Ugh. This friggin’ heat, am I right? You’d think an organization of gods, demigods, and semi-immortal godlike beings from a representative sampling of the world’s various pantheons dedicated to battling the manifestations of Evil in all its myriad forms and protecting humanity from the myths, monsters, and madmen who lurk in the shadows could pry open the pocketbook and spring for A/C in their chief historian’s office. No such luck. I’m stripped down to my skivvies, and I’m still sweating buckets—which really can’t be good for this ancient Assyrian parchment. I think I might have just perspired away a doomsday prophecy. I’m just gonna have to sit here and think cold thoughts. Snowmen. Ice cream. Siberia. Ooh, Siberia!
Shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque…
You might have noticed that Siberia’s been in the news lately, which is pretty impressive for the world’s largest frozen hellscape. It’s the holes. A hat-trick of massive craters have opened up on the remote Yamal Peninsula, dropping away for hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface. Scientists claim to have a few theories about what’s causing it—melting permafrost, methane bursts, that sort of thing—but get enough drinks in one of ‘em and they’ll admit that they don’t have a friggin’ clue what’s going on. But hey, at least it’s just Siberia. Worst thing that can happen up there is a couple reindeer take a tumble into the abyss, right? Wrong. Head down to South Korea, and you’ll find that sinkholes are popping up all over Seoul, threatening to topple a record-breaking skyscraper they’ve got under construction. Or check out Florida, where a sinkhole almost swallowed up a couple of houses this past April. And back in February there was one in Kentucky that ate a bunch of classic cars at a Corvette museum. In 2007, one of ‘em opened up in the middle of Guatemala City that caused fifteen deaths and the evacuation of over a thousand people. Sinkholes have always been around, but over the past decade or so they’ve been swiss-cheesing the planet like crazy, getting worse and more frequent. Almost like something down there’s popping up to say hello.
We usually think of the earth’s surface as being pretty damn solid. That’s what they taught us in school. That’s why we built all this crap on it—we figured it wasn’t going anywhere! So it’s goddamn terrifying to realize that the ground could drop away from you at any moment, leaving you briefly floating over a bottomless pit like so much Wile E. Coyote. So what’s really down there, under the dirt and the rocks? Science tells us it’s somewhere between three and thirty miles of candy-coated crust, followed by 1800 miles of nougaty mantle, 1400 miles of creamy, chocolatey, molten, outer core, and another 760 miles of crispity, crunchity, iron inner core. Sure, that’s one theory; and a pretty damn good one too. Lots of diagrams and complicated math to back it up. But there’s other theories out there. Wilder ones. Weirder ones. Bat$#&@-crazier ones. And they’re no less true! ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
