A man-made comet is striking the Earth |
From climate change and extinction to groundwater depletion and chemical pollution, human activity is now transforming the Earth on a geological scale with potentially catastrophic consequences for civilisation and life itself.
A farmer digging a well in his field to water his crops seems unlikely to knock the planet off its axis. But a billion farmers in a billion fields, aided by teeming cities, took just 17 years to work such a feat: extraction of the Earth’s groundwater has shifted the global axis by 78 centimetres.
The displacement of two trillion tonnes of groundwater between 1993-2010 is the latest proof that humans are less a species of animal than a geological force of nature, reshaping the planet in a myriad of potentially disastrous ways.
Any child can now recite how, 66 million years ago, a comet from deep space slammed into the Earth exterminating the dinosaurs, among 80 per cent of all living species. Nowadays, the impactor has two arms, two legs and a head with a barely functioning brain, insufficient to comprehend the havoc it is unleashing.
That cometary impact sent vast shock- and heatwaves rippling round the Earth, incinerating or flattening forests and animals. Giant tsunamis swept the coasts. Huge clouds of pulverised rock, molten metals, toxic gases, CO2, smoke and dust enshrouded the planet, throwing it into an instant ice age lasting centuries. Plants and algae died, robbing the air of breathable oxygen. Seas and lakes became acidic and dead. The combination of cold, dark, acidity and starvation was the true killer of the dinosaurs.
Today humans are reshaping the planet no less profoundly – and likely with similar consequences for all life, ourselves included, as the following cases illuminate.
Climate change driven chiefly by our burning of fossil fuels and land clearing will take the planet up by 4 degrees by 2078 – and the natural release of methane this is........