The Ends of the Earth
5 reasons why the planet is going to hell.
By Bruce Sterling
Exploratory all-terrain vehicles are capering around Mars, yet our own planet remains bafflingly alien. We're Mother Earth's children and we think we know her well, but whenever some unexpected phenomenon rouses our curiosity, we uncover disturbing aspects of her secret life. Lately, the rush of peculiar discoveries has been downright embarrassing. Let's consider some of Mom's eccentricities - and their implications.
Global dimming: The sunlight reaching Earth's surface is getting feebler. Assuming there's nothing wrong with the sun, some unknown atmospheric factor is steadily darkening the planet.
Evidence: In 1985, Atsumu Ohmura, a climatologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, checked sunlight records in Switzerland and discovered that solar radiation had declined a startling 10 percent in 30 years. Subsequent studies found the same effect in Ireland, Japan, the former Soviet Union, and at both poles, but scientists remained in denial. A 2001 metastudy confirmed Ohmura's findings.
Implications: This is an entirely unexpected phenomenon, even more off the wall than global warming. Who put out the lights? How will we eat?
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Full Version: 5 Reasons Why the Planet is Going to Hell
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| Unpredictable day length: Eighteenth-century astronomers suspected that Earth's daily rotation on its axis was slowing, and the advent of the quartz clock in the 1930s proved them right. But new evidence indicates the planet's spin has been speeding up since 1999. Nobody knows why. Evidence: Atomic clock readings taken by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, prove that the slowing trend has inexplicably reversed. Implications: Days of unpredictably varying length can affect communications, air traffic control, financial markets, telescopes, and any data interchange that requires absolute synchrony. Technicians dealt with the rotational slowdown by adding "leap seconds," but if we can't count on Mother's timing, we've got software problems. |
Very interesting.
Is this tongue-in-cheek or serious?
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| In 2002, Jesus Maiz-Apellaniz, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, found that a supernova-spewing cluster of stars was closer to Earth a few million years ago. Core samples dating to that era contain a rare iron isotope, likely debris from a stellar explosion. Massive extinctions of plankton at that time have yet to be explained. Implications: If Mom settled in a bad galactic neighborhood, there's not much we can do about it. |
interesting & cheered me up 
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| Is this tongue-in-cheek or serious? |
as far as i know it was a column on a website that looked very serious so...i would assume it's serious
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