Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: George Nori with you, Michael Rampino with us. Michael, what
Speaker 2: got you involved in all of this? This is great work.
Speaker 3: Well, what got me involved in the geology and the
Speaker 3: study of the Earth in general was when I was
Speaker 3: seven years old. They reached to the Museum in National
Speaker 3: History in Manhattan and I saw, you know, the dinosaurs,
Speaker 3: and I saw the meteorites, and I saw the jans
Speaker 3: and minerals, and I said, hey, this is for me,
Speaker 3: you know, I want to know more about this stuff.
Speaker 3: And I stuck with it over the years, and it's
Speaker 3: wiped out pretty well.
Speaker 2: Did the asteroid that hit the Earth sixty some million
Speaker 2: years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs allow us as
Speaker 2: human beings to evolve?
Speaker 3: Yes, well, it was important because the dinosaurs were dominant
Speaker 3: on the Earth sixty six million years ago, and the mammals,
Speaker 3: the small mammals that were our our ancestors, were living
Speaker 3: along with the dinosaurs. But they were just small, tiny,
Speaker 3: rat like, mouse like animals. And it wasn't until the
Speaker 3: dinosaurs were taken out of the picture that those little
Speaker 3: mammals got a chance to evolve into all the present
Speaker 3: day mammals we have today in the world, including primates,
Speaker 3: including us. So we've can thank that that asteroid sixty
Speaker 3: six million years ago for the you know, for humanity.
Speaker 3: We wouldn't be here today that asteroid had missed the Earth.
Speaker 2: Roughly how many asteroids are considered near missus that buzzed
Speaker 2: by us every year?
Speaker 3: Well, I think every year there's around fifty Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that are close enough to hit us if something
Speaker 2: goes awry, it could be.
Speaker 3: Yes, some of them are. Most of them are passed
Speaker 3: by closer than the Moon, right, so they're pretty close
Speaker 3: to the Earth. But there's still a rather wide range there.
Speaker 3: So so nothing that we know of now that we've
Speaker 3: predicted the orbits for is on a collision course with
Speaker 3: the Earth. But you know, sometimes things pop out of
Speaker 3: nowhere and and on strange orbits, and and you never
Speaker 3: know when an impact might take place.
Speaker 2: Michael, what about volcanoes? How dangerous are they do us?
Speaker 3: Well, the the you know volcanoes are most of them
Speaker 3: are dangerous for local and regional areas. Right, if you're
Speaker 3: near the volcano and it's explosive volcano that erupts, there's
Speaker 3: gonna be damage, and there's gonna be a loss of
Speaker 3: life in the area of the volcano. But if the
Speaker 3: volcano is big enough explosive volcano is large enough, what
Speaker 3: we call super volcanoes, uh, then it could put so
Speaker 3: much a material up into the atmosphere. That's the problem.
Speaker 3: When they explode, a lot of fine dust and drop
Speaker 3: its of sulphuric acid go up into the upper atmosphere
Speaker 3: and they cut out some of the sunlight that will
Speaker 3: be coming and warming the planet. And so we after
Speaker 3: historical eruptions, you know, we've seen coolings lasting for a
Speaker 3: couple two or three years after those eruptions. And when
Speaker 3: we do the calculations of what the cooling would be
Speaker 3: after a supereruption, which might last for several years, it
Speaker 3: would be enough to cause what we call a volcanic winter.
Speaker 3: And what that means is that that Earth would become
Speaker 3: so cool, so cold that you probably lose a couple
Speaker 3: of growing seasons. And if that happened, there'd be mass starvation.
Speaker 3: And so that's that kind of civilization. It's not a
Speaker 3: mass extinction volcanic eruption, but it would certainly threaten civilization.
Speaker 3: If you're going to lose a couple of growing seasons.
Speaker 3: We don't have a backup of enough grain to get
Speaker 3: us through that kind of situation on a global basis,
Speaker 3: and so there would be a lot of trouble for
Speaker 3: the civilized world to get through that.
Speaker 2: In Italy and October seventy nine AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted,
Speaker 2: killing up to thirty five hundred people. They say maybe
Speaker 2: up to sixteen thousand. They're not sure. Did those poor
Speaker 2: people have any notice at all?
Speaker 3: Michael, No, that eruption, There were really no precursors that
Speaker 3: suggested that there was going to be an eruption, and
Speaker 3: so the eruption started in the morning and it just
Speaker 3: went from there. And so there was really no real
Speaker 3: warning for the people in that area to try to
Speaker 3: get away. They were trying to get away during the eruption.
