Not to worry, as my friend always says, because who on earth can remember banana splits unless you're as old as me, although to be honest, I've had just one banana split in my life since they were pretty much the generation before me. And as far as dancing and doing "the splits," well them days are equally long gone (not that I could ever do them...ouch). No, these splits are a bit more dramatic as in Earth shattering, or maybe Earth splitting...and it's happening now. As an article in
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| Yosemite at night. Photo: David Applebee |
So I guess what brought all of this up were the books I was reading about geology and gases (gasp), two subjects of which I understand zip. But
Neil F. Comins asked in his book from way back, what if the moon didn't exist? He wrote that had the Mars-sized chunk of planetisimal mass shifted only a few inches (inches!) from its wild orbit, it would had veered right past us. Okay, those few inches would have it missing us by some 25,000 miles. But still. Instead, that object impacted us with such force that it tore off a chunk of our planet and made our moon. And how big was that force that hit Earth Zambia? If you take the combined forces that were in the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you'd equal 40 megatons of TNT. This planetisimal mass hit us with a force equal to a
million megatons of force. Our planet cratered from the impact as entire land masses sunk into Earth’s mantle as it struggled to repair this massive "wound." But all of that was something our planet had done before. If one can somehow picture geologic time (which most of us, including me, can't do), erasing massive mountain ranges and shifting entire continents
before Pangea (i.e.
Rodinia) is almost par for the course: the rumored Ancient Rockies flattened and replaced by the current Rocky Mountains; the ancient Appalachias (once as large as the Himalayas) also flattened to form a good chunk of the shallow continental shelf of the Eastern seaboard; and the Himalayas, eroding away enough of their original range to fill the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers with sediment 10 miles deep (enough to build the Himalaya range all over). All of that from Peter Brannen's recent book,
The Story of CO2.
Don't doze off quite yet because the numbers from both books, and others, are staggering. But if trying to envision geologic time was too difficult, imagine some current stats from Brannen's book: ...
every ten weeks humans burn through as much carbon as is contained in all the animals on Earth...This industrial respiration now injects over a hundred times more CO2 in the atmosphere every year than all the volcanoes on Earth. And this on how and why we have hurricanes:
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| Photo by my nephew some weeks ago of Kilauea |
Only one-billionth of the energy emitted by the sun in its churning collapse actually hits the surface of our planet, and a further 30 percent of this one-billionth is instantly reflected off the surface back into space. Nevertheless, that infinitesimal fraction of the sun's energy that actually warms the Earth is still sufficient to drive giant converting air masses on a planetary scale, weather systems, and even hurricanes -- all of which form to dissipate this solar energy as efficiently as they can. They exist because while the Earth is heated by the sun, it is an uneven warmth, leading to huge temperature differences between the equator and the poles -- a disequalibrium that hurricanes help soothe out. But in a larger planetary context this energy from the sun needs to be reradiated back to space. When this buildup of heat in the upper ocean becomes too great, and the slow and steady diffusion of it from the sea into the atmosphere isn't fast enough, something has to give. The system is frustrated, out of equilibrium. And so the tropical hurricane emerges out of a jumble of chaotic weather and --with no one there to orchestrate it-- reliably self-organizes into a towering rotating structure that sucks that heat out of the ocean, dissipates the energy in tremendous winds, and radiates much of it out of its cloud tops and back into space as infrared radiation, waste heat, relieving the planet of its frustration.
Out of equilibrium. Balance. So it can seem for us in today's world. Countries and peoples split into sharper and sharper definitions, almost as if caught in a political eddy; except there are signs that those divides have now begun to gel like cells inside our bodies. Latinos, blacks, women, the disabled and disowned, the unemployed, the ones needing healthcare, the soldiers stuck on a ship or cubicle near Iran and wondering "wtf?," are concealing and removing their imaginary blindfolds to see that they are not the minorities, but the majorities. A mixed bag for sure, but the majority. The constant barrage of violence and force may be starting to unravel as US weapons and
munitions run low (in one case --the Pentagon recently revealed-- partially because of
defending Israel which kept most of its own missiles for future use). And ever so slowly, the revelation that neither fresh water nor fossil fuels will last indefinitely. Equilibrium.
The Earth will adjust itself again, we hope. But if not, Earth’s possible collapse will be preceeded by another mass extinction...its sixth. As Brannen noted, the Earth once spewed enough magma from its innards, enough to bury the entire lower US a kilometer deep. The
entire lower 48 states! And those 1,000-ft. walls of magma lasted for over 300,000 years! And yet life still survived. It was only when that magma coulld no longer break through and instead found underground fissures and ignited natural gas deposits and coal that the Earth began to bake, so much so that an estimated 96% of ocean life perished. On land, fire and drought wiped out nearly every tree on the planet, while hurricane winds topped 500 mph along the coasts. Wrote Brannen: ...
