Wednesday, 21 December 2011

2012… A practical joke? Or impending catastrophe?




These things in the 10th generation shall come to pass. The earth shall be shaken by a great earth quake that throws many cities into the sea. There shall be war. Fire shall come flashing forth from the heavens and many cities burn. Black ashes shall fill the great sky. Then know the anger of the gods.
                                                                                                           

                                                                                                             -The Sybilline Oracles.

The Mayan, Indian and Chinese calendars talk about it. Nostradamus, the Greek prophecies and oracles have all mentioned it. Even our modern day scientists and computer softwares have predicted it. So the question remains, when will we be facing doomsday or rather the bigger question, how is it going to happen? Over the past years, speculations have risen on the many ways our world may end. Ranging from a virus out break to an asteroid collision or even an alien invasion, many scientists and speculators have come up with plausible and implausible ways to our demise.

I had started this research and completed it over the course of one year and have gotten it validated by the various scientific communities out there. As we go along, we will see that these events, although being three separate events, could actually turn out to be a chain reaction of one single event.

Let us first start by looking at the earth. The earth’s land masses are made and separated by tectonic plates.  These tectonic plates are constantly moving and colliding with each other which form the earth’s landscape. 


For example, the Himalayan mountain range is formed by the collision of the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate. It is this continuous collision between these two plates that has been causing the mountain range to be growing over time. It is the same movements of these plates that also cause earthquakes. When the earth plates move against each other, the plate with more solidity tends to move downwards while the other is forced to move upwards. It is this friction caused by the forced movement that causes tremors and if forceful enough, earthquakes. But occasionally certain glitches occur.


 About 200-300 years ago, the Indo-Australian Plate (the subducting plate) which was colliding with the Burma Sub-plate (over-riding plate), part of the Eurasian Plate got stuck to each other due to high amounts of friction. The part of the plate which got stuck started moving inwards with the other plate while the major portion of it was still moving against it. This had caused a “spring like” effect on this plate. Just as how a spring lets go with such force after being tightly wound to its maximum point, the Burma Sub-plate had popped back up, raising the sea bed to about  41ft along the coast of Sumatra for about 3100 miles, causing the Dec 24th, 2004 tsunami. So you may ask, why should we worry about something which has already passed? Well, around the same time the previously mentioned plates got stuck, there were two other plates which did the same. This “sister” plate is located in the west coast of the Americas where the Pacific and North American plates meet. The problem is, not only is this plate still stuck, it has a larger land mass and is also situated in the Pacific ocean. When these plates let go, not only would it take 15 minutes for giant waves to wipe out North and South America, but it would generate waves that would travel across the Pacific and hit the Asian region too, creating a global catastrophe. These waves would be much larger than those of 2004 because of the volume of water it would travel through, the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. 

    Another problem which would arise from this earthquake is massive shockwaves. Shock waves travel in a circular direction. When these shock waves travel downward, they would cause tremors in magma chambers, causing the magma rivers to rise, triggering active volcanoes. Conveniently enough, the Ring of Fire, the region in which the largest portion of the world’s active volcanoes are situated in and connected by magma streams sits right under the collision point of the Pacific and North American Plates. 

So, large enough shockwaves would cause these streams in the Ring of Fire to activate.




 A similar incident had occurred back in August 26th, 1883 in the islands of Indonesia. When two colliding plates sent shockwaves to the magma streams, it had caused the magma to rise with immense force through a volcano called Krakatoa that it exploded with the force of 200 megatons of TNT, eventually blowing the whole island off the face of the earth. The explosion had also generated waves which were 120ft in height which raced across the globe even as far as the English Channel. Dr. George Pararas, a geologist, had stated that the eruption had produced ashes and smoke which blocked out the sun for 3 years and sent shock wave to travel the earth thrice. 
But these are not even close to what scientists and geologists fear might happen when the current mega volcanoes were to erupt. The current most volatile mega volcanoes are currently situated in the same place



 – the Yellowstone National Park. Geologist Dr. Bob Christiansen, who has been researching the Yellowstone National Park for decades has noticed that since a major earthquake in August 17th, 1959, Yellowstone National Park has recorded an average of 25 earthquakes a week, showing great signs of seismic activity. Geologist Dr. Bob Smith and leading volcano expert Dr. Bill McGuire, when trying to measure the size of the magma chambers were flabbergasted by their find. 



The first magma chamber was 50 miles long and 25miles across while the second magma chamber was 60 miles long and 30 miles wide. To help up visualize the devastation these would create, Dr. McGuire compares it to the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in the US.



