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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you, Bobby Acard with us, Bobby, where's your book available? Is it on Amazon bookstores?
Yesterday? Is on? They can go to my website Bobbyacart dot com and see everything that I've written. But also if you type my name into the Amazon search engine, all of the books will come up, and I come. I write in produce ebooks. I produce paperbacks, jacketed hardcovers and also audio books. I know a lot of your
listeners are truckers, and I appreciate everything they do. And in fact, I wanted to tell you that if they would email me at Bobby Acart at gmail dot com, if they'll pick out an audiobook that they like, I'll provide them a code for Audible and so they can listen to it for free.
Oh that's great, and a lot of visually impaired people to love these audio books. To be sure, you've got social network platform and we've got your website linked up at coastacostam dot com. Bobby, you mentioned the eighteen fifty nine Carrington event which was a major X flare from the Sun which killed the wireless systems that we had available at the time, which was the Western Union, the telegraph, and things like that. If it happened today, we're up a creek, aren't we.
Well they our wiring is not prepared for the massive energy burst that would enter into our atmosphere, and then once it hits our atmosphere, the atmosphere works like a protective shield. And the reason you see these beautiful aurora near the North Pole, you know, the hues of greens and blues and purple, sometimes oranges, is because our atmosphere
is weakest at the poles. So when these massive solar flares and all of this plasma hurtles through space and hits the planet, then it into our atmosphere through the north Poles and creates the aurora. And sometimes when they're extremely strong, you'll see weather watchers and space watchers say we could see aurora as far south as the mid latitudes of the United States, and some people get excited
by that. I, on the other hand, think, I know what this could do to our way of life, because when we built all of our electrical grid and everything is based upon computers, nowadays, the intricate wiring that the fine components of all of these electronic devices are not capable of withstanding the pulse of energy that would literally fry them and just ruin them. And it's a naturally
occurring event. It happens all of the time. In twenty twelve, we barely dodged a solar flare nearly as strong as the Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine by only seven or eight days in these so if the Earth had been in a certain location as it revolves around the Sun, we would have taken a direct hit. And we're wholly
unprepared for this. Back in the nineties, Congressman Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, led a commission called the EMP Commission, and laid all the science out for Congress and said, we need to do something to protect our power grid from this type of event. And in typical government fashion, they found other things to spend their money on. So it's something that they're aware of in Washington, but it's also something that they have done precious little to protect us from.
It's not a matter of this, it's a matter of when it's going to happen.
Well, absolutely, and then to take it one step further. People ask me all the time, Well, there's these natural occurring events like solar flares and super volcanoes, arc storms, et cetera. But then there are man made events as well. And we have the nuclear capability to detonate a nuclear device, an electromagnetic pulse weapon EMP over the central part of the United States, And sadly, Saint Louis is always the one that's given, is the example, and I hate.
To do that.
Ground zero ground zero for targeted EMP. And then when this EMP is detonated, you know, three four hundred miles above the surface of the planet, it spreads out and then these these powerful energy particles will then hit everything from our cars to well, you know everything we've discussed. So an EMP burst can be naturally occurring from the Sun or it can be from some of our adversaries capable of detonating a nuclear weapon anywhere above the United States.
And the list is long, from Russia to China to North Korea, India and Pakistan. Everybody has this capability now, and Iran is developing nuclear weapons. And it's a frightening thought when you realize how many people don't like us very much. And they possess these powerful weapons that we may or may not be able to defend ourselves.
Again, you had mentioned earlier about the mass extinction events of asteroids from space, and I'm not so sure the right thing to do is to blow them up, because you create a shotgun effect.
Don't you. You're exactly right. There are a number of ways to deal with these, but none of them are very good. The first thought is, well, we have powerful nuclear devices, and let's just hit it with everything we've got. But then instead of having one near Earth object approaching the planet, you have hundreds, if not thousands. The theory is is that many times they call the NEOs ineo, these NEOs burn up in the atmosphere because they're small.
The larger ones that make impact have a profound effect. I mean, there are craters like the one in Arizona that's many miles wide, and of course the Gulf of Mexico is created by one. But all you have to do is look to the Moon and look at all the pock marks in the moon and realize that that satellite of Earth is a magnet for these near Earth objects. And if you if you destroy one, you're going to
have thousands to deal with. Another option is what they call diverting, and this is what I wrote about in the Asteroid Trilogy. You hit the asteroid hard enough not to destroy it, but to just move it off its path. And it takes some calculations in order to do that, and you have to hit it hard enough so that the Earth's natural magnetic pull does it back towards you.
And they're aware of this at NASA. They have practiced it most recently in the last couple of years by sending a satellite through space and actually made impact on a near Earth object. It wasn't designed to divert it. It was just simply to see if they were capable of doing it. So they're aware of the problem. And you know, so far, knock on wood, there are no NEOs near Earth objects that are scheduled to hit for one hundred years that we know of, and that goes
back to the problem. Oftentimes, these NEOs are missed by our best technology, our best scientific minds that have the ability to see into space, and we don't know that they passed us until they've they've already done their Flyby.
