World's end in less than a week? What's going on?

[Yael]

So, crazy theories have been popping up since last month, and they have strengthened throughout last weeks. I'm not that confident of that happening, mostly because people believe it is due to planet X (Nibiru) passing too close to earth that it will extinguish life on Earth.

Normally, I'd not be concerned, happened in 2000, 2012, 2015, and again this year; however, as a Mexican myself, I've been seeing an increased number of earthquakes around the south of my country (I live in the northern frontier, so I'm fine, in case you're wondering. Thanks, too.)

Last week Chiapas and Oaxaca's, and today Mexico City's, both pretty strong. Have anyone investigated about the phenomena that is causing the Earthquakes so suddendly? I don't believe in Haarp's conspirancy theories, but I'm still concerned about the current state of Earth's natural disasters (counting the active hurricanes, three at the moment if I recall).

Anomalies caused by the proximity to Nibiru? Earth's suffering changes?

What's going on?

[Lleban]

Probably not the most fulfilling answer, but fault line in that area has prob been building pressure for a while and said pressure was released. I'm not a seismologist, I'm chemist by trade, so you should do some reading on the subject when you get the chance.

As far as planets go, there is not planet sized body about to hit earth. Something that large would disrupt the orbits of most of the bodies in the inner section of the solar system. It's effects would be very observable + we'd be able to see something like that in the night sky.

[Yael]

Probably not the most fulfilling answer, but fault line in that area has prob been building pressure for a while and said pressure was released. I'm not a seismologist, I'm chemist by trade, so you should do some reading on the subject when you get the chance.

Any article or thesis you'd recommend?

As far as planets go, there is not planet sized body about to hit earth. Something that large would disrupt the orbits of most of the bodies in the inner section of the solar system. It's effects would be very observable + we'd be able to see something like that in the night sky.

This is why I'm more worried about what's happening on Earth than what could happen out in space. I actually read about what you mention, it should be visible as it is pretty large.

[Razade]

This is why I'm more worried about what's happening on Earth than what could happen out in space. I actually read about what you mention, it should be visible as it is pretty large.

What do you mean "what is happening on Earth". The planet is a tectonic-ly active planet and the plates shift and move. You'd expect to have earthquakes on a planet like that. Especially in an active area of faultlines.

[Lethologica]

The first two quakes mentioned in the OP are unusual because they occurred in the interior of the tectonic plate, rather than along the boundary, which is relatively rare.

That said, it's not unusual enough to appeal to either massive undetected objects in the solar system or global apocalypse scenarios for explanation.

[Yael]

What do you mean "what is happening on Earth". The planet is a tectonic-ly active planet and the plates shift and move. You'd expect to have earthquakes on a planet like that. Especially in an active area of faultlines.

I do understand that Earth's natural disasters are that, natural. But I mean that these things have been happening in quick succession during last months, and maybe I'm the one not informed enough, but most big natural happenings tend to have some span between their occurences.

I mean, biggest Earthquake, closest to today's at Mexico City, was like 20-30 years ago.

The point of this thread is to try to inform myself (and others) about whatever I can~

[NichG]

Mexico in particular seems to regularly have earthquakes >7 magnitude every couple of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...akes_in_Mexico

So this isn't particularly statistically unusual...

[Eldan]

As for the storms, you can thank climate change. More energy is added to weather systems, so we'll be seeing record storm after record storm all the time.

[snowblizz]

But I mean that these things have been happening in quick succession during last months, and maybe I'm the one not informed enough, but most big natural happenings tend to have some span between their occurences.

That's a misunderstanding of how statistics work by most people, and I'm far from an expert myself. In the US they talk about 500 year floods, like e.g. the flooding by Harvey. But what it really means is that there's a low say 0.002% (I forget the actual number) for it happening any given year. The problem is the way it is described it sounds like it can only happen once every 500 years. This si a recent article about it that was quite informative. 100-500-year-flood-meaning

When we plot out "big stuff" on a very long timeline we can have some 10 years apart, a couple 1000s of years apart and some millions of years apart. If we do an average of that it might end up say couple 10000s of years average for the "big stuff", but that doesn't perclude things happening in much closer proximity.