Speaker 3: But then, as you said, there was a lot of
Speaker 3: loss of life, and those cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum
Speaker 3: were destroyed by the pyroclastic flows from men that big eruption.
Speaker 2: What causes a volcano to erupt, what builds.
Speaker 3: Up, Well, there's you know, these these magbists that are
Speaker 3: inside the earth are charged with with gas. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of gas CO two and water vapor dissolved in
Speaker 3: in these magbusts, and as they come to the surface,
Speaker 3: that gas can be released, and it can be released
Speaker 3: explosively if the magni comes to the surface fast enough
Speaker 3: and so that will will cause an explosion and the
Speaker 3: so the so the magwa doesn't come out as a
Speaker 3: lava flow, it comes out as as particles, as pieces
Speaker 3: of and and fine ash and stuff. That's that's what's
Speaker 3: produced by explosive volcanic eruption. And as I said, they're
Speaker 3: very hard to predict. And sometimes there's some precursory activity
Speaker 3: that allows you to say, well, there might be a
Speaker 3: big eruption coming, so maybe we better get people out
Speaker 3: of there. But very often there's not much precursory activity
Speaker 3: that tells you very much until the actual eruption.
Speaker 2: What would you say, Michael, might be the biggest dangers
Speaker 2: to us on this planet?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 3: The biggest dangers Well, I mean, of course an asteroid
Speaker 3: impact would be the ultimate danger, but they don't happen
Speaker 3: that often. In the last really big one, it was
Speaker 3: sixty six million years ago that was the one that
Speaker 3: wiped out the dinosaurs. They've been some smaller ones since then,
Speaker 3: but so it's it's a it's not a it's a
Speaker 3: rare event which has a very big effect. And the
Speaker 3: same thing is true with super volcanoes. They don't happen.
Speaker 3: They happen maybe once in every fifty thousand years, So
Speaker 3: the relatively rare events. I say, one of the big
Speaker 3: biggest problems we have today in terms of sort of
Speaker 3: an existential problem for us is climate change. You know,
Speaker 3: people who have kind of ignored it or tried to
Speaker 3: ignore it for a number of years, but just look
Speaker 3: at what's happening this year. You can't ignore it anymore.
Speaker 3: You can't ignore the fires, you can't ignore the droughts,
Speaker 3: you can't ignore the super high temperatures. You can't ignore
Speaker 3: the very warm ocean temperatures that are gonna wipe out
Speaker 3: the coil reaes. I mean, as you said earlier, it's happened.
Speaker 3: It seems to be happening so fast, and I think
Speaker 3: it's because we hit a tipping point. Things were changing slowly,
Speaker 3: and then we hit a point where things started to
Speaker 3: change really fast.
Speaker 2: In theory, if it's man caused, it should get worse
Speaker 2: and worse and worse from here on in.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, as long as we're continuing to.
Speaker 2: Put if we keep doing what we're.
Speaker 3: Doing, Yes, if we stop, you know, if we stop
Speaker 3: tomorrow burning fossil fuels, eventually it would start to get cooler.
Speaker 3: It wouldn't happen right away. But as long as we
Speaker 3: continue to put greenhouse gases, and I can't see us
Speaker 3: really coming that down on a short term basis, it's
Speaker 3: just going to get warmer.
Speaker 2: Now, what's your definition of a greenhouse gas.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a gas. There are a few gases which
Speaker 3: are greenhouse gases. CO two, for example, carbon dioxide methane
Speaker 3: is a greenhouse gas. And what they do is they
Speaker 3: allow sunlight to come through the atmosphere and warm up
Speaker 3: the ground, and then the ground warms up and then
Speaker 3: warms up the atmosphere, and the heat that's coming out
Speaker 3: to warm up the atmosphere is trapped by the greenhouse gases.
Speaker 2: I had heard that we had high carbon dioxide levels
Speaker 2: lots of years ago, many years ago. Is that true?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Sure, one hundred million years ago. CO two is
Speaker 3: very very high, and the planet was warm. But those
Speaker 3: those changes took place over millions of years, slowly gradually.
Speaker 3: The problem with what's happening now is it's happening you know,
Speaker 3: over decades and ecosystems, you know, life on Earth can
Speaker 3: adapt to changes that are happening. That's sass.
Speaker 2: What's happening with the what's happening with the sea life
Speaker 2: right now? I'm sorry sea life fish?
Speaker 3: Well, if you have the temperatures in the ocean off
Speaker 3: of Florida are a hundred degrees uh, that's reaching the
Speaker 3: limit of where lots of sea life can survive.
Speaker 2: That's like cooking. The fish in the ocean.
