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Chapter 15: Dangerous Beauty

#150: Dec. - Feb. 2017 (Non-Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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Chapter 15: Dangerous Beauty

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Chapter 15: Dangerous Beauty

Please either use this thread to discuss the above referenced chapter of "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson.
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DWill

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Re: Chapter 15: Dangerous Beauty

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This chapter and the previous one concern the related phenomena of earthquakes and volcanoes. I guess it would be good to keep in mind that the "dangerous beauty" of the geothermic attractions of Yellowstone represents the dynamism of our planet that has helped produce life. But mainly Bryson makes it sound as though we're living on borrowed time, or at least this is true for some hotspots like Tokyo and Yellowstone. Speaking of Yellowstone, though, you wonder whether the "overdue" explosion of the area might not imperil life on the entire planet. Bryson talks about the puzzle of there being no volcanic crater discovered in Yellowstone--until aerial photography showed that the whole park, 2.2 million acres, is a caldera. Nor is a volcanic superplume like Yellowstone all that rare. It's just that, unlike almost all others, it lies beneath a continental plate rather than under an ocean floor. If Yellowstone blows again, there would definitely be a worldwide impact producing many trillions of dollars of economic losses, not to mention millions of deaths, by the sound of it. Since there do exist potential catastrophes we can do nothing to prevent, it would be very wise to act regarding the ones we perhaps can, such as nuclear disarmament and climate change. I suppose, on the other hand, a kind of what the hell fatalism could also be induced by thinking too much about the earth (or outer space) turning on us. Why work on our problems if an asteroid is going to smite us anyway.

I noted Bryson's statement, "Every day on average somewhere in the world there are two [earthquakes] of magnitude 2.0 or greater" (p. 212) . Yet according to the "60 Minutes" report on hydraulic fracturing in Oklahoma, in 2015 there were 907 of 3.0 or greater in Oklahoma alone. Most of the the quakes are not strong enough to cause major damage, but one was 5.8, and did. There probably isn't a more glaring indication of what we're willing to do to the earth for the sake of our economy than our inducing seismic shocks by injecting fracking wastewater into underground wells.

Bryson mentions the apparent ability of animals to "predict" the onset of earthquakes, observed over the centuries from changes in the animals' behavior. Some scientists say the ability is imagined, but others think that animals have an undefined capacity to sense movements or sounds coming from the earth's crust that our instruments can't pick up.
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