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George Nori with you, Michael Rampino with us. Michael, what got you involved in all of this? This is great work.
Well, what got me involved in the geology and the study of the Earth in general was when I was seven years old. They reached to the Museum in National History in Manhattan and I saw, you know, the dinosaurs, and I saw the meteorites, and I saw the jans and minerals, and I said, hey, this is for me, you know, I want to know more about this stuff. And I stuck with it over the years, and it's wiped out pretty well.
Did the asteroid that hit the Earth sixty some million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs allow us as human beings to evolve?
Yes, well, it was important because the dinosaurs were dominant on the Earth sixty six million years ago, and the mammals, the small mammals that were our our ancestors, were living along with the dinosaurs. But they were just small, tiny, rat like, mouse like animals. And it wasn't until the dinosaurs were taken out of the picture that those little mammals got a chance to evolve into all the present day mammals we have today in the world, including primates,
including us. So we've can thank that that asteroid sixty six million years ago for the you know, for humanity. We wouldn't be here today that asteroid had missed the Earth.
Roughly how many asteroids are considered near missus that buzzed by us every year?
Well, I think every year there's around fifty Wow.
Yeah, that are close enough to hit us if something goes awry, it could be.
Yes, some of them are. Most of them are passed by closer than the Moon, right, so they're pretty close to the Earth. But there's still a rather wide range there. So so nothing that we know of now that we've predicted the orbits for is on a collision course with the Earth. But you know, sometimes things pop out of nowhere and and on strange orbits, and and you never know when an impact might take place.
Michael, what about volcanoes? How dangerous are they do us?
Well, the the you know volcanoes are most of them are dangerous for local and regional areas. Right, if you're near the volcano and it's explosive volcano that erupts, there's gonna be damage, and there's gonna be a loss of life in the area of the volcano. But if the volcano is big enough explosive volcano is large enough, what we call super volcanoes, uh, then it could put so much a material up into the atmosphere. That's the problem.
When they explode, a lot of fine dust and drop its of sulphuric acid go up into the upper atmosphere and they cut out some of the sunlight that will be coming and warming the planet. And so we after historical eruptions, you know, we've seen coolings lasting for a couple two or three years after those eruptions. And when we do the calculations of what the cooling would be after a supereruption, which might last for several years, it would be enough to cause what we call a volcanic winter.
And what that means is that that Earth would become so cool, so cold that you probably lose a couple of growing seasons. And if that happened, there'd be mass starvation. And so that's that kind of civilization. It's not a mass extinction volcanic eruption, but it would certainly threaten civilization. If you're going to lose a couple of growing seasons.
We don't have a backup of enough grain to get us through that kind of situation on a global basis, and so there would be a lot of trouble for the civilized world to get through that.
In Italy and October seventy nine AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing up to thirty five hundred people. They say maybe up to sixteen thousand. They're not sure. Did those poor people have any notice at all?
Michael, No, that eruption, There were really no precursors that suggested that there was going to be an eruption, and so the eruption started in the morning and it just went from there. And so there was really no real warning for the people in that area to try to get away. They were trying to get away during the eruption. But then, as you said, there was a lot of loss of life, and those cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the pyroclastic flows from men that big eruption.
What causes a volcano to erupt, what builds.
Up, Well, there's you know, these these magbists that are inside the earth are charged with with gas. There's a lot of gas CO two and water vapor dissolved in in these magbusts, and as they come to the surface, that gas can be released, and it can be released explosively if the magni comes to the surface fast enough and so that will will cause an explosion and the so the so the magwa doesn't come out as a lava flow, it comes out as as particles, as pieces
of and and fine ash and stuff. That's that's what's produced by explosive volcanic eruption. And as I said, they're very hard to predict. And sometimes there's some precursory activity that allows you to say, well, there might be a big eruption coming, so maybe we better get people out of there. But very often there's not much precursory activity that tells you very much until the actual eruption.
What would you say, Michael, might be the biggest dangers to us on this planet?
Now?
The biggest dangers Well, I mean, of course an asteroid impact would be the ultimate danger, but they don't happen that often. In the last really big one, it was sixty six million years ago that was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. They've been some smaller ones since then, but so it's it's a it's not a it's a rare event which has a very big effect. And the same thing is true with super volcanoes. They don't happen. They happen maybe once in every fifty thousand years, So
the relatively rare events. I say, one of the big biggest problems we have today in terms of sort of an existential problem for us is climate change. You know, people who have kind of ignored it or tried to ignore it for a number of years, but just look at what's happening this year. You can't ignore it anymore. You can't ignore the fires, you can't ignore the droughts, you can't ignore the super high temperatures. You can't ignore the very warm ocean temperatures that are gonna wipe out
the coil reaes. I mean, as you said earlier, it's happened. It seems to be happening so fast, and I think it's because we hit a tipping point. Things were changing slowly, and then we hit a point where things started to change really fast.
