Remo > Books: basado-en-hechos-reales‎ (91)

How to Survive the Worst Tornado in American History
The Tri-State Tornado’s demonic combination of speed, duration, and power make it such a meteorological anomaly that almost a century later a group of tornado experts led by Robert Maddox, the former director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory, set out to discover how the skies produced such a monster. According to Maddox, it began, as nearly all weather systems do, with a drop in pressure. Tornadoes are the end result of an extraordinary series of events involving so many variables that many meteorologists doubt whether we will ever be able to predict their formation with any certainty. At their core, though, they are the explosive, unpredictable result of an atmospheric contortionist act that occurs when air masses of different temperatures and humidities collide. Smaller versions of these collisions occur every day all over the globe, but the North American Midwest hosts more than 75 percent of the world’s tornadoes because its long flatlands provide a unique, unobstructed atmospheric pathway from Mexico to Canada. As a result, collisions in the Midwest play out on a continental scale. Every spring, when the winter jet stream still blows with enough force to create a strong low-pressure vacuum, and when the skies above Mexico warm but it remains cold over Canada, the Midwest hosts the atmosphere’s greatest demolition derby.

How to Survive the Sinking of the Titanic
At 11: 40 p.m. on the moonless night of April 14, 1912, Titanic’s lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee first spotted the 1.5-million-ton block of ice when it was only 500 yards in front of the ship. The Titanic, unlike ships in the Royal Navy, steamed without spotlights, so even though the massive block of ice rose more than 100 feet above the water, it remained camouflaged against the dark sky until it was far too late. When Fleet first rang the helm, the 50,000-ton ship was barreling through the North Atlantic sea at 22 knots. At that speed, it was only thirty-seven seconds from impact. At the call of iceberg, Titanic reversed its engines and executed a hard left turn, but there was not nearly enough time. The maneuver avoided a head-on impact, but at 11: 41 p.m. Titanic scraped 300 feet of its front starboard side against the ice. Sleeping on F deck, you’ll be one of the closest passengers to the impact, but even so the jolt will feel relatively benign. Perhaps even anticlimactic. One fireman bunked within feet of the collision later claimed to have slept through the incident entirely. “Dead to the wide [world],”he told investigators. Other, lighter sleepers will describe the impact as a “big vibration,”“a large cable being run out,”“a grinding crash,”“crunching and jarring,”or like “a basket of coals dumped on an iron plate.”Because the lurch is so mild, few passengers initially suspect a serious problem. But of course, there is a serious problem. You’re six decks below the lifeboats while seven tons of water pour into the lower holds every second. You need to act. Your first instinct might be to immediately sprint out of your bunk. Don’t. You have plenty of time before water floods your section of the ship, and you need to use that time wisely. Instead of running, change into your finest clothing. Put on a tux, a dress, or at the very least brush your hair. The lifeboats load from the first-class deck, which means for a brief but critical period they are an invitation-only party you need to crash. It will help if you look the part. Finally, before you depart, put on the life jacket stored above your bunk. Getting dressed will take a few extra minutes, but don’t worry. The great ship sinks so slowly you could make an interminable movie out of its demise. More than two and a half hours will elapse from impact to final foundering. And even more remarkable than the length of its fight against the weight of the frigid north Atlantic sea is the grace with which she fights it. The Titanic never capsizes, nor even takes on the kind of serious list that would make navigating the ladders and stairwells difficult or the launch of lifeboats impossible. Remarkably, the Titanic’s deck never tilts beyond a few degrees, even as she takes on thousands of tons of water. As a result, you not only have time to dress yourself, but when you do finally make it to the top decks, you won’t find the sheer chaos that accompanies most founderings. Instead, you’ll find a sociological cocktail of gallantry, cowardice, courage, chivalry, sacrifice, prayer, panic, and even music. The time Titanic takes to sink enables you to escape from even its lowest holds, but it also produces a human drama that partially explains the wreck’s infamy.

