Earth has plenty of natural disasters and tragedies;
we have tornadoes that rip up the Midwest yearly, hurricanes that
flatten and drown cities, and volcanic eruptions that evacuate entire
island nations. But the rest of the solar system is a much harsher
place, with disasters that would end life as we know it if they happened here.
Volcanoes are a big deal here on Earth;
they are worshiped as gods, and rightfully feared for their ability to
both create and destroy. I haven’t heard of any other natural disaster
that has caused entire civilizations to disappear or to have to pack up
and move. In my lifetime I can cite Mt Pinatubo and Montserrat as two
cases where an entire island nation has had to jump ship because the
volcano they lived on tried to kill them. And we have some doozies;
calderas are what we also call super volcanoes, which are volcanoes that
stretch for hundreds of miles and have the power to kill us all.
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| A moon of Jupiter, or a teenager's face; you be the judge. |
On Jupiter’s moon, Io, that kind of
thing is a daily occurrence. The stress of passing through Jupiter’s
massively powerful magnetic field, along with being bathed in radiation
from the giant planet causes the moon to boil over with sulfur volcanoes
constantly.
The volcanic explosions can toss
material up to 120 miles into the sky, and generate lava flows that are
hundreds of miles long. That would be like Krakatoa, which changed the
world climate for several years after it blew up, every day, several
times a day. Imagine the planet where Anakin Skywalker got his legs
chopped off (you saw Revenge of the Sith, right?), except
without an atmosphere, and constantly bathed in radiation.
2. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
On earth, we have one event that appears
to have been a comet impact. It happened back in the early 20th century
over Tunguska in Siberia. The impact leveled every tree for 1000 square
miles. We got off easy.
See those little brown bruises on the
upper right part of the image? Each one of those was an impact site.
What happened was this; the comet broke into several pieces because the
same gravity and magnetism that causes Io to burp sulfur all over itself
also ripped the comet apart. And then the gravity dragged those pieces
into a crash course with the big planet. The result was a cataclysm that
would have likely pushed the reset button for life on Earth. Many of
the stains in the picture were the size of Earth, with the fireballs
from the impact reached 24,000° Kelvin, that is 42740.33° Fahrenheit.
The surface of the sun is 9941°, by contrast. That was over four times the temperature
of the sun, over an area the size of our entire planet. The apocalypse
in the movie 2012 was pretty lame, by comparison.
3. Jupiter’s great Red Spot
Speaking of Jupiter, it is home to the
worst hurricane in the solar system. The Red Spot is a storm that has
been raging for anywhere from 180 to 345 years, and is roughly 3 Earths
in diameter. That should really put Jupiter’s size into perspective; our
entire planet is the scale they use to measure parts of it.
And to think, most buildings make us feel insignificant in comparison...
Hurricane Katrina was awful; it was
huge, and had winds gusting up to 175 mph, and pretty much wiped New
Orleans off the face of the earth. The winds in the Great Red Spot are
around 268 Mph, which is more like a tornado than a hurricane. at that
speed, it could put a piece of straw through the moon. Scientists aren’t
quite sure why the spot has persisted for so long, or why it is red.
Apparently sometimes it disappears from sight in the normal human
spectrum of light, but it is still there and shows up on infrared.
Apparently, some day it may just wink out of existence, when whatever is
driving it stops. Or maybe if the monoliths get pulled into it.
4. Neptune’s Winds
At this point, the Earth comparisons
start to dwindle, since the scale of these things reach a point that
there is no analog on our planet. Neptune’s winds definitely fits the
bill. The highest natural wind ever recorded on Earth was on Mt
Washington New Hampshire back in 1934, and it reached 231 Mph. Neptune’s
wind regularly coasts at - get this - 600 meters per second. I did the
math, and I can’t help but think something must be off, because that
figures to winds of 1,324 miles per hour. For perspective, the speed of
sound is 768 miles per hour.
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| I can't think of anything that adequately describes this, except "Holy C**P." |
Neptune is home to some of the most
violent weather in the solar system, and fortunately since
it has no surface, we don’t have to worry about anyone ever trying to
land there. Like Jupiter, Neptune has it’s own spot, called the Great
Dark Spot, but unlike Jupiter’s -
which is a giant storm filled with clouds - Neptune’s is a giant cyclonic
wind with no clouds. In fact, it is basically a giant hole in the
planet, where the winds are spinning so fast that the atmosphere itself
opened up and shows off the planet’s undergarments. The spot comes and
goes every few years, behaving a bit more like Earth hurricanes (except,
you know, they last for years), which makes sense since seasons on
Neptune last 40 years.
5. Mars’s Dust Storms
You would think that since Mars is
little more than half the size of Earth that things there would be less
extreme, but that just isn’t the case. In fact, almost everything is
bigger; bigger canyons, bigger glaciers, bigger volcanoes. In fact, the
only reason the volcanoes didn’t make the list is because they are all
extinct. However, our tiny red neighbor from the way-out-there-verse has
one thing that blows the rest away (pardon the pun); the biggest dust
storms in the solar system. For those of you that aren’t die hard Doom
fans, this is Mars on a normal day:
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| From up here, it is hard to imagine that it's crawling with demons. (According to video games) |
Mars has dust storms fairly regularly,
but sometimes they grow in scope to the point that even millions of
miles away, the thought is terrifying. Some of the storms could easily
cover an entire continent or two on Earth, although sometimes they grow
to cover the entire planet. The really severe storms kick up enough dust
to actually cause the planet to warm up as it traps sunlight. If
mankind ever sets up a base on Mars, you can just about count on it
being the new universal Australia, where only the criminals are sent.
6. Venus: The Worst Possible Conclusion of Global Warming
Whether you think humans are causing
global warming or not, it’s a fact, sometimes the temperature of the
Earth changes and sometimes those changes are a warming trend. Most
worst case scenarios wind up with a Waterworld-type conclusion with
flooded cities and destitute, hungry people with no land to farm and
Kevin Costner roaming free in tight clothing (eek!..). Even that horror
pales in comparison to what is happening on the pretty, white “star”
many of us see every night as the sun goes down.
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| Venus with clouds, and a quick glimpse at her surface. |
Venus’s surface reveals her to be the
pock-marked hooker that she is beneath that beautiful veil of
cloud-makeup. The clouds themselves are pure acid rain - sulfuric acid.
The ambient air temperature changes little from day to night, averaging
460 degrees Fahrenheit nearly all the time. In addition to the ungodly
heat and everything-melting rain, the air pressure on the surface of the
planet is 93 times that of Earth at sea level. Imagine being at the
bottom of the ocean, and that the ocean was hot enough to melt metal and
highly corrosive. The really scary thing is that
scientists have found evidence that suggests that a billion years ago,
Venus was a lot like Earth in terms of atmosphere and water content, but
that a “runaway greenhouse effect” resulted in its current state.
Source : http://www.weirdworm.com
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