the best estimate is that we're emittingc carbon perhaps ten times faster than even the mindless, undirected Siberian volcanoes that brought about the worst mass extinction ever...if you put too much CO2 into the air in such a short period of time that these planetary guardrails fail, all hell breaks loose. The planet can bend, but it can also break. And unfortunately, the rate at which humans are currently injecting CO2 into the oceans and atmosphere today far surpass the planet's ability to keep pace. We are currently at the initial stages of a system failure. If we keep at it for much longer, we might see what actual failure means. In the End-Permian mass extinction, the planet didn't merely surpass this carbon threshold, but indeed seemed to have tied a brick to the gas pedal and kept going for thousands of years. The devastation of the planet at the end of the Permian was so complete that it didn't matter if you spent your life in the foothills of the Trans-Pangaen Mountains and had never known the smell of sea salt on the air, or if you made your living in the abyss, clinging to the seafloor of the globe-spanning Panthalassa Ocean, miles down, having never known a photon of sunlight. You were almost certainly going to go extinct, no matter where you were, or who you were. Once the Earth started burning through fossil fuels on a massive scale, it was all over (Bill McKibben provides an excellent summary of Brannen's book in
The NY Review).
It doesn't have to be this way. Even among ourselves, we can still heal, still mend divides, still find equilibrium. One needs only to sit outside in a park or in your backyard and see all of the variety of leaves both above and below, and to hear sounds you usually tune out, even if it is just traffic. For better or worse, it's what we could lose. Without the moon, our tides would have been a shell of what they are, and our days would have been just 8 hours long. We'd have emerged (IF we emerged) as a different planet. But none of that matters, especially to the Earth. It's hurting now, and what was once a small wound which was tolerable may now be getting infected. If that infection gets too bad, the Earth will fight back, fight to heal itself. Doesn't matter what if anything lives above or below. If killer gases will fix the wound and balance things out, then all the better. Humans (that's us) would likely have to make way for a species more used to the changed atmosphere, the heat and sulfuric fumes, the acid rain and the poisonous rivers. That's what could happen...but doesn't have to.
I clearly remember my standing at the observation platform overlooking the
Halemaumau crater on the island of Hawaii. Hundreds of feet below, whisps of steam clouds would snake their way on the bottom, waiting for an updraft that could whisk them out of the crater and onto freedom. Standing there on the open air platform, I watched this fog-like cloud coming my way at a fairly good clip, and soon everyone was engulfed in a fog. Which is when I noticed that my breathing was getting to be a bit more difficult. Then it became even more difficult and I began to hurriedly try to find a way out of this cloud. Quite honestly, it was the crater's Darth Vader slowly choking the air out of people (or at least me, since, when out of air and neaer a panic stage, how much do you really notice others). I think back to that time and now marvel at how easily Earth could just tell us, "enough." (the observation deck has since been moved back quite a ways from that rim overlook)
So one last marvel, something else we'd miss: hearing. I happened to be reading about the Great Gray Owl, and how owls in general (but particularly the Great Gray) can fly so silently that prey often have no idea until it is too late. Wrote
Jackie Higgins:
For years, the focus had been the feathers along the wing's leading n trailing edges. Those at the front have tiny stiff barbs that point forward like the teeth of a comb, whereas those at the back ar flexible and fringed. They work together to break up, then smooth the air currents as they flow over and off the wing, dampening down any noisy turbulence. But the owls' primary feathers were also coated with a millimeter of fine fluff, stiff yet able to bend with the air flow, reducing the sound and turbulence even further. The Navy ran experiments, patented the design, and now use that micro-feature on their stealth planes, submarines, and even wind turbine blades to reduce their sound profile. But the more interesting thing beyond the owls' wings and eyes, was the discovery that owls hunt almost exclusively by hearing. Not echolocation like bats, but with such delicate sensitivity to noise that even from 100 feet away, it can pinpoint a mouse under deep snow (unlike humans, the hairs inside of owls' ears continue to grow and mend throughout their lives: ours don't, so 33% of people over 65, and 50% of those over 75, suffer some form of hearing loss). While reading about owls was a random thing, it stunned me that such distinctively different books could be so fascinating about our natural world. So much left to discover and uncover. Equilibrium (I guess)...
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| US bombed oil facility in Tehran, April 2026. Photo: NY Review |
This is our home, like it or not, and what's not to like? Even the people tired of war and tired of living in a bombed-out home, still want to survive. This isn't the ideal world they imagined, but they had raised a family and once knew good times, as have so many of us. Can we just stop, or pause, and take stock of how we can just call it quits and quit fighting? And to the ones drilling and draining and manipulating and pocketing, I must ask: how much is enough? How much money? How much oil? How much power? Too many cooks (or is that crooks) spoil the soup, as they say.
Our planet has seen it all, and was completely covered (as in 100% covered) in ice layers a mile thick for millions of years. The average air temperature was -60F. And this snowball effect happened twice in Earth’s history. Had it not been for the volcanoes that punctured that mile layer and began emitting CO2, our Earth would have died. Our Earth wants to live, and to heal. Maybe it's about time we forget our petty drives and prejudices and consider extending a hand to a planet that has undergone some pretty tough times. Our home...
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