CapitalistImperialistPig

OK, I don't find this a particularly credible Doomsday Scenario , but just in case, a hearty f-u to all the environmental doubters out there. If the methane bubble—a bubble that could be as big as 20 miles wide—erupts with titanic force from the seabed into the Gulf, every ship, drilling rig and structure within the region of the bubble will immediately sink. All the workers, engineers, Coast Guard personnel and marine biologists participating in the salvage operation will die instantly. Next, the ocean bottom will collapse, instantaneously displacing up to a trillion cubic feet of water or more and creating a towering supersonic tsunami annihilating everything along the coast and well inland. Like a thermonuclear blast, a high pressure atmospheric wave could precede the tidal wave flattening everything in its path before the water arrives. When the roaring tsunami does arrive it will scrub away all that is left. And oh yeah, the methane could trigger all other sorts catastrophes, ...

Many a past and present society has imperiled itself through inadvertant destruction of its habitat. In the worst cases whole civilizations have collapsed, leaving behind decaying and abandoned monuments. Jared Diamond's Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed examines several examples. He uses Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous sonnet Ozymandias as an epigraph: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, Th...