To the surprise of no one but the delusional, Washington D.C. is on borrowed time. Some folks might be overjoyed by the news that our politicians will finally get their comeuppance, but this concerns geology, not politics. Sorry to disappoint anyone.
No, this concerns a report in the Geological Society of America’s August 2015 issue of GSA Today that tells of another potential cause for Washington D.C.’s imminent demise. Because this tale of doom has to do with science, you’re probably thinking that the report focuses on the rising of the seas brought on by the melting of the glaciers brought on by the warming of the globe brought on by me, the Producer of the All-Natural Carbon Dioxides. The paper submitted by researchers at the University of Vermont, with assistance by the USGS and others, does bring up climate change, but it adds a new scary thing to consider. It says that our nation’s capital is sinking into the sea.
Here’s how it was explained on the University of Vermont’s website:
Washington’s woes come from what geologists call “forebulge collapse.” During the last ice age, a mile-high North American ice sheet, that stretched as far south as Long Island, N.Y., piled so much weight on the Earth that underlying mantle rock flowed slowly outward, away from the ice. In response, the land surface to the south, under the Chesapeake Bay region, bulged up. Then, about 20,000 years ago, the ice sheet began melting away, allowing the forebulge to sink again.
“It’s a bit like sitting on one side of a water bed filled with very thick honey,” explains Ben DeJong, the lead author on the new study, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources with support from the U.S. Geological Survey, “then the other side goes up. But when you stand, the bulge comes down again.”
They say that this subsiding of the land in and around D.C. will make the region drop six inches deeper into the water by the end of this century and will continue to subside for thousands of more years. This clearly means that the sick earth is sick and tired of us making it sick and is therefore accelerating our extinction. We toxic humans aren’t destroying ourselves quick enough for it with our glarbal wormenings, so the planet has decided to take matters into its own hands, destroying more of us mostly bipedal poisonous organisms faster through tectonic-caused coastalized sinkening.
The earth’s land-masses have shifted without human help for umpteenzillion years, so it’s not like we can take all the blame for extincting ourselves. But what would a mainstream article on this report be without throwing the standard guilt-tripping Chicken Little freak-out factor into it, as the Washington Post did:
Even without the sinking action, sea level would still be rising because of global warming — melting glaciers (Alaska, Greenland, the West Antarctic ice sheet, to name a few), and thermal expansion (when water warms, it expands). Looking at climate change influences alone, average global sea level is likely to rise anywhere from one foot to to 2.5 feet by 2100.
Combine the two effects — sinking and climate change — and the Chesapeake Bay’s sea level rise could surpass three feet by the end of the century. Of course, that is assuming the absence of a catastrophic melting event in Greenland or Antarctica.
Ah, yes. We can’t forget that we’re creating catastrophe by melting Greenland, which will raise the tides of the oceans another three or four inches by the year 2100. Shame on all of us.
In commenting on this massive collapsing bulge of Washington (if you look close, you may see several messages within that phrase) to the University of Vermont, this scientist added something that shows no partisan agenda whatsoever:
“It’s ironic that the nation’s capital—the place least responsive to the dangers of climate change—is sitting in one of the worst spots it could be in terms of this land subsidence,” said Paul Bierman, a UVM geologist and the senior author on the new paper. “Will the Congress just sit there with their feet getting ever wetter? What’s next, forebulge denial?”
Haha, that’s funny. He said, “Denial.” When trying to invoke fear doesn’t get results, mockery is the next best technique professionals should use to have people take them seriously.
