There is danger and danger. This damn Covid has paralyzed the world. Insupportable. Incidentally, let’s remember that, if it led to the death of more than 5 million people for 2020 and 2021 out of a total of 115 million deaths, during this same time, 18 million others disappeared from cancer, 2 million AIDS-related deaths (a total of 36 million deaths since the start), and 270 million new births have been registered.
We forget another danger, real, that one day, again, our planet will encounter another asteroid, as was the case in Mexico 66 million years ago with a devastating effect on the whole earth. The risk is not at all immediate, but in the past the falls of extraterrestrial rocks were numerous and destructive. In November 2003, the asteroid Didymos grazed the earth at 7 million kilometers, not much on the scale of the solar system. There are more than 2200 asteroids with risk factors. To prevent possible future disasters, NASA took off, on November 24, a probe in the direction of the moon of Didymos. Its objective is to test our ability to divert the trajectory of these dangers.
The excess of CO2 produced mainly by the consumption of hydrocarbons is a calamity. In order to better control the future, ever more energetic measures are fortunately being taken. Their main drawback is that they are slow to put in place, but everything is going in the desired direction, and an apocalyptic effect is not for tomorrow morning.
There is another completely underestimated danger. The volcanic problem originated when the Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. And the climate on the surface is not responsible…
For 100 million years, volcanoes released large amounts of gas into the atmosphere. The combined effects of volcanic gases and particles dispersed in the atmosphere have caused the disappearance of countless species by volcanic winters followed by an increase in the greenhouse effect by changes in the gaseous composition of the atmosphere.
We could see it very recently in La Palma in the Canary Islands: when the depths get angry, there are real consequences. And I must mention the eruption off the Tonga Islands a few days ago.
In 2010 it was in Iceland that things went wrong. Air traffic, far and wide, was suppressed for eight days, and the greenhouse gases were considerable: more than 150,000 tonnes of carbon per day.
There are 1400 active surface volcanoes in the world. About 60 of them erupt each year. Between 1150 and 1300 volcanoes eject hundreds of millions of tons of sulphate aerosols.
The past abounds with quite incredible situations: around 1500 years before our era, in Santorini, a spectacular eruption was a real cataclysm with the formation of a giant tsunami, which is said to be responsible for the disappearance of the Minoan civilization.
The best known eruption is undoubtedly that of Vesuvius in 79, which led to the destruction of the city of Pompeii. The explosion produced a column 30 km high, releasing the energy equivalent of 50,000 Hiroshima bombs.
In Sicily, Mount Etna, 550,000 years old, is one of the most active volcanoes in the world with around 80 eruptions in the 20th century.
On April 5, 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia emitted a column of ash that spread over an area of 1300 km around the volcano. They reached the stratosphere and caused significant drops in temperature, giving rise to the expression “icy summers”: the summer of 1816 was the coldest ever recorded in Europe.
All this seems more or less distant, but on the scale of the age of the Earth, it is obvious that cataclysms of this type will return. When?
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– We are dancing on a volcano
The Covid is at the center of our concerns, but the Earth has been at the center of many other dangers, and for a long time.
OpinionPierre-Marcel Favre