How to Survive the Ice Age
Colloquially, the era in which you find yourself is referred to as the Ice Age, but that’s a confusing misnomer, says Nicholas Swanson-Hysell, a professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, because we are still living through the very same “ice age.” It began almost 3 million years ago when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere first began to plummet. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere serves as our planet’s insulation. It traps heat otherwise headed for deep space, so its quantity dictates the earth’s temperature. In eras when it has been elevated— such as in the Triassic, when its atmospheric concentration soared to 2,000 parts per million— you could have bathed above the Arctic Circle on a fern-forested beach. And when carbon has dropped— such as in the Cryogenian, when it plunged below 40 parts per million— ice has encrusted the equator.[*] Because rocks contain the vast, vast majority of the earth’s carbon, prior to the industrial revolution only volcanism spewed the significant planet-warming amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. At the end of the Triassic, for example, a 500-year eruption released a million cubic miles of lava and vented as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as all human activity in the twenty-first century. The planet warmed by 5 degrees, and three quarters of the world’s species died. But just as carbon enters the atmosphere with the destruction of rocks, it also exits with their creation. When carbon dioxide dissolves into water and encounters calcium and magnesium from freshly eroded mafic rock, the minerals and carbon react (in a process called “weathering”) and settle on the ocean floor as vast beds of limestone. In other words, the life cycle of carbon looks something like this:

Rocks
——
VOLCANO!
——
air
———
ocean
———
rocks.

Volcanic eruptions might be more dramatic than the rather mundane chemical reaction that creates limestone, but the process has an equally profound, if diametrically opposed, environmental effect. When inordinate quantities of fresh mafic rock erode into water, the rock’s minerals react with the atmosphere’s carbon to create huge limestone beds. Earth loses its insulation, and the planet enters an ice age. Of course, an increase in erosion sufficient to lock up enough carbon to send the planet into a prolonged freeze doesn’t occur with the occasional mudslide. It occurs with the creation and erosion of entirely new islands and new mountain ranges. It occurs when continents and volcanic arcs collide and uplift huge amounts of fresh rock loaded with calcium and magnesium— and even then, only when those mountain ranges arise in the warmest, wettest, most erosion-friendly places. In other words, ice ages have an inciting incident— and it is always the same: a tectonic collision in the tropics. Three million years ago, the Indonesian archipelago slammed into northern Australia. Millions of tons of fresh mafic rock uplifted into torrents of warm rain, calcium and magnesium flowed into the ocean, locked away gigatons of carbon into beds of limestone, and the earth’s temperature plunged. Yet even within ice ages, the earth warms and cools as a result of cyclical changes in its orbit. Like a spinning top, the planet wobbles ever so slightly as it spins. These wobbles occur on 40,000-year cycles, and as Earth increases its tilt its hemispheres receive less winter sun, altering the ocean’s currents in ways that cause the sea to sequester more carbon. The Northern Hemisphere reached the nadir of its wobble 25,000 years ago, causing atmospheric carbon dioxide to plummet to 65 percent of preindustrial levels and the average global temperature plunged 15 degrees below what it is today. With the earth’s insulation ripped away, massive ice sheets covered much of its Northern Hemisphere.

* * *

As you look around this new world of ice you have arrived in and try to understand the environment, your tendency might be to take what you already know about the current European steppe and drop the temperature 15 degrees. That simple formula would suggest you’ve found yourself in an arctic tundra like those of modern northern Canada or Russia. But both examples are wrong, as is your attempt to liken your current environment to anything you would find on earth today. This is a tricky cognitive pitfall to avoid: Unlike in the Dinosaur Age, many animals will be familiar to you, but they’ll appear in what seems like a bizarre biological juxtaposition. You’ll see what you thought were animals that lived only in the African savannah grazing next to arctic ones. You’ll observe arctic fox, bison, and reindeer— and all will seem normal. But then you’ll watch a cheetah chase them. A rhino may graze next to a wolverine. A wolf may sit beside a lion. The result is an unsettlingly familiar landscape that falls into a kind of biological uncanny valley. If you spot a pack of lions racing after a reindeer— do not be alarmed. Well, maybe you should be alarmed. But at least you’re not imagining things. Instead of comparing where you are to what you know, start with this: You’re in a cold, arid environment filled with sunny days and very little clouds or rain. Yearly rainfall approaches desert levels thanks to the Scandinavian ice sheets deflecting moisture from the Atlantic. Yet these same glaciers produce soil with fantastically productive potential thanks to constant replenishing from glacial deposits. The result is an incredible faunal dichotomy between the watered river valleys and the desert-dry highlands in the mammoth steppe. The elevated plateaus and mountain terraces resemble polar deserts, while the watered soil of the river valleys explode in productivity. The floodplains of the mammoth steppe’s rich soils create an ideal grazing environment for the large, nomadic herd animals such as bison, horses, woolly mammoths— as well as the big-game hunters capable of bringing them down.