Complex Numbers

Zoned Out

An entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]...

Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone

From what I've heard, the Earth looked a little different 65 million years ago.

Here's a drawing: https://images.slideplayer.com/16/5101171/slides/slide_2.jpg

Some of the continents are vaguely recognizable. You can make out South America, Africa, Australia as it was divorcing from Antarctica. In between Africa and Australia, just east of what is already recognizable as Madagascar? That'll become India in several million years as it migrates north and forms the Himalayas.

And that big explosion-looking thing in red? In what's going to become the Gulf of Mexico? That's the impact crater that they say probably killed off most of the dinosaurs.

Though they're still speculating about that, last I heard, it remains the most likely scenario. Whatever the actual cause, there's little doubt that it was around that time when the non-avian dinosaurs died off, paving the way for mammals to take over, which eventually led to the evolution of some clever apes who, in the span of about 100 years, wiped out a lot of the deposits of crude oil that it took billions of years for nature to sequester underground.

What is certain is that the impact would have killed off anything in its immediate vicinity. The rest was, so the speculation goes, devastated by the resulting sudden change in climate.

It's a myth that crude oil is dead dinosaurs. A myth, but a persistent one. Sinclair still uses a dinosaur for its logo, which was originally a brontosaurus, then an apatosaurus, and now they're saying no, wait, it's actually a brontosaurus after all.

No, the bulk of these deposits were formed long before the dinosaurs. Had they developed oil wells, perhaps they would have sucked the planet dry before we even showed up on the stage. But they didn't, so it waited another 65 million years or so until we came along and decided we needed energy.

And one of the places we get that energy from happens to be the Gulf of Mexico. We all know about the massive oil spill there from over a decade ago, but that wasn't the only one. These spills killed a bunch of shit and drove the rest off.

Another Gulf of Mexico dead zone. Not from a sudden impact, but in geological time, 100 years might as well be a minute.

People can't help but speculate: what comes after humans, after we've experienced the inevitable extinction event? Will another civilization arise? Maybe cockroaches will learn to build and drive cars?

Well, no. Because we've sucked all the oil out that powered those cars. And taken away all the low-hanging fruit -- the once-easy-to-find minerals that kick-started each of what we like to call "ages:" stone, bronze, iron, nuclear, whatever. It will take millions, even billions, of years to recover those, if it happens at all, as continents continue to drift and new material gets sucked up from the mantle.

No, if another species on earth ever managed to learn to make tools and use them to fight each other over other resources -- they couldn't, because there's nothing left on the surface, not enough to make a difference, anyway.

The Earth will recover, as it did from the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous. Life will, uh, find a way, to paraphrase Jurassic Park. But that's it for what we like to call "civilization."

I can't say the planet will be worse off for it. Sucks for us, though.