Basically "happening in quick succession" is more a matter of "damn, that's unlucky".

As it happens earthquake aren't entirely random either. That is to say they happen due to pressure in the earth's crust, some places are more prone than others. When one goes it will affect other pressure areas nearby. Which is why you have aftershocks and such. But also means if one fault goes, it can cause a chainreaction in another fault or place where pressure built up. Or it might not. Incidentally it's probably possible to cause an earthquake with eg nuclear testing or building a huge dam in the wrong place as one puts pressure in new places.

As humans we are hardwired to see patterns whether they exist or not. And we desperately want to explain what we can't quite understand. That's good to keep in mind. One earthquake or hurricane is a tragedy, make it two and it must somehow be portentious.

The planet thing is such utter trite it's unbelievable though. At cosmic scales things move at such glacial pace it would be apparent decades and centuries before it happened. I was gonna find some article, I read one recently about it but searching game me so much crackpot trite I have to have a liedown.

Incidentally, for anyone believing in this stuff I'll buy your stuff cheap at 0.01 cents on the dollar value. Everything except Apple stock. And if you go low enough I might consider that too.

I've always wondered what it is about the American continent (North and South) that makes people over there so willing to jump onto any and all end of the world scenarios. From the Azteks (and probably before them I'm just not familiar with it) onwards everyone on the left side of the Atlantic seems incredibly focused on how the world is going to end, and soon.

[DigoDragon]

Yeah, this is natural disaster lottery in action. It's like when you're playing a tabletop RPG, and you roll a 1 (or equivalence) several times in a row. It feels like there's something going on, but really it's just statistics like Snowblizz mentioned above.

The 2004 hurricane season had four major storms rip through Florida. I was there for all of them and back then a lot of my neighbors sure felt like there was a supernatural world-ending thing going on. Which was kind of funny cause I think the world would be fine if Florida were wiped off the map. Mostly fine. There would be a lot of people with lost vacation plans.

[Lord Torath]

Yesterday's earthquake was 32 years to the day from the last major earthquake to hit Mexico City.

If you think you've got it bad, take a look at Japan: Japan Earthquakes 2011 Visualization Map - YouTube. One of my coworkers was living in Japan that year. They had the big 7.0 earthquake hit in March, and thought "Oh, good! We've had a big one, so we don;t need to worry about another big one for a while. Then they got the huge 9.0 earthquake that caused a tsunami that took out the Fukishima nuclear powerplant.

Here's a similar visualization for the whole world: World Earthquakes Visualization Map 2012-2013 - YouTube. Earth is not really experiencing an abnormal number of earthquakes. It can feel like it, but that's just the limitations of human memory.

[Leecros]

As for the storms, you can thank climate change. More energy is added to weather systems, so we'll be seeing record storm after record storm all the time.

It's also the height of Hurricane Season which certainly doesn't help.

[Strigon]

Look, I get the whole end-of-the-world concern. Really, I do. Let's take a look back at North America's summer, shall we? We have a one-in-a-lifetime, massive great American eclipse, wildfires all along the west edge, abnormally large and frequent hurricanes, earthquakes, political unrest, and probably more I'm forgetting besides. Sounds terrible.

But it's not apocalyptic, by any stretch. First off, as important as America may seem, they shouldn't be the only ones getting the memo. Most other countries are carrying on more or less as they have for decades, so a global catastrophe seems unlikely.

But let's take one step further back, shall we, and look at an even bigger picture. 100 years ago, even as we speak, the biggest, deadliest war in history - at the time - was taking place. All the world's superpowers were sending a generation barely out of high school to be slaughtered by the millions. And they were finding new and ever more gruesome ways to do it, too: artillery, machine guns, bombs dropped from airplanes, and who could forget mustard gas? Sounds awful, right?
Then, just as the war ended, a new threat emerged; a massive plague that swept the globe, killing millions more. Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it for the Spanish Flu! Where it came from, nobody can say for certain, but this little bug killed possibly as much as one twentieth of the world's population back in its day. That sounds like the recipe for the world to end, but it didn't.

