A guide to the end of the world : everything you never wanted to know
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Bibliographic Information
A guide to the end of the world : everything you never wanted to know
Oxford University Press, 2002
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 179) and index
HTTP:URL=http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy031/2002283522.html Information=Table of contents
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The earth is an extraordinarily fragile place which is fraught with danger - a tiny rock hurtling through space, wracked by violent crustal movements and subject to dramatic climatic changes as the earth's geophysical and orbital circumstances vary. Only 10,000 years after the end of the Ice Age, the planet is sweltering in some of the highest temperatures it has ever experienced. At the same time, overpopulation and exploitation are dramatically increasing the vulnerability of modern society to natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions. As futurologists long ago discovered, predicting the future is high on impossible, and few of us can even start to imagine what life will be like on planet earth in a million or even a thousand years time. The real question is, however, will there be any human life here at all? "The End of the World" will focus on the many potential catastrophes facing our planet and our race in the future, and will address both the probabilities of these events happening and our chances of survival.
The breadth of treatment will extend from discussion of the likely consequences of the current global warming experiment to the inevitable destruction of the Earth in the far future, when it is enveloped by our giant, bloated sun. In between, other end of the world scenarios will be examined, including the new Ice Age, the asteroid and comet impact threat, supervolcanoes and their effects, and megatsunami.
Table of Contents
- Foreword
- 1. A very short introduction to the earth
- 2. Global warming: a lot of hot air?
- 3. Whatever happened to the next Ice Age?
- 4. The enemy within: supervolcanoes, giant quakes, and megatsunami
- 5. The threat from space: asteroid & comet impacts
- 6. Five billion years AD: the earth's final days
- 7. Epilogue
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