Speaker 3: Are just are just are dying and and and once
Speaker 3: they die and the temperatures remain one hundred degrees in
Speaker 3: the water, they're not they're not going to dat And
Speaker 3: so that's that's a big, you know, potential, very very
Speaker 3: major problem.
Speaker 2: What's a normal temperature for the.
Speaker 3: Ocean in the in the summer, Yeah, maybe eighty degrees
Speaker 3: something like that.
Speaker 2: So it's twenty degrees hotter right now. That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Now maybe in a few years it'll be
Speaker 3: even more hotter than that.
Speaker 2: If we have cycles of winters, we could have a
Speaker 2: bad winter though, right like you said, yeah, there's.
Speaker 3: No guarantee that the winter is going to be any
Speaker 3: any any milder. Uh, it's the summer season, that's that's
Speaker 3: that's the critical one.
Speaker 2: And we've got another month of that at least, don't we.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, we have at least another month of that.
Speaker 3: Of yes, I I July was the hotest July on record,
Speaker 3: and I don't see why August wouldn't end up being
Speaker 3: the hottest August on record as well. You know, I
Speaker 3: can make that prediction, I think pretty safety.
Speaker 2: Well, if this is caused by mankind, we're not going
Speaker 2: to change what we do any day quicker.
Speaker 3: So what happened, what happens? Yeah, Well, you know, it
Speaker 3: will just continue to get warmer. The more the more
Speaker 3: these the gases we put into the atmosphere, the warmer
Speaker 3: it'll get. So so you know, in San Antonio it's
Speaker 3: one hundred ted degrees, and you know, years may need
Speaker 3: to be one hundred and twenty degrees one hundred and thirty.
Speaker 2: Degrees in theory, Michael, should it get worse next summer
Speaker 2: if things just stay the same, I.
Speaker 3: Would say probably. Since we're still putting more of the
Speaker 3: greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we might expect it to
Speaker 3: be even warmer next summer.
Speaker 2: Now, what happens if it's dramatically less, then what do
Speaker 2: you say, Well.
Speaker 3: You know, there's always variability from year to year. But
Speaker 3: as I said, if you go back the last twenty
Speaker 3: thirty years, every year has been hotter than the year before.
Speaker 3: So there's a trend of warmer and warmer temperatures. And
Speaker 3: so this last couple of years, we've currently hit a
Speaker 3: spot where we're seeing these very elevated temperatures. And as
Speaker 3: I say, this may just be a tipping point that
Speaker 3: we've reached. It's gotten warm enough so that there's so
Speaker 3: much extra heat in the atmosphere that we're seeing these
Speaker 3: very very high temperatures across well across the whole world. Essentially.
Speaker 2: That's what really baffles me, Michael. This is not just
Speaker 2: the United States or a North American problem. This is
Speaker 2: worldwide right now. I mean, Greece is on fire, everything's
Speaker 2: going crazy.
Speaker 3: Well, the CO two we put in the atmosphere is
Speaker 3: mixed into the atmosphere goes everywhere. So we're putting CO
Speaker 3: two in China, is you know, every country that's burning
Speaker 3: cross and fuels is adding to the CO two of
Speaker 3: the atmosphere, that that carbon dioxide is mixed around throughout
Speaker 3: the atmosphere, and so you know you should see a
Speaker 3: fairly uniform warming.
Speaker 2: I did not hear any meteorologists last year predicting this
Speaker 2: kind of weather this summer.
Speaker 3: Did you, I don't think. I don't think if they
Speaker 3: predicted these kinds of temperatures. But I have a feeling
Speaker 3: they'll be predicting them for next year.
Speaker 2: It'll be much easier to predict, that's for sure. Sadly,
Speaker 2: back to the asteroids for a moment. When you look
Speaker 2: at the Moon, it's shattered with all kinds of asteroid
Speaker 2: holes and craters and things like that. If you dried
Speaker 2: out the planet Earth, the oceans, and the vegetation, would
Speaker 2: we look to.
Speaker 3: No, because the same we've been hit by the same
Speaker 3: number of things. So there would be the same number
Speaker 3: of craters on the Earth, except that on the Earth
Speaker 3: there's erosion and there's balcanism, and there are all kinds
Speaker 3: of things that would tend to erase the craters. And
Speaker 3: so there are about two hundred known verified impact craters
Speaker 3: on the Earth, and we find a couple more every year,
Speaker 3: and they're hard to find because they get buried, they
Speaker 3: get erased, you know. But if there was no erosion
Speaker 3: on the Earth, there was no geological activity, it would
Speaker 3: look like the moon.
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