Customer Reviews

Apocalypse

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This book is absolutely terrifying. Each chapter goes into a different cataclysmic natural event, which, the authors show us, is certain to take place sooner or later. There are chapters on monstrous mega-tsunamis; stupendous super-volcanoes; economically egregious earthquakes; and, well, apocalyptic asteroid strikes. Each chapter is carefully presented, using as conservative data as possible. The authors help us understand that ALL of these events have happened before in Earth's history, over and over again, at irregular intervals. These disasters, we are shown, usually aren't even thousands of years apart -- only a few hundred. Every one of these disasters is certain to happen again, and again, and again.

Statistics are given, but please don't worry if you have math-phobia. It is perfectly possible to get a vastly enhanced understanding of these perils, while paying only minimal attention to the statistics. The text makes everything quite clear.

As an additional, macabre, morbid bonus, readers are treated here to four mini-thrillers. The end of each chapter contains a little fictional scenario about how the event under discussion might play out. The authors make the not-terribly-unreasonable assumption that each scenario might take place some time within the next century or so. (They aren't suggesting that ALL of these events will happen during the next century -- they simply construct each separate, unrelated scenario within that timeframe.) Each mini-thriller is about 5 or 10 pages long. Two of the events portrayed lead to only a relatively moderate negative outcome -- total, absolute, utter global economic collapse, requiring decades for a recovery. That's the MODERATELY negative outcome. The other two mini-thrillers end with the whole planet being plunged into a new Dark Age, which the authors speculate could last for centuries. I'll leave it up to you to see which disasters are the really bad ones.

Most alert people today are reasonably familiar with the asteroid threat, and with the possibility of catastrophic earthquakes. Two scenarios which, bizarrely enough, have received significantly less attention in the popular media, are the "super-volcano" scenario, and the possibility of a "mega-tsunami" inundating the east coast of the United States. This book helps us understand how bad things could be, and how real the threat is. Did you know that all of Yellowstone Park is basically the top of a gigantic underground volcano, which could wipe out about 10 states overnight if it ever blew? I, for one, was totally unaware of this. Not only that -- scientists have proven that the Yellowstone Supervolcano blows up approximately once every 600,000 years. The last time it exploded was about 640,000 years ago. Do the math, and think carefully about your next vacation plans.

Let me quickly add that all the events described in this terrific book are NATURAL disasters. There's nothing about nuclear war, for example. As long as you're on a disaster kick... I'd like to recommend "Planet Earth in Jeopardy: Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War," by Lydia Dotto. In the same vein, you might want to find a copy of "The Cold and the Dark," by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich. Both of these books are detailed discussions of what scientists think nuclear winter might be like.

I myself am not a geophysicist, an oceanologist, or an astronomer. Therefore, I need books like this to keep me informed. If you are like me, you will benefit from this book, and your friends could benefit as well. I recommend that you buy a copy, and talk it up amongst your friends, co-workers, and family. We should all be better informed about these issues. Two thumbs up for Bill McGuire and Maggie O'Hanlon, for this incredibly important book.

As I read "Apocalypse," I kept thinking of a phrase from Woody Allen's "My Speech to the Graduates": "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." McGuire's book is hard to put down, but it doesn't offer much comfort when it comes advice about how to escape the consequences of global disasters.

The short message is that there are some cataclysms that we can do absolutely nothing to prevent and that we can do very little to protect ourselves against. McGuire describes four "big ones" that could plunge civilization into a new Dark Ages or cause the extinction of the human race. These are a volcanic super eruption, a massive tsunami, a massive earthquake in Tokyo, and an asteroid or comet strike.

Each major section of the book explains the science behind these scenarios and describes what we know about how often these events have occurred in the past. McGuire ends each chapter with a dramatic and lurid account of what happens when one of these things hits: Yellowstone Park (which is actually the caldera of a gigantic volcano) massively erupts, buries large parts of the United States under a blanket of ash and throws the rest of the world into a volcanic winter; the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupts and sends half the island of La Palma tumbling into the Atlantic, causing huge tsunamis that wipe out the east coast of the United States and all the coastal cities of western Europe and Africa; a magnitude 8.3 earthquake hits Tokyo, wiping the city out and causing worldwide economic catastrophe; a one kilometer wide piece of comet smashes into the earth, annihilating western Europe and plunging the rest of the world into mass starvation.

The troubling thing about all of this is that it is not a matter of "if," but of "when." McGuire explains that super eruptions, comet and asteriod strikes, massive tsunamis and fairly large earthquakes are regular occurrences on a geological time scale, and they are bound to happen again. The difference this time is that there is now a large and interdependent global civilzation in the way, and it is not likely to survive the encounter.

Having said all that, I have learned to take predictions of doom with a grain of salt. The Y2K bug didn't live up to its billing, and I suspect that McGuire is underestimating how resourceful human beings can be in responding to disaster, even one on a global scale--we get a few brownie points for surviving ice ages and the last super eruption in 70,000 BC. This doesn't mean that "Apocalypse" isn't sobering, or that the "big one" won't get us all eventually, but I'm not prepared to give up hope yet.

