If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve finished The Hippopotamus - for about the sixth or seventh time, I reckon, so I’m ready for next week’s Radio 4 recording and am back onto A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s a fascinating read, and I’m burning through it as quite a rate, which when you consider I’m in the sections about geology at the moment is surely the sign of a very well written piece of work.

Bryson’s 3-page description of what would happen if an asteroid should hit the earth is a riveting read (we probably wouldn’t see it until the last second when it had already entered our atmosphere, and even if we spotted it a year before we don’t have any nuclear weapons that can escape Earth’s gravitational pull, so we could never blast it into bits like they do in the films). It’s easily as engaging as anything I have ever come across in a work of fiction, and his explanation of earthquakes makes the Asian tsunami easier to put into perspective:

The [Richter] scale is, of course, more an idea than a thing, an arbitrary measure of the Earth’s tremblings based on surface measurements. It rises exponentially, so that a 7.3 quake is fifty times more powerful than a 6.3 earthquake and 2,500 times more powerful than a 5.3 earthquake…

The scale is a simple measure of force, but says nothing about damage. A magnitude 7 quake happening deep in the mantle - say, 650 kilometres down - might cause no surface damage at all, while a significantly smaller one happening just 6 or 7 kilometres under the surface could wreak widespread devestation.

It is, at times, an uncomfortable read. The detail into which he explains what the effects could be of Yellowstone National Park erupting (pretty much the whole thing is a massive volcano) is particularly unsettling. The last time it went, it took about 10,000 years for the environment to clear. Almost all life on earth was wiped out, and only a couple of thousand humans were thought to be alive at any one point for the next few thousand years. We’re lucky to be here at all.

Its next eruption is already overdue by 40,000 years, and scientists are starting to see some strange happenings in the park. Bits of it are bulging upwards, while other parts are sinking. If that’s a sign, don’t go starting any big projects.

Tokyo has already suffered one of the most devastating earthquakes in modern times. On 1 September 1923, just before midday, the city was struck by what is known as the Great Kanto quake - an event over ten times as powerful as Kobe’s earthquake [richter 7.2, 6,394 dead, $99bn damage]. Two hundred thousand people were killed. Since that time, Tokyo has been eerily quiet, so the strain beneath the surface has been building for eighty years. Eventually it is bound to snap. In 1923, Tokyo had a population of about three million. Today it is approaching thirty million. Nobody cares to guess how many people might die, but the potential economic cost has been put as high as $7 trillion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2005 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.