 When St. Helens erupted in May 1980, it had spewed 7billion tons of rock and enough debris to cover Manhattan in 55ft of ash. And the force of the explosion was 500 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Dr. McGuire, after spending months calculating, said that when these mega volcanoes erupt, the first would erupt with a force 1000 times greater than St.Helens while the second chamber would erupt with a force 2500 times greater than St. Helens. Prof. Mike Rempino of New York University had stated that when the Tambora volcano in East Java, the only thing which was remotely close to a mega volcano ever recorded, blew in 1815 the ashes which had clouded the Stratosphere blocked the sunlight sending US and Europe into a mini ice age right up to 1816. Dr. Rempino went on to say, that calculating the amount of ash and debris from the Yellowstone eruption would not only cover half the US with ash but would send enough ash and debris to the stratosphere to block out the sun and plunge us into an actual ice age killing billions of people.

 If the ice age doesn’t reek enough havoc, scientists at Harvard University have discovered that the debris from volcanic ash, which is made of rocks and glass shards, which is easily carried by winds, would cause something called the Maurice’s disease. When living beings breathe in the ash and debris, it would cause their lungs to bleed and as a natural reaction, the body would tend to grow new bones on top of the old ones, which translates to a slow and very painful death.

Besides these two death threats, the increase in seismic activity, which would cause shock waves to travel through the earth would cause huge land masses to collapse. When the vibration travels through solid masses, it would vibrate it causing to have internal shifts and if it shifts enough, it could dislodge a huge mass. Prof. Derek Elsworth of Pennsylvania State University demonstrated that when there is water trapped between two huge masses, 



 the water would tend to act like a lubricant. And this could make it easier for land masses to fall apart. This had happened in Alaska in July 9th 1958 at Latuya Bay, when a small earthquake had caused a part of the mountain to fall into the waters. What scientists in Switzerland discovered, having built the most advanced model in testing the effects of landslides found out that when a huge mass of land thrusts itself into a body of water, the water would be displaced by the same amount of land mass causing what scientist now call a mega tsunami. When the mountain had collapsed in Alaska, it had cause huge waves which were almost 150ft in height, destroying quite a prominent amount of the surrounding landscape. Now, the problem is, volcanoes have a common property of being able to trap water within their walls.  Dr. Elsworth states that when this water trapped within the volcanic walls heats up, it produces steam which would cause pressure to act within the walls. So now, these walls would be lubricated and would have immense pressure working within forcing this already volatile chunk of land to collapse. And one particular volcanic island has caught the attention of scientists - The island Le’ Palma in the Canary Islands. 



Le’ Palma is made of two volcanoes, one dormant and the other active called the Cumbre Vieja. An eruption in 1949 had caused the dormant portion of the volcano to slide 13ft away from the Cumbre Vieja. Following this slide, scientists and geologists have swarmed the island to find out what would happen to this island in the long run. What they found was that the volcanoes were separated by walls of water stored in tank like columns within. If there were to be a substantial eruption, it would heat up the water, causing pressure to rise, which would dislodge  a part of the island measuring 13miles in length and weighing ½ trillion tons into the Atlantic. This would cause such displacement in the water that the initial wave would be 12200 ft in height and 98000 to 130000 miles in length, racing across the Atlantic at speeds of 480mph towards the east coast of America. This wave would destroy everything from New York right up to Miami traveling 13miles inland.  And this would take 8 hours to reach the USA.

So when is all of these going to happen? It could be today, tomorrow maybe a few thousand years from now. Or it could very well be Dec 21st 2012, a date which has become synonymous to global apocalypse.  Why did the many ancient civilizations, prophets and oracles predict not just the same date but almost the same events which were going to happen on this day? Could it be mere coincidence that they all predicted the same things when they hardly had any means of corresponding with one another or the fact that most of their predictions had come true along the course of time? 



The Mayans had calculated that on this very day, the Sun, the moon, the earth, the planets and the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way (our galaxy) would be in a perfect alignment.  Something which Albert Einstein in 1955 further confirmed. Princeton University, which further undertook this study to further understand how this would affect the earth were mortified when they found out that during this alignment, the magnetic fields would be so strong that it would literally shift the earth’s mantle plate in just a matter of days. This event had been predicted to occur only every 800,000 years. True enough; 800,000 years ago, the earth’s mantels had shifted, altering the earth’s north and south poles. To give a clearer picture, scientists said that before the shift, Alaska was at the Earth’s equator. This will cause the poles to shift which could shift the earth’s rotation, possibly pushing the earth off its axis.

So, it is not a matter of whether these things are going to happen or not. They are going to happen. They question is, when?

By,
Ashveen Chakravarthy Sekaran
Dec 21, 2009

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