N.A. Zharvin

Candidate of Geographical Sciences, Corresponding Member

of the Academy of Defense and Law Enforcement Security

The King of Volcanoes

The lithosphere-oceanic theory asserts: the global rift system is no other than a huge linear underwater volcano approximately 80 thousand kilometers long. By the materials of the author�s monograph: �What is in store for the mankind cradleland?� and its subheading �Greenland-Iceland Geogenetic Complex�, Moscow , �Liberea-Biblioform� Publishers, 2006

            Linear volcanoes are many on the land, in particular in Iceland , for example, the country�s highest volcano Gekla. No less numerous are underwater volcanoes which quantity is dozens of times more than on land. Most well-known are volcanoes with a flat, as if cut-off tops, the so-called guyots. But the rift volcano is a unique feature. Hundreds of top scientists from different countries have been studying it for already several decades, but so far no one guessed that the global rift system is, first of all, the volcano fatally hazardous for all alive, �the king of volcanoes�.

            We called it also the Great Rift Volcano. It erupts not often, only when appropriate conditions are formed, but its eruptions are really devastating. And these conditions are simple. For this infernal machine to come into full swing the Greenland ice shield should melt somewhat below the critical mark. The mass of the Greenland glacier is approximately 2.5 trillion tons. Should it melts down completely, the whole Greenland region sill be purged due to the action of the giant force of 2.5 trillion tons. But this movement is curbed by cohesion of lithospheric plates (North-American and Eurasian). This cohesion is not so strong and it is still less in the area of the Iceland Island ( Iceland cohesion). But its strength is relative and it is inferios than the destruction force from glacier melting, otherwise there were no either mid-oceanic ridges, or continents or mountains on them. The Greenland glacier will not have to melt completely, the disaster will come much earlier. And with each new disaster this lead time grows because the resistance force becomes less with the growth and development of the asthenosphere, and the critical mark is progressively shifting from the island center to its margins.

            When the breakdown force exceeds the resistance to destruction the lithosphere seam in the Iceland area will break up disastrously quickly because the Earth�s crust is fragile, and this is its inherent feature. The eastern margin of the North-American plate will thrust up to several hundred meters. Perhaps, the displacement amplitude will be measured vertically in kilometers, i.e. commensurable with the height of glacier melting. Horizontally the size of deformation will be dependent on a length of the Greenland glacier, this is several thousand kilometers. Correspondingly, the western margin of the Eurasian plate that lifts up together with the North-American plate due to cohesion forces, having lost the support will dip downwards. And huge masses of oceanic water will rush to the formed abyss under a head of 300-400 atm. They will come in contact with the asthenospheric material heated to over 1000^oC and will largely turn into vapor. The water turning into vapor will expand 1740 times. In such conditions water becomes an explosive substance. Regarding the scale of the contact it is not difficult to guess that the global environmental disaster will acquire the fantastic scale. Compressed vapor will breach the ocean thickness and release into the atmosphere the huge masses of a mix of vapor, basalt dust and mantle gases. A global, absolutely black cloudiness will be formed around the Earth making visibility zero. And furious tar-like rainfall will rush on the Earth accompanied by flashes of multiple lightnings and unending roars of thunder.

