly world threatening. An Alaskan fishing crew here, a quaint Italian village there; it’s probably nothing that can affect you, right?
Your optimism is so endearing!
But no, at some point in the near future there will be a megatsunami—one so massive that it will leave entire continents drowned in its wake. Because right now, off the northwestern coast of Africa in the Canary Islands on the isle of La Palma, there is an entire volcano ready to collapse into the water. A 1949 earthquake split the island’s southernmost mountain, Cumbre Vieja, completely in half—opening a fissure that caused the entire shore side of the volcano to shift nearly 7 feet down toward the water. The endangered half of the volcano has an estimated volume of 1.6 million cubic feet, which gives it an approximate mass of 1.5 × 1015 kilograms. Basically, you know you’re in fucking trouble when the numbers used to explain how much shit you’re in need other, smaller numbers to explain them. In short, this fissure puts more than 100 cubic miles of land in danger of sliding into the sea at the next serious volcanic eruption, so it kind of sucks that it’s literally the most active volcano in the area. On the upside, this proves conclusively that God has a sense of humor. On the downside, your fear of dying a horrible death is apparently his favorite punch line.
• “Liquor? I hardly knew her!”
• “Because he was stuck to the chicken!”
• “I have a wife and kids!”
• “I want to live! I want to liiive!”
When the mountain falls, the ensuing wave will initially reach heights of more than 2,000 feet, but would likely settle out to a paltry 100 when it hits land… in New York, in Boston, in Florida—the entire eastern seaboard of the United States actually, as well as parts of Brazil, the Caribbean, and Canada. At that point, the wave would be moving at a speed of nearly 700 mph (that’s nearly the speed of sound) and with enough force to uproot entire cities like weeds, drag broken skyscrapers miles inland, and generally just erase life like God spilled a bottle of Wite-Out on the Western Hemisphere. The wave would travel nearly thirty miles inland, completely submerging the major population centers of the United States before dragging all debris—human or otherwise—out to sea when it’s drawn back. A weakened but still devastating wave would hit across the entire Atlantic seaboard, but the brunt of the impact is squarely on American soil.
The resulting death toll and damage would be devastating to billions of people, and the lasting economic impact would completely destroy the modern way of life, effectively sending everybody not drowned or crushed by waylaid cities directly back to the Stone Age. The new bodies of standing water, millions of corpses, and unsanitary conditions would most likely wipe out the rest of the survivors with disease, but these are Americans we’re talking about here, goddamn it, and there’s just no way they’ll be totally wiped out by one little son-of-a-bitch wave!
And that’s good, because thanks to the rippling effect, there are going to be ten more right behind it.
GLOBAL WARMING and climate change can cause any number of problems—from food shortages to drought to inclement weather—but they do not always work in such subtle, gradual ways. Changes in the environment don’t always function like a cancer, killing you slowly over a long period of time. Sometimes the environment just loses its damn mind, and that’s when an event called a hypercane can occur. If the normal consequences of a shifting climate are akin to a metaphorical disease infecting the world, a hypercane’s consequences are a metaphorical Bruce Willis: That is to say, if global warming might kill humanity slowly over a period of generations, a hypercane is going to tie a fire hose around the world’s neck and then throw it off an exploding skyscraper.
A hypercane is a hurricane on a global scale. With winds up to supersonic speeds, a hypercane doesn’t just dismantle and destroy what it touches—it utterly disintegrates it. They can be the size of a continent, the conditions that spawn them could also render them self-sustaining, and their long-term effects are beyond disastrous. In short, it’s like a hurricane on death Viagra: In every way it is bigger, stronger, and longer lasting than the worst hurricane you’ve ever seen.
Though it’s a long shot that a hypercane will ever naturally occur again (many theorize that hypercanes have been present for, if not responsible for, some major past extinctions), if it ever does happen, it will be what scientists refer to as a “planet killer”—which, incidentally, is one of the reasons scientists don’t get invited to many parties. I’m not saying that these scientists are exaggerating the threat; it’s just that there are more sensitive ways to deliver terrible news. Doctors dealing with terminal patients don’t break the traumatic news that a patient has cancer by telling them it’s “like the atom bomb of diseases;” they don’t tell AIDS patients that they have the disease equivalent of “a gun shooting you from the inside out;” and they don’t explain leukemia to terminal children by telling them that it’s “like the bogeyman lives inside your bones.” So scientists are a little tactless, sure, but unfortunately that doesn’t make their predictions any less true. While a compassionate soul would tell you that, in the event of a hypercane, we’d all go out peacefully in our sleep, dreaming of past loves and warm summer days, my mother taught me that honesty is the best policy. And in keeping with that philosophy, I should tell you it’s far more likely that not only would your skin be sheared off by a supersonic wind, but also it would afterward become a deadly storm-borne projectile that would probably continue on to impale your entire family.
Parkinson’s: Like poppin’ and lockin’ in hell.
