1015 kilograms. Basically, you know you’re in fucking trouble when the numbers used to explain how much shit you’re in need other, smaller numbers to explain
• “Liquor? I hardly knew her!”
• “Because he was stuck to the chicken!”
• “I have a wife and kids!”
• “I want to live! I want to liiive!”
When the mountain falls, the ensuing wave will initially reach heights of more than 2,000 feet, but would likely settle out to a paltry 100 when it hits land… in New York, in Boston, in Florida—the entire eastern seaboard of the United States actually, as well as parts of Brazil, the Caribbean, and Canada. At that point, the wave would be moving at a speed of nearly 700 mph (that’s nearly the speed of sound) and with enough force to uproot entire cities like weeds, drag broken skyscrapers miles inland, and generally just erase life like God spilled a bottle of Wite-Out on the Western Hemisphere. The wave would travel nearly thirty miles inland, completely submerging the major population centers of the United States before dragging all debris—human or otherwise—out to sea when it’s drawn back. A weakened but still devastating wave would hit across the entire Atlantic seaboard, but the brunt of the impact is squarely on American soil.
The resulting death toll and damage would be devastating to billions of people, and the lasting economic impact would completely destroy the modern way of life, effectively sending everybody not drowned or crushed by waylaid cities directly back to the Stone Age. The new bodies of standing water, millions of corpses, and unsanitary conditions would most likely wipe out the rest of the survivors with disease, but these are Americans we’re talking about here, goddamn it, and there’s just no way they’ll be
And that’s good, because thanks to the rippling effect, there are going to be ten more right behind it.
8. HYPERCANE
GLOBAL WARMING and climate change can cause any number of problems—from food shortages to drought to inclement weather—but they do not always work in such subtle, gradual ways. Changes in the environment don’t always function like a cancer, killing you slowly over a long period of time. Sometimes the environment just loses its damn mind, and that’s when an event called a hypercane can occur. If the normal consequences of a shifting climate are akin to a metaphorical disease infecting the world, a hypercane’s consequences are a metaphorical Bruce Willis: That is to say, if global warming might kill humanity slowly over a period of generations, a hypercane is going to tie a fire hose around the world’s neck and then throw it off an exploding skyscraper.
A hypercane is a hurricane on a global scale. With winds up to supersonic speeds, a hypercane doesn’t just dismantle and destroy what it touches—it utterly disintegrates it. They can be the size of a continent, the conditions that spawn them could also render them self-sustaining, and their long-term effects are beyond disastrous. In short, it’s like a hurricane on death Viagra: In every way it is bigger, stronger, and longer lasting than the worst hurricane you’ve ever seen.
Though it’s a long shot that a hypercane will ever naturally occur again (many theorize that hypercanes have been present for, if not responsible for, some major past extinctions), if it ever does happen, it will be what scientists refer to as a “planet killer”—which, incidentally, is one of the reasons scientists don’t get invited to many parties. I’m not saying that these scientists are exaggerating the threat; it’s just that there are more sensitive ways to deliver terrible news. Doctors dealing with terminal patients don’t break the traumatic news that a patient has cancer by telling them it’s “like the atom bomb of diseases;” they don’t tell AIDS patients that they have the disease equivalent of “a gun shooting you from the inside out;” and they don’t explain leukemia to terminal children by telling them that it’s “like the bogeyman lives inside your bones.” So scientists are a little tactless, sure, but unfortunately that doesn’t make their predictions any less true. While a compassionate soul would tell you that, in the event of a hypercane, we’d all go out peacefully in our sleep, dreaming of past loves and warm summer days, my mother taught me that honesty is the best policy. And in keeping with that philosophy, I should tell you it’s far more likely that not only would your skin be sheared off by a supersonic wind, but also it would afterward become a deadly storm-borne projectile that would probably continue on to impale your entire family.
Parkinson’s: Like poppin’ and lockin’ in hell.
Alzheimer’s: Like having tiny zombies feeding on your brain.
Herpes: Sex pimples.
It’s not like we didn’t have any warning, though, as 2008 was one of the most devastating hurricane seasons on record. Massively destructive individual hurricanes like Katrina and Rita in 2005 don’t even rank among the ten most powerful storms of all time. But you certainly can’t just dismiss this disturbing trend of increasingly stronger storms on the basis that they haven’t yet produced the strongest ones ever recorded—that’s like telling yourself that the ravenous pack of wolves following you for the past fifteen minutes are nothing to worry about because you saw a much bigger lion on Animal Planet that one time. It’s the strength of the overall weather systems that matters; since that is increasing, that can mean some very, very bad things down the line.
If you don’t like the idea of your own skin being used to dismember your loved ones, try some of the following: tips, in the event of a hypercane.
1. Don’t have a family.
2. Don’t have skin.
3. Those are your only options.
A hypercane can form when a significant expanse of water reaches a temperature of about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 25 degrees higher than the highest ocean temperature ever recorded. But just because we haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Some theories hold that a hypercane was partially responsible for the extinction period that wiped out the dinosaurs. The meteor impact at Chicxulub in what is now the Gulf of Mexico would’ve started it all, but the resulting superheated ocean could have spawned a long-lasting hypercane that would have ravaged the Earth for weeks on end. The really scary part about the formation of hypercanes is that, much like the world’s scariest bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, you can’t have just one: Any stretch of ocean superheated enough to spawn one hypercane would stay at that temperature long enough to spawn several more —so even though one is quite enough to kill the world just fine, it’s brought all of its friends along… just in case.
• Increased tidal activity
• More rogue waves
• Super-cell storm systems
• Twisters
• Complete disbanding of yacht clubs