            Nearly the same quantity of vapor will rush backwards, to the astenopshere, expanding its volume and increasing its �weakness� and affecting the Earth�s magnetic field. And this disaster will affect not only the Iceland-Greenland region, but, like a forest fire moving along a forest belt, will propagate southward and northward of Iceland along the world rift system. Most potent becomes the southern direction. The vapor explosion will breach the edges of the rift valley forcing them apart to 10- 30 kilometers at once and bending them to form a new pair of mid-ocean ridges. The upwelling mantle substance being cooled with water will plug the abyss bottom, thus, creating a new rift valley. Moving apart the edges of the old rift valley the global vapor explosion will shift the plates from their peripheries to the center increasing the lithosphere thickness under continents, a height of continental mountains and quantities of their folds, increasing the number of faults or sizes of the existing ones. And again the width of all oceans will become some kilometers more. Incomparably horrible earthquakes will shake the whole Earth, dormant volcanoes will become alive again, hundreds of new volcanoes will be formed. And, of course, the acting volcanoes will reach their maximum might. But it is quite unlikely that the lovers of something extraordinary will be able to admire this raving nature. Enormous two-three kilometer high tsunami waves (their height will be commensurable with the deformation of the ocean bottom in the rift area) one after another will rush on the shaking, immersed in darkness continents and destroy everything alive for hundreds and, in some places, even for thousands of kilometers from the coastlines of seas and oceans. During a day or two billions of people will find their death in the coastal, most densely populated regions on the Earth. And formerly beautiful cities which names are often heard now, such as Saint-Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Riga, Tallin, Gdansk, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Havre, Bordo, Lisbon, new-York, Boston, Havana, Rio-de-Janeiro, Buenos-Aires, Dakar, Kinshasa, Luanda, Cape Town, Mumbai (Bombay), Chenai (Madras), Ho Chi Minh, Shanghai, Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto, Los-Angeles, San-Francisco and thousands other cities and settlements that seems not be threatened by anything are, in fact, doomed. London and Paris , Berlin and Washington as well as other great and small cities should not indulge in vain hopes, too. All these cities absorbed the labor, talent, feeling of beauty of generations of the people. But menacing might of the nature, carelessness of the people, narrow world outlook, laziness, triumph of immorality as well as dumbness of science, at least, of the modern Russian science, threaten to turn them into nothing together with their inhabitants.

            So the next World Flood will come, and in the North Atlantics it will be followed by a new glacier period. Uplift of the oceanic bottom near the Faeroes rapids as a result of the vapor explosion will force Gulf Stream to turn southwards before reaching Faeroes. The Northern Atlantics will be left without the warmth of the tropics, as if some powerful hand switch off water heating in the presently God Blessed regions. The glacier will grow up over the greater part of North America, Northwestern, Northern and Central Europe and also northern part of Eastern Europe and Northwestern Asia for centuries and millennia, but the Antarctic climate will reign here immediately after the Flood. Such names as Great Britain , Ireland , Sweden , Norway , the Netherlands , France as well as Canada , United States (and this sorrowful list may be continued) will disappear at once and for all. While Sahara, as a result of the Gulf Stream changing its direction, will witness rainfall periods. The climate in Kamchatka, Chukotka, the whole Northeastern Asia and a part of Alaska will become very mild after transfer of a glaciation phase. The tropical heat will rush there together with the Kuroshio stream that will become much more intensive after equalizing of the inter-oceanic water exchange caused by the Gulf Stream departure from the Arctic Ocean .

            When will it happen? The Climatologists from NASA, renowned climatologist G. Flon from Germany as well as many other US and West-European scientists (Jonathan Gregory, Philipp Highbrecht, Bill Grebil and others) assert that due to the climate warming escalating through the whole second half of the XXth and still progressing in the XXIst century (and among other things due to the anthropogenic factor) the Greenland glacier shield will break down nearly completely by the end of the XXIst century. If they are mistaken, then I am also mistaken. But if these qualified specialists are right, then the global environmental disaster with all its attending horrible consequences will occur approximately in the period from 2030 to 2070, because, as it was already mentioned, the critical situation will happen before complete melting of this glacier. One should not be fascinated by a slow pace of rising and lowering of the northern and southern coasts of Scandinavia . These differently-oriented slow displacements are not caused most likely by postglacial uplift of the Eurasian lithospheric plate (it had risen long ago), but are due to fluctuations of the asthenospheric material disturbed by the recent global disaster (6000-5500 years ago) that may really move very slowly and in different directions. The Greenland upfloating is subject to the Archimedes� principle and very likely will happen rather quickly. In the face of such situation fraught with death of the greater part or the whole of mankind I prefer considering the worst alternative.

            The article in a journal is subject to rigid limits, that is why it is difficult to present a detailed system of proofs, while the proofs taken in isolation are very vulnerable. Thus, I refer the readers to my monograph ��What is in store for the mankind cradleland?� which particulars are given in the subheading of this article, and they can get there the access to some other proofs. There they can find description of a likely, but not simple way for disaster prevention. For the book, please, apply to the site: www.king-of-vulcans.narod.ru

August, 2006

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