Steven I. Dutch

Natural and Applied Sciences (Earth Science)

The Earth Has a Future

The Earth Has a Future is a new way of visualizing geologic time. Most treatments of geologic time stress the past, an approach that may produce some impressive numbers but may fail to connect with non-scientists. Looking into the future vividly brings