Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Global Change...a man made disaster?


Climate change is not the only 'global' issue we face when it comes to the health and sustainability of our planet... there is another issue we face that we can directly influence it, because we (humans) are the source and cause of 85% of it. It's called Global Structural Change.

It would normally take hundreds of thousands of years to move as much topsoil, gravel and stone around the surface of the Earth, as it has taken mankind only a few centuries. It would tale millions of years for the under-structure of mountains to be hollowed out, and salt domes to be emptied by water solutions, for arid plain's under-fields of water and oil to me drawn to the surface and the rise, and or fall, of grounds to elevations more suitable for life....and mankind has done this in less than a century. Globally.

We move substrate from under solid ground, pump fluids and gasses into hollowed out salt domes and empty coal caverns. We pump water into bedrock crevices to flush out stable channels of under-structure. We drain ponds, lakes and swamps, and fill them with strata to place even more weight than was once there before. And we remove entire mountains from where they once stood and redistribute that matter across many miles of land unaccustomed to that weight and have less structural support deep within the crust lining. And we wonder why earthquakes, landslides and flooding is an issue in our modern world.



We humans see only the surface, and only consider a few hundred feet at the most when we do these things. And although we know and have an understanding of Geology, Physics and basic Earth Science of density and tensile strength, we forgot the simplicity of the domino effect and the ripple patterns that we learned in our youth. Once one thing is removed, or placed, and even replaced, it will effect all things in the old and new places....creating short term and long term issues.

The Earth is not just rotating on it's axis, nor just revolving around the Sun; it is expanding and contracting, the tectonic plates move, the crust rises and falls on its own in its own time of new lift and under supplementation. The Earth is literally 'breathing' and shifting mass in gas, liquid and solid forms all around itself. That we have no control of, yet can influence either in a positive way or a negative way. However, the Earth will do as She pleases, and although we may argue with Her and with ourselves, we cannot win that fight.

In moving mass earth in stone, sand and soil, we shift millions of tons around. We tip the balance and things beyond our scope of control begin to shift and shake. Like a sponge, the compression once removed, it expands. Like a spring held under tension, once the tension is lessened or released, the spring moves to a more suitable or natural state. That is what the crust of the Earth is, and how it acts and will react, given time and the right influence for it.

And what about water? We humans in America, while experimenting with nuclear explosions and military weaponry, managed to poison the largest underground fresh water deposit in Nevada... although a desert lays above it, we now have millions of people living there and are desperate for constant and reliable fresh water sources from the neighboring states. We deposit crude oils and gasses into our coastal waters. We release toxic chemicals into our air which taint our rainfall rendering it all but useless to natural life, and at times deadly to any life that consumes it or touches it. And Americans are not the only ones to be guilty of this....most 'developing countries' have done the same, over and over.

And speaking of air, we need that balanced equation of inert gasses to be able to live here. Oxygen alone will not sustain us well, and the amount of it is also a factor; too much and we die, too little and we die. Not just humans, but all animals. We need our plants to thrive, if the animals are to live, including humans. Yet we clear-cut rain forest for soy beans (removing 80% of that area's ability to produce oxygen), level meadows and forest alike to cover it with concrete and asphalt, which not only removed the oxygen machine in place, but now we up the ante by creating carbon gasses and other toxins by our machines not designed for life support, but for our own comfort.

The 'Global Changes' that we face today are clearly, for the most part, our own doing. And we have gone way past the tipping point in regaining positive influence any time soon, and now have to ride out the damage ongoing and to come, while trying to install corrective change and positive influences to shore up our failing under-structure and rebuild the life support machine that we so ignorantly have been dismantling.

No comments:

Post a Comment