Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The End is Nigh!


Happy New Ye-- What the...?! Ruuuuuun!!!

Sure it's the end of the year, but it just could be the end! of! the world!, too.

The Discovery Channel today ran a happy little show called "Apocalypse How." Because what better way to ring in the new year than two hours of mass extinction scenarios, right?

In addition to the usual -- worldwide famine, plague, nuclear war -- they threw out the interesting idea of mankind meeting its doom buried under oceans of ash and magma courtesy of one of seven "super volcanoes" known to exist.

Turns out Yellowstone National Park is one of those.

And should that 45 x 35-mile cauldron of fire churning five to 15 miles beneath Old Faithful actually blow (likely 30 miles high at "several times the speed of sound") it would represent a blast 6,000 times bigger than Mount St. Helens.

Yeah. We'd be toast.

And they tell us Yellowstone has done just that at least once before.

What made me sit up and start saying my prayers, though, was one expert's line that the telltale signs it's about to blow would be the arrival of "hundreds to thousands of earthquakes a day."

And guess what the news has been reporting this week!

Personally, I'm still hoping for the nuclear thing so I can roam the wasteland in my supercharged 1983 Interceptor with a shotgun pistol strapped to my parachute pants. (It's all riding on you, Pakistan and India.)

I guess it could be worse... At least we have a magnetic field.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We must not allow a mineshaft gap!

Mrs. P said...

Parachute pants! LOL!!!

Anonymous said...

All this Catastrastroke business. Meteors and comets colliding with Earth.
All a bunch of Wolf-crying. When it hits, we'll never see it coming.
There's lot of money made off of warning us of impending doom.

CI photog

Anonymous said...

tee-hee, love Mad Max... gotta get my hubby some of those aviators

Splash said...

Yep. Great films. Everybody seems to like 2 the best, but strangely, for me, it goes 3, 1, 2 in terms of my personal-favorite ranking of the trilogy.