Of course, it wasn't long after that, we had the Great Depression. Millions of americans had to flee the dust bowl in the midst of a global recession the likes of which we still haven't really seen since. What else could go wrong? Well, if you were living anywhere in Europe, you sure know what else: let's take a look at World War II: Electric Boogaloo. Yes, all your favourite hits from the first one, but this time with extra genocides! Sounds like the end of times to me!
But we survived. And then, we all decided the apocalypse was coming on a bit too slowly for our tastes, so why not give it a little help with nuclear weapons? Yes, for the first time, we were in the driver's seat to our own extinction. You know how many times we almost jump-started a third (and final) world war over a false alarm? Too many. Lots of times. I can't even remember them all off the top of my head, and some might still be classified.

Then we have Y2K. SARS. Swine flu. Bird flu. 2012. Fukushima. And on and on it goes. There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser Power-mad despot, or a Corillian Death Ray nuclear-armed nation, or an intergalactic international plague that's about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet.

We didn't start the fire, mate. It was always burning, since the world's been turning.

[Chen]

It's also the height of Hurricane Season which certainly doesn't help.

While climate change doesn't exactly cause the storms, the effects of climate change (higher sea level, warmer oceans) make it so that the big storms end up being worse.

[Lord Torath]

Here's another link about the world not ending on saturday: http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/will-th...turday-hint-no

[Lvl 2 Expert]

In summary: This hurricane season sucks, and so does Mexico's earthquake season, this does not mean that another Biblical numerologist spouting just as much nonsense as any of those before him is right this time. It also does not mean that planets can turn invisible and sneak up on us, or that you can predict the orbits of planets or the chaotic effects they have on nearby planetary bodies by studying an old book that is specifically not about astronomy. I would suggest you don't worry about it and sleep tight tonight, but then again you might wake up in the middle of a completely unrelated earthquake, so take that advise any way you like it..

[MikelaC1]

The world is going to end on Saturday? Damn it, why didn't I hear about this before I paid my cable bill?

[Knaight]

That's a misunderstanding of how statistics work by most people, and I'm far from an expert myself. In the US they talk about 500 year floods, like e.g. the flooding by Harvey. But what it really means is that there's a low say 0.002% (I forget the actual number) for it happening any given year. The problem is the way it is described it sounds like it can only happen once every 500 years. This si a recent article about it that was quite informative. 100-500-year-flood-meaning

0.2%, not 0.002% - it's not that low, and it's a simple inverse (1/.002)=500, and it's just an easier metric to use in hydrology. With that said, once the numbers start getting big they also start getting fuzzy. Hydrologic models are fit based on past data, and while that's great for interpolation within a curve it's not so great for extrapolation, and nobody has a 500 year dataset. There's also the matter of how global warming makes existing data sets less useful for future prediction.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

You know what, forget what I said earlier. I'm not sure after all, but I'd like to make a bet for a crate of beer that the world does not end.



(Because if it does, we're all dead anyway, and if it doesn't, free beer!)

[Yael]

Well, I thank for the articles. I may have sounded a bit ignorant there~ maybe I was I dunno

Today we experienced a 6.1 Earthquake at Japan. And Hurricane Maria reached category 5, hitting Mexico today (I'm not sure if that already happened, I just read about it earler today). Not a lucky year, huh.

[Rockphed]

As for the storms, you can thank climate change. More energy is added to weather systems, so we'll be seeing record storm after record storm all the time.

Based on a cursory look at total energy in storms in the Atlantic basin, that prediction doesn't pan out with the evidence. While there has been more energy in storms in recent years than in previous decades, the difference is less than a standard deviation and might be linked to long term cycles that we haven't fully measured. The NOAA even published something along those lines.

[NichG]

Based on a cursory look at total energy in storms in the Atlantic basin, that prediction doesn't pan out with the evidence. While there has been more energy in storms in recent years than in previous decades, the difference is less than a standard deviation and might be linked to long term cycles that we haven't fully measured. The NOAA even published something along those lines.

