Year 2012: End of the World

Weeks ago the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull (the volcano in Iceland everybody was butchering the name of in the televised news) was international news. This slumbering volcano stirred and belched molten earth and ash into the skies. From there, winds and the jet stream spread this dangerous gaseous soup all over Europe, affecting weather patterns and international travel for days. It was almost impossible to get a flight in or out of Northern Europe at the time. Industry experts project the lost revenues caused by the initial eruption to be $1.7 billion or more. Some speculate it might have been bad enough to literally drive some European air carriers into bankruptcy.

But the eruption is not over. In recent days Ireland and Scotland have been struggling with another ash cloud which may soon, once again, influence larger segments of Europe. While some people might consider this a sign that “the Mayans were right” or as some kind of evidence of a foretold doomsday scenario unfolding before our eyes, I am confident in saying that is simply not true. What we are witnessing is a normal and natural geological process. The process by which the Earth’s mantle is replaced is well documented and easy to understand.

At fault lines and trenches, the crust of the Earth winds up being pushed down into the core. The deeper this material goes the more heat and pressure it is subjected to. Eventually this material is reduced into magma. Magma flows all around and through the planet in various concentrations and densities. Eventually, a local concentration of magma will reach a critical level and trigger a volcanic eruption. This is not a strange or mystical process. It does however seem to be basic geology that is somehow not learned during the course of most people’s elementary sciences.

There are volcanoes all over the world, both dormant and active. Unfortunately, a lack of funding has led to a woeful inability to monitor, track, and even understand the complicated systems involved in volcanic eruptions. It has been deemed more important to fund weapons systems than developing early warning capabilities that might, at the least, help us prepare for and work around volcanic eruptions. Do not think that such an investment would be fool hardy. Eyjafjallajokull is just a “normal” volcano and the impact it has had on Europe’s people and businesses is impossible to deny. The threat that ought to concern humanity lies in “super volcanoes.”

There are at present at least six known super volcanoes, three of them in North America alone. These volcanoes are so massive that if one were to erupt they would belch more than 240 cubic miles of ash, dirt, and magma into the sky. These are eruptions that are large enough to change weather patterns, block out the sun, and potentially even trigger new ice ages. There is currently no “real” way to “prepare” for the eruption of a super volcano. The best you can do is hope that they manage to release their pressure in smaller and less destructive ways (like geysers) than a full scale eruption.

The fact that we are so woefully unprepared to understand and predict, or possibly even prevent, catastrophic eruptions has nothing to do with it being “impossible.” It is instead the fault of people in positions of authority refusing to deal with such situations because it is considered a political liability with little to no reward. I cannot help but wonder what the people of New Orleans think about the decades of negligence on the part of local, state, and Federal officials to deal with the problem of their inadequate levies, preferring instead to “hope nothing bad would happen.”

There is a lot of speculation these days about the possibility of a global cataclysm in the next few years. Most of this attention is based on the Mayan calendar. December 21, 2012 is the supposed end of the Mayan long form calendar, but it is only the end of one epoch, not the end of time. This date has been popularized by the modern media, being featured in everything from History Channel specials to a major Hollywood blockbuster film. There is no shortage of people out there willing to cash in on the attention being given to this phenomenon, but sadly, personal gain all too often outweighs informed or reasonable analysis.

To start off with most of the people talking about the “Mayan’s 2012 prophecy” do not have a proper understanding of the long count Mayan Calendar. December 21, 2012 is not actually the end of the calendar, it is the end of the 13th b’ak’tun. We will be delving into the intricacies of the Mayan calendar in the future, but to keep it simple for now, even the Mayans predicted events to occur after the 13th b’ak’tun’s conclusion. Not even the fascinating culture who’s calendar has inspired much of this frenzy thought that this impending date would be the end of the world.

End times prophecies and fears are common. While the most recent and easily remembered is probably the threat of the Y2K virus, they are not a new or recent phenomenon. Even the belief in an impending Rapture and biblical End Times prophecies, a relatively new school of thought within Christianity, is essentially only a little over 100 years old in a religion with a history that spans two millenniums. All you have to do is look at accounts of the turn of the first millennium to find evidence of groups shouting about the impending end of the world, and that was a thousand years ago.

However, it is also true that a failing infrastructure has left large segments of the population at risk from perfectly normal natural disasters. The National Academy of Sciences did issue a statement in January of 2009 warning about potential issues to modern electrical and communication networks caused by solar flaring. Prophecies might not be anything to worry about, but that does not mean there are no dangers presented by our reliance on modern systems and how they would interact with the processes of our planet and solar system.

It is our goal to not only examine theories and risks that modern society might face in the near future, it is our intention to provide reasonable advice you can act upon to help protect your self and your family. With all of the hysteria about the end times in today’s culture it is comforting to know that you are actually doing something. The year 2012 is probably not going to be the end of the world. However, unless we as a civilization fail to prepare ourselves and our culture to adapt to the challenges we will be facing in the future the era of man on Earth may be coming to a close sooner than we think.

If you’re wondering why the “n” in Mayan is in parenthesis in the title, it’s because it should in fact be Maya, but media more typically uses the popular, but incorrect, “Mayan.” This is a relatively small mix up compared to all of the excitement about a supposed “Mayan Prophecy” for world shaking events of some kind in December of 2012. There’s debate as to which exact day it supposedly occurs on, but the two most common interpretations are the 21^st and 23^rd.

There are some good reasons for the discrepancy of when the Maya(n) calendar supposedly ends that have to do with determining where it starts. While the Mayan calendar is very good at measuring days, the start point, or day one, of the calendar is not universally agreed upon. This is why you have disagreements on where it ends, they purport that it has a specific number of days (1,872,000, as the end is supposedly the “end” of our current period, the 13th b’ak’tun.) so depending on which exact start date they choose, they get a slight different end date. By and large we have managed to get a relatively accurate correspondence with our modern calendar thanks to historical documents during Europe’s conquest of the America’s.

The thing is, the calendar does not actually end with the 13^th ba’k’tun. Specifically, the Temple of Inscriptions in Palneque contains references to a date that would correspond with October of 4772. The Mayans believed there was a cycle that predated the current one they lived in(and we’re living in it too). It is faulty reasoning at best, and crass arrogance and disrespect at worse, to suppose they would not expect there to be another one. In short, while a cycle of the long count Maya calendar is 13 b’ak’tuns, which is ending in Dec of 2012, that does not mean the world ends with the cycle. Quite the contrary, it is a milestone achievement.

The argument that the end of the world will occur when the Mayan calendar’s current cycle does is the equivalent of seeing a 2009-2010 calendar and assuming that the whole world is going to end on Dec 31^st, 2010. Most people would quickly point out the absurdity of that. We make calendars annually. The calendar ending does not mean the world does. The fact that there are far fewer dates recorded by the Maya for the next cycle compared to our own is simply a question of distance. You would be hard pressed to find a publisher making calendars for the year 2100, or even 2020, at this point, but we could easily calculate a future date with our calendar system. If one was to set a long term goal or perhaps an elaborate fantasy in a far flung future, they could do so simply. Nobody can see the future, but we can recognize and predict patterns fairly well as a species. Considering that people have been “foretelling the End of the World” since man discovered fire for some reason or another, and they have all been wrong, there is no justification in believing the hype that claims this impressive feat of time keeping has any kind of life and death significance. No, things that have life and death significance are for more subtle, widespread, and all too common.