Alzheimer’s: Like having tiny zombies feeding on your brain.
Herpes: Sex pimples.
It’s not like we didn’t have any warning, though, as 2008 was one of the most devastating hurricane seasons on record. Massively destructive individual hurricanes like Katrina and Rita in 2005 don’t even rank among the ten most powerful storms of all time. But you certainly can’t just dismiss this disturbing trend of increasingly stronger storms on the basis that they haven’t yet produced the strongest ones ever recorded—that’s like telling yourself that the ravenous pack of wolves following you for the past fifteen minutes are nothing to worry about because you saw a much bigger lion on Animal Planet that one time. It’s the strength of the overall weather systems that matters; since that is increasing, that can mean some very, very bad things down the line.
If you don’t like the idea of your own skin being used to dismember your loved ones, try some of the following: tips, in the event of a hypercane.
1. Don’t have a family.
2. Don’t have skin.
3. Those are your only options.
A hypercane can form when a significant expanse of water reaches a temperature of about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 25 degrees higher than the highest ocean temperature ever recorded. But just because we haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Some theories hold that a hypercane was partially responsible for the extinction period that wiped out the dinosaurs. The meteor impact at Chicxulub in what is now the Gulf of Mexico would’ve started it all, but the resulting superheated ocean could have spawned a long-lasting hypercane that would have ravaged the Earth for weeks on end. The really scary part about the formation of hypercanes is that, much like the world’s scariest bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, you can’t have just one: Any stretch of ocean superheated enough to spawn one hypercane would stay at that temperature long enough to spawn several more—so even though one is quite enough to kill the world just fine, it’s brought all of its friends along… just in case.
• Increased tidal activity
• More rogue waves
• Super-cell storm systems
• Twisters
• Complete disbanding of yacht clubs
A hypercane could vary anywhere from a measly ten miles in diameter to the size of an entire continent, but in the patronizing words of your ex-wife, “size doesn’t matter, honey, it’s how you use it,” because even the smallest hypercane would have the same planet-killing effects as a continent-sized storm. A hypercane has winds of over five hundred miles an hour—more than enough to rip the skin from your body, not just to dismantle a house but to completely disintegrate it, and to send entire cities hurtling through the air like a normal hurricane would send trees. For a better idea of how devastating this event would be, think of it like this: A hypercane moves the very air around you at about the speed of a typical airliner. So the odds of surviving a hypercane would be about the same as surviving on a planet where the entire atmosphere—the very air itself—consisted solely of jumbo jets traveling at top speed. Clearly, your basement ain’t gonna help much when you’re trying to breathe in airplanes.
As an added bonus, a hypercane would also have a plume rising twenty miles right up into space. So if you ever dreamed of being an astronaut—now’s your chance! You’ll most likely be some form of jelly when you achieve that dream, but hey, we all make sacrifices for our goals, right? That plume is the truly worrying part: It would raise water, dirt, debris, and of course the obligatory trailer parks twenty miles straight up into the stratosphere. For those of you coming from public schools, that’s like the bottom of space! This sudden influx of matter in the upper atmosphere would punch a hole right through the ozone layer and scatter everything formerly safe on the ground into orbit. On the plus side, suborbital trailer parks sound marginally more livable than normal trailer parks, but on the downside, the debris would then act as a superpollutant, blocking out the sun, poisoning the air, and triggering even further planetary devastation. The water and dust molecules introduced to this fragile area would also block the atmosphere’s ability to absorb harmful ultraviolet light. So hey, if you do manage to survive the actual hypercane with the power of clean living and intense prayer, you still get terminal space cancer if you ever see the sun again. Jesus, it’s like it not only wants to kill you, but also plans to take away everything good about your life if it can’t. The hypercane sounds so epically awful that it would have been equally at home in either science fiction or as a Care Bears villain—just out to steal joy away from the world.
• Stay away from glass.
• Seek shelter in a basement or small room.
• Have an emergency kit prepared.
• Don’t.
And just when you thought it was over—well, it’s quite possibly never going to be over. Because the extremely low barometric pressure inside a hypercane also gives it a nearly indefinite lifespan. For example, look skyward: See that giant spot on Jupiter, commonly called The Eye? The one that’s been there for thousands of years? Technically, that’s a hypercane. And if the conditions are exactly right, a self-sustaining infinite hypercane is also theoretically possible right here on Earth.
But hey, it’s not so bad. After all, the hypercane takes a lot to be triggered: It needs a large expanse of water rapidly heated to well over 100 degrees to form. Anything capable of achieving something like that is pretty unlikely to occur. It would take another form of serious disaster, like a worldwide rise in temperature (a “Global Warming,” if you will) or an asteroid impact like Apophis (see chapter 12) or an underwater supervolcano (see chapter 6) like on La Palma (see chapter 7)… to… shit.
Put on your screamin’ shoes, looks like we’re going hypercane shopping.
Observers are hungry lions.