Sorry, for clarity, do you mean the standard deviation of the yearly distribution, or the standard deviation of the estimated mean (since it sounds like you're talking about binning over a range of years)?

Rare events tend to be Poisson distributed, so the standard deviation of what could happen in any single season is generally going to be about as big as the mean. That means that 'the difference is one standard deviation' would mean that e.g. the current average yearly storm intensity is as much as double what it has been in the past. Whereas if you're talking about the standard deviation of a multi-year estimator, that's going to look more like a Gaussian around the mean multi-year statistics, which would tend to be a much smaller number.

[Rockphed]

Sorry, for clarity, do you mean the standard deviation of the yearly distribution, or the standard deviation of the estimated mean (since it sounds like you're talking about binning over a range of years)?

Rare events tend to be Poisson distributed, so the standard deviation of what could happen in any single season is generally going to be about as big as the mean. That means that 'the difference is one standard deviation' would mean that e.g. the current average yearly storm intensity is as much as double what it has been in the past. Whereas if you're talking about the standard deviation of a multi-year estimator, that's going to look more like a Gaussian around the mean multi-year statistics, which would tend to be a much smaller number.

I was using this website as my source. I ran a 5 year average over the data to make trends more obvious, and graphed it. I don't have the graphs anymore, but my memory was that the variation in 5 year average was less than the listed standard deviation.

[Grinner]

Guys, guys, guys...You are going about this with the wrong attitude entirely. You gotta think positively. Don't ask yourselves: Will the world end Saturday? Instead ask yourselves: How can we end the world Saturday? Black hole generator? Tesla-style superweapon? Whatever it is, I believe you all can do it.

[Tyndmyr]

Based on a cursory look at total energy in storms in the Atlantic basin, that prediction doesn't pan out with the evidence. While there has been more energy in storms in recent years than in previous decades, the difference is less than a standard deviation and might be linked to long term cycles that we haven't fully measured. The NOAA even published something along those lines.

Yup.

Hurricanes are complicated, and come and go in spurts. It's further complicated by that fact that humans only really pay attention to the big ones that hit land, particularly where it's populated. A storm that spins up, but fizzes safely far from civilization makes less of an impact than one that makes landfall where you live.

But we're not actually seeing a steady long term trend towards more hurricanes. We actually had a pretty long quiet spell a while back. This makes the current lot seem more unusual, but in climactic terms, both are pretty normal things to happen. Stretches with few hurricanes and stretches with many are both equally likely compared to the average, and a handful of years is honestly an eyeblink on climate scales.

[NichG]

I was using this website as my source. I ran a 5 year average over the data to make trends more obvious, and graphed it. I don't have the graphs anymore, but my memory was that the variation in 5 year average was less than the listed standard deviation.

That standard deviation is over the whole dataset though, so you'd see this even if the trend were a perfect zero-noise linear increase, because the standard deviation would just be measuring the range of that linear increase. I think you'd have to calculate the standard deviation over 5 year intervals as well if you want to make this comparison sensible.

[Lord Torath]

Global warming has conflicting influences when it comes to hurricanes. On the one hand, warmer oceans make more powerful hurricanes. On the other hand, increased wind shear (different wind velocities at different altitudes) tends to hinder the formation of tropical cyclones. What I've understood from the scientific discussion is that global warming will not impact the net number of tropical cyclones we get each year, but those storms that do form will tend to be more powerful that they would have been without global warming.

[hamishspence]

What I've understood from the scientific discussion is that global warming will not impact the net number of tropical cyclones we get each year, but those storms that do form will tend to be more powerful that they would have been without global warming.

Sounds about right - there was an essay on it at the BBC just day:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41347527

[snowblizz]

But we're not actually seeing a steady long term trend towards more hurricanes. We actually had a pretty long quiet spell a while back.

So in reality this has just been a busy mating season for the West African Hurricanebutterfly (Windus Muchicus Madeupicus).

[Fri]

Honestly, if the world's going to end I'm hoping it'll end before the 25th. **** if I have to pay rent then the world end anyway.