Реферат: A Guide To The End Of The

World Pt 2 Essay, Research Paper

A Guide to the End of the World pt 2Of all geological hazards, landslides are perhaps the most

underestimated, probably because they are often triggered

by some other hazard, such as an earthquake or deluge, and

the resulting damage and loss of life is therefore subsumed

within the tally of the primary event. Nevertheless, landslides

can be highly destructive, both in isolation and in numbers.

In 1556, a huge earthquake struck the Chinese province of

Shensi, shaking the ground so vigorously that the roofs of

countless cave dwellings collapsed, incarcerating (according

to Imperial records) over 800,000 people. In 1970, another

quake caused the entire peak of the Nevados Huascaran

mountain in the Peruvian Andes to fall on the towns below,

wiping out 18,000 people in just four minutes and erasing all

signs of their existence from the face of the Earth. Heavy

rainfall too can be particularly effective at triggering landslides, and when in 1998 Hurricane Mitch dumped over 30

centimetres of rain on Central America, it mobilized over

a million landslides in Honduras alone, blocking roads,

burying farmland, and destroying communities. The final – and perhaps greatest – threat to life and limb

comes not from within the Earth but from without. Although

the near constant bombardment of our planet by large

chunks of space debris ended billennia ago, the threat from

asteroids and comets remains real and is treated increasingly

seriously. Even as I write, the UK government has announced

funding for a new research centre dedicated to the study of

the impact threat and its consequences. Recent estimates

suggest that around a thousand asteroids with diameters of

1 kilometre or more have orbits around the Sun that cross

the Earth’s, making collision possible at some point in the

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