Its clear from the geological record that the history of life on Earth has been punctuated with dramatic and drastic changes in the global climate.In this book, Bill McGuire, gives a vivid account of four types of extreme natural disaster, supervolcanic eruption, tsunami (wrongly called tidal waves in English), catastrophic earthquake and cometary or asteriodal impact, all of which have plentiful precendents in Earth's history, and presents an entirely plausible account of the disastrous consequences in global climate, the resultant human and biosphere changes and even the consequences to the global economy. Bill McGuire writes wittily and with style. He brings a grim sense of humour together with a zest for geology and geophysics, which manages to translate what could be a dry recollection of past geological events into an exciting and fascinating dialogue. My favourite(!) disaster concerns the tsunami hazard to the United States posed by a little known volcano in the Canary Islands. I'll be watching the news very carefully for news about the Cumbre Viejo volcano from now on! Weird prophetic point: how did the author know that the International Space Space would be christened "Alpha"? Not quite five star material. A few more diagrams and photographs would be a big help. All in all, an excellent book of science and serious scientific speculation. Recommended.

I first came across Bill McGuire (aka Disasterman), Director of the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Center, volcanologist, Benfield Professor of geophysical hazards at the University of London, and author of "Apocalypse" in Susan Casey's nonfiction best-seller The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, where he made some serious predictions about how the changing climate is going to affect (among other things) wave height and the intensity of storms. I'm certain I've also seen him on one or another of the cable TV series that specialize in the prediction of Earth's doom in various unpleasant ways.

Professor McGuire was one of our earliest scientific prophets of world-wide disaster. This book was published in 1999, and in it he concentrates on four catastrophes that could change our lives (or eliminate them, altogether) in the near future. He discusses the science and history behind each scenario, then uses his imagination to tell a story about a future occurrence:

* A volcanic blast powerful enough to devastate a continent and change the earth's climate. Yellowstone National Park's caldera field is the culprit in this author's imagined scenario. I've already seen a made-for-TV movie about the explosion of Yellowstone's super caldera, and can't help wondering whether the movie script was developed from this book. Twelve years after "Apocalypse" was published, at the beginning of 2011, 'National Geographic' commented on continuing activity at Yellowstone: "supervolcano just took a deep 'breath,' causing miles of ground to rise dramatically, scientists report." Furthermore, Yellowstone is just one of many active caldera fields scattered over the Earth. Others include "Italy, in the Bay of Naples and around Rome, on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea and in the North Island of New Zealand."

* A giant wave capable of destroying entire cities along the coastlines of the Pacific or Atlantic. McGuire made his predictions well before the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (magnitude 9.1) and tsunami caused 227,898 deaths (figure supplied by the U.S. Geological Survey) and the 2011 magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Eastern Japan. But these two tsunamis are relatively small compared to the one that will be caused by a gigantic landslide from a volcanic island such as Hawaii or La Palma. The author documents enormous slides that have occurred in the past. In McGuire's imagined scenario, the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Island of La Palma crashes into the Atlantic and wipes out (among other areas) the Eastern Coast of the United States.

* A cataclysmic earthquake that could destroy the world's economy. This is the most dated section of "Apocalypse" as the author uses Japan as his model of how a massive earthquake could destroy the world's economy. Japan experienced such an earthquake in 2011. Although it didn't demolish Tokyo (the author's imagined scenario) it did wipe out much of Japan's automobile production facilities. The World Bank's estimated economic cost was US$235 billion, making it the most expensive natural disaster in world history. It definitely affected the world's economy, but didn't destroy it. Since China has now overtaken Japan as the world's number two economy, a more up-to-date scenario might focus on the destruction of Shanghai rather than Tokyo.

* An asteroid impact that would kill a billion people and take our civilization back into the Dark Ages. According to the author, it wouldn't even take a chunk of rock as big as the one that caused the dinosaurs to go extinct---the Chicxulub impactor is estimated to have been ten kilometers long. A one kilometer asteroid or comet could do the job very nicely.

Although many of the author's future-casts are already out-of-date (several were supposed to take place in the first decade of the new millennium), this book should still be read by anyone who wants a glimpse of what this new century could have in store for us. Disaster planners should be especially interested in "Apocalypse." There are things we can do right now to lessen the death toll following a major earthquake, tsunami, volcano, or celestial impactor. I believe we should be spending the most money on preventing or mitigating the latter, because that could be the one that completely wipes out our civilization, and/or our species. We need those tracking telescopes in place right now. We need to come up with the technology to keep these deadly chunks of rock from smashing into our blue and beautiful planet. Now is the worst possible time to take money away from the space program. Just remember what comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 did to Jupiter: in the author's words, one of the largest impactors "formed a huge dark spot on the planet that was larger than the Earth."

Suppose the next comet is heading right toward us.

After a general introduction on volcanoes and earthquakes, this book gets down to the wild scenerios the reader is looking for. There are four: a super eruption at Yellowstone Park, a major Tokyo earthquake, collapse of the Canary islands into the Atlantic and an asteroid strike. Actually, only the last is likely to kill us all, and the earthquake would likely disrupt the world economy a bit for only a few years. But they are hellish enough to contemplate in any case.

While interesting enough, one should understand this is more of a scientific work than anything else. It is written for the public and is not hard to get through, but one can't help the feeling of being a student in high school geology class. Somehow science writers rarely escape this effect. One almost expects an exam at book's end where the index usually is. Of course, many scientific types will enjoy it for just this reason and that's fine. But they had better be prepared for a look at our demise, perhaps in just a few years time.