Bobby earlier this year is seven point eight at earthquake magnitude hit in Turkey killed fifty one thousand people. It was horrible. I mean, how deadly are these For mass extinction events?
Well, a mass extinction would probably require something greater than an earthquake. The worst case scenario in an earthquake is what we've seen, especially in Southeast Asia, when it's an underwater quake. There's, first off, you have no warning of an earthquake, I mean maybe minutes if you're lucky. Seismic precursors. Seismic activity leading up to a larger quake might lead
seismologists to say, hey, we've got something coming. But it's not like a hurricane that you see forming in the Gulf and heading towards the coast, and it's even tornatic activity in the Midwest. You know, you have all kinds of radars that you watch and you identify hook echoes, etc. But with earthquakes, they just happen. And if it happens underwater, there's a tsunami associated with it, and then you have
a very large catastrophe, be killing tens of thousands. An extinction level event is something that would take out many millions, if not billions, of people on the planet, and those usually involve something that creates a nuclear winter of atmosphere, whether it be a super volcano like Yellowstone erupting, or even a regional nuclear war between countries like Pakistan and India where they decided to shoot at each other. Once all of that material enters the atmosphere, it cools the
temperatures and causes food disruptions. And I know I got a little bit off track there, but the earthquake is more of a regional type of impact, is opposed to an extinction level, which is more of an entire planet impact.
About two and a half years ago, you and I were talking about your book New Madered Earthquake about the New Madured fault which cuts Ron through Saint Louis. Why did you key in on the New Madrid Fault.
Well, San Andreas is probably the best known, and Hollywood can be thanked for that that every movie that you ever see about an earthquake always involves the San Andrea Fault. And it's significant because of its location where the plates meet along the coast of California, and it's in a
very highly populated area from San Francisco on down. But one of the most severe potential earthquakes that we could have in this country is along the fault lines running somewhere between Memphis and going past Saint Louis up into Illinois, known as the New Madrid Seismic system. And when New Madrid in the early eighteen hundreds had a series of quakes couple in December, then one into January, and another in February, smaller after shocks, it actually lit the country
along the Mississippi River, causing the river to flow backwards. Now, what I wrote in New Mattered Earthquake the novel, was what would happen if that occurred today? What would the impact be? Not only on localized areas like Memphis and Saint Louis, but think about all of the bridges that span the Mississippi. There's not that many the interstates that cross.
I think there's seven major bridges, all of which would be destroyed because of the shaking of the earth, which would have a profound impact on the nation's commerce.
Oh absolutely. And in addition to Arcstorm, a couple others of your trilogy novels are coming out Fractured and Mammoth.
Well.
I followed the science, and with Arcstorm, I studied what geologists were writing and saying as to what would happen if that major flood event occurred today and how that would impact act what's underneath the ground. And when you start inserting large amounts of water and the weight of a lake that would be created by the arc storms twenty two times the size of the Mississippi River, then you're going to have an impact on the seismic zones
throughout California. And it's the most seismic active state in our country and probably in the world. And so I took it a step further. I took the other big One, as scientists called it, created the massive Lake. And then I showed in the book Fractured, which came out back in July, what would happen to these seismic zones after it's been holding the weight of this newly created lake and all of the water injected into the fault lines.
And it triggered a series of earthquakes that started down in La near San Bernardino and included the Garlock Fault and Ridge Craft at the lower end of the Central Valley, and then San Andreas got involved. Because earthquakes can trigger one another even if they're not in the same fault line fault zone one massive quake and San Bernardino can certainly trigger quakes on the San Andreas fault because of their close proximity to one another, and so Fractured takes
the series of catastrophes a step further. After the arcstorm created the lake, fractured then drained the lake because of the earthquake activity across California. And then the third book in the threesome, called Mammoth, which comes out this coming Thursday, just a few days from now, is a result of all of the quake activity that triggers the eruption of a volcano in Mammoth Lakes, California. A beautiful place, Christine,
gorgeous mountain. People love to ski there, not having any idea that they're sitting on top of a of a caldera called the Long Valley caldera that has the potential to be as deadly as Yellowstone.
And Yellowstone is overdue for an eruption, isn't.
It it is? You know, it's a funny thing about timing. They go back to the geologic record and do all of their studies and say, well, Yellowstone usually does something violent every seven hundred thousand years and it's been longer than that now. And what I always laugh about in this. You know, the scientists that I talk to and by
email and a couple of conversations will tell me. You know, the first thing that they will say is, well, you know, yes, this is a very dangerous you know, potential for America and the world, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. But then you go to them and you say, well, it's not going to happen anytime soon. But how do you know this.
You don't know that it could happen anytime Yeah.
If you can't predict it, how can you assure me it's not going to happen anytime soon? Which is why I write these novels. I want people to understand that what you may hear from the media or you might hear from government officials, is it necessarily what could happen. And so when you look at something as catastrophic as a supervolcano eruption, it could happen without warning and it would certainly be devastating to the planet.
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