Earth is COOKED: Warming oceans, melting ice caps and a super volcano
Mother Earth, we are sorry. Humans seem to be the most destructive species on the planet.
Can we not help our destructive ways? Our carbon emitting habits prove that. We are destroying the only planet we can call home.
This year’s hurricane season is proving itself to be one for the books. Ten consecutive storms have reached hurricane status in the Atlantic during the 2017 season. That hasn’t happened since 1893!
Peep the size of Maria compared to PR
Now hurricane Ophelia, which is the tenth hurricane to form in the Atlantic, is raising eyebrows as it heads towards Europe. Yes, Europe.
Reindert Haarsma, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, said in an interview with Newsweek,
“A number of [tropical storms] reach Europe, but usually they are weak systems. That they reach Europe with this strength, near hurricane force, is quite unusual.”
The storm won’t make landfall as a hurricane but it is said it may still pack hurricane force winds.
Will it ever stop and how will the next hurricane season greet us if the oceans keep warming? With grave catastrophe.
Especially since the leader of the free world, President Donald Dump, won’t consider global warming as a threat to humanity. He dubbed the Paris Accord.
Could you expect someone like him to know what is really good? Absolutely not. He doesn’t even know that he is president of the Virgin Islands. God help us.
Despite having only having 4 percent of the world’s population the US has contributed to one-third of the excess carbon dioxide that’s in the earth’s atmosphere. The US stands as the biggest contributor to carbon pollution in human history.
Global warming won’t only affect the climate, which will cause drought and longer and more intense heat waves. We are losing our ice caps. They are melting and appear as if they were never there.
Earth is cooking
Peep the rapid melting
This will directly affect our sea levels. According to NASA,
“In the next several decades, storm surges and high tides could combine with sea level rise and land subsidence to further increase flooding in many regions.”
Do the math, rising sea levels plus supercharged hurricanes equals devastation. It seems as if all we hear on TV is how we can donate to destroyed islands or states that were destroyed by flooding or powerful gale force winds.
The storms all gain extra power from the warming oceans. Imagine what a storm will look like 10, 20. or 30 years from now. You can expect more nations to be left in the dark and completely destroyed more often if we don’t make a change.
Puerto Rico is still suffering as they recover from back to back hurricanes. Although it is a territory of one of the most powerful nations in the world, most of PR still remains without power three weeks after Hurricane Maria hit. Maria made landfall at a category 5.
In other cooked news, there has been a huge hole the size of Maine which has opened up in Antartica in the Weddell Sea. It is fluctuating in sizes of up to 80,000 square kilometers.
That hole is big AF!
Autonomous float deployed in 2015 has resurfaced unexpectedly inside polynya & started transmitting data https://t.co/qnyTYRVoOy @NSF pic.twitter.com/JgfwdDtBoc
— The Antarctic Report (@AntarcticReport) October 12, 2017
The scientific name for the hole is called a polynya. There are two kinds of polynya coastal and open-ocean.
Coastal polynya form all the time and are a result of strong winds that blow ice out of the area. Open-ocean, on the other hand, forms because of rising of warmer and saltier water from below. The hole that is there now is open-ocean polynya.
This has happened before, 40 years ago. The hole back then was actually bigger – 250,000 square kilometers. Scientists don’t know why this phenomenon occurs and Kent Moore, professor of physics at the University of Toronto, told CBS, “It’s like an enigma on many levels.”
Although it is still too “premature” to blame the massive hole on global warming it definitely should be of concern as the ocean’s temperatures rise. Could we possibly see more of these holes appear in the Antarctic?
Antartica is undergoing drastic changes. The Washington Post reported an iceberg twice the size of Paris broke off the Pine Island Glacier. According to a recent study, warming oceans are undermining the importance of the floating ice shelf in West Antarctica.
Damnnn, Ice Scientists are Shook AF!
Moving on to matters that are out of our hands. This cooked situation involves a supervolcano threatening life as we know it.
The supervolcano, which lies secretly under Yellowstone park, is expected to blow sooner than expected. Researchers believe it could erupt within the next few decades.
We weren’t supposed to have to worry. Scientists thought we had thousands of years until the next major supervolcanic eruption. Nope, scientists say that there is potential for an eruption as early as the 2030s.
The Yellowstone supervolcano had an eruption 631,000 years ago. The magma pocket refilled quicker than expected. Once it explodes expect what scientists are calling a volcanic winter.
National Geographic reported that large amounts of ash and pulverized rock from the eruption will get lofted into the atmosphere and then fall back slowly to Earth.
Also, volcanic material and gases that linger in the atmosphere will block sunlight, resulting in a global temperature decrease.
According to analysis team scientist James Farrell of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in an interview with National Geographic,
“You’ll get ashfall as far away as the Great Plains, and even farther east.”
NASA believes the Yellowstone supervolcano is a greater threat to life on Earth than any asteroid.
Underneath Yellowstone Park lies a monster
Speaking of asteroids, one almost collided with our beloved planet on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. The asteroid is said to have whizzed by earth back in 2012 and came twice as close this year at an altitude of 27,300 miles.
That’s only a few thousand miles above where geosynchronous satellites chill. Every time Asteroid 2012 TC4 passes earth it’s affected by our planet’s gravitational pull. This makes it possible for it to eventually impact the earth.
The next time Asteroid 2012 TC4 is expected to pass again is in 2050. Scientists say that we’ll get lucky that year. The year we have to watch out for is 2079.
Rüdiger Jehn of the European Space Agency told AFP,
“We know today that it will also not hit the Earth in the year 2050, but the close flyby in 2050 might deflect the asteroid such that it could hit the Earth in the year 2079,”
The odds of an impact that year 1 out of 750. Sheesh, that’s only 62 years from now.
Peep the close call
Since we are on the topic of huge objects hurtling towards our planet, let’s discuss the out-of-control Chinese space station that is. The Tiangong-1, “Heavenly Palace 1,” which weighs 9.4 tons has fallen 185 miles in altitude.
The “Heavenly Palace 1” has been slowly making a decline and hurtling out of control towards earth for a year now. The big question is should we be shook? Yes and no.
The chances of space material actually hitting is highly unlikely, but still, you might be that dude to catch an antenna in his dome piece.
According to astrophysicist, Jonathan McDowell, in an interview with The Guardian, “chunks weighing more than 200 pounds could make an impact on Earth.”
Predictions have been made that the space station will crash to Earth somewhere between October 2017 and April 2018.
If you’re scared you can track the satellite here.
Looking on the bright side of life, scientists have discovered plastic eating worms that could possibly help save our planet.
Wax moth larvae, which are commonly used for fish bait, were found eating plastic. But how? There’s a reason why the little buggers are used for fish bait, they drive beekeepers crazy.
In the wild, you would find them in a beehive eating away at beeswax. According to the Guardian, a family of them made into Federica Bertocchini’s crib. Upon finding them in one of her hives she put the gang of caterpillars into a plastic bag.
The little fuckers ate their way out. “I went back to the room where I had left the worms and I found that they were everywhere,” she said. “The bag was full of holes.”
They are really eating the plastic. Lab tests conducted by the Spanish National Research Council and scientists at Cambridge University proved that 100 worms can devour 92 milligrams of polyethylene in as little as 12 hours.
Scientists are now trying to figure out if the worms are eating the plastic to escape or as a source of energy.