In theory, if it's man caused, it should get worse and worse and worse from here on in.
Right, Well, as long as we're continuing to.
Put if we keep doing what we're.
Doing, Yes, if we stop, you know, if we stop tomorrow burning fossil fuels, eventually it would start to get cooler. It wouldn't happen right away. But as long as we continue to put greenhouse gases, and I can't see us really coming that down on a short term basis, it's just going to get warmer.
Now, what's your definition of a greenhouse gas.
Well, it's a gas. There are a few gases which are greenhouse gases. CO two, for example, carbon dioxide methane is a greenhouse gas. And what they do is they allow sunlight to come through the atmosphere and warm up the ground, and then the ground warms up and then warms up the atmosphere, and the heat that's coming out to warm up the atmosphere is trapped by the greenhouse gases.
I had heard that we had high carbon dioxide levels lots of years ago, many years ago. Is that true?
Yeah? Sure, one hundred million years ago. CO two is very very high, and the planet was warm. But those those changes took place over millions of years, slowly gradually. The problem with what's happening now is it's happening you know, over decades and ecosystems, you know, life on Earth can adapt to changes that are happening. That's sass.
What's happening with the what's happening with the sea life right now? I'm sorry sea life fish?
Well, if you have the temperatures in the ocean off of Florida are a hundred degrees uh, that's reaching the limit of where lots of sea life can survive.
That's like cooking. The fish in the ocean.
Are just are just are dying and and and once they die and the temperatures remain one hundred degrees in the water, they're not they're not going to dat And so that's that's a big, you know, potential, very very major problem.
What's a normal temperature for the.
Ocean in the in the summer, Yeah, maybe eighty degrees something like that.
So it's twenty degrees hotter right now. That's amazing.
Yeah. Yeah, Now maybe in a few years it'll be even more hotter than that.
If we have cycles of winters, we could have a bad winter though, right like you said, yeah, there's.
No guarantee that the winter is going to be any any any milder. Uh, it's the summer season, that's that's that's the critical one.
And we've got another month of that at least, don't we. I'm sorry, we have at least another month of that.
Of yes, I I July was the hotest July on record, and I don't see why August wouldn't end up being the hottest August on record as well. You know, I can make that prediction, I think pretty safety.
Well, if this is caused by mankind, we're not going to change what we do any day quicker.
So what happened, what happens? Yeah, Well, you know, it will just continue to get warmer. The more the more these the gases we put into the atmosphere, the warmer it'll get. So so you know, in San Antonio it's one hundred ted degrees, and you know, years may need to be one hundred and twenty degrees one hundred and thirty.
Degrees in theory, Michael, should it get worse next summer if things just stay the same, I.
Would say probably. Since we're still putting more of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we might expect it to be even warmer next summer.
Now, what happens if it's dramatically less, then what do you say, Well.
You know, there's always variability from year to year. But as I said, if you go back the last twenty thirty years, every year has been hotter than the year before. So there's a trend of warmer and warmer temperatures. And so this last couple of years, we've currently hit a spot where we're seeing these very elevated temperatures. And as I say, this may just be a tipping point that we've reached. It's gotten warm enough so that there's so much extra heat in the atmosphere that we're seeing these
very very high temperatures across well across the whole world. Essentially.
That's what really baffles me, Michael. This is not just the United States or a North American problem. This is worldwide right now. I mean, Greece is on fire, everything's going crazy.
Well, the CO two we put in the atmosphere is mixed into the atmosphere goes everywhere. So we're putting CO two in China, is you know, every country that's burning cross and fuels is adding to the CO two of the atmosphere, that that carbon dioxide is mixed around throughout the atmosphere, and so you know you should see a fairly uniform warming.
I did not hear any meteorologists last year predicting this kind of weather this summer.
Did you, I don't think. I don't think if they predicted these kinds of temperatures. But I have a feeling they'll be predicting them for next year.
It'll be much easier to predict, that's for sure. Sadly, back to the asteroids for a moment. When you look at the Moon, it's shattered with all kinds of asteroid holes and craters and things like that. If you dried out the planet Earth, the oceans, and the vegetation, would we look to.
No, because the same we've been hit by the same number of things. So there would be the same number of craters on the Earth, except that on the Earth there's erosion and there's balcanism, and there are all kinds of things that would tend to erase the craters. And so there are about two hundred known verified impact craters on the Earth, and we find a couple more every year, and they're hard to find because they get buried, they
get erased, you know. But if there was no erosion on the Earth, there was no geological activity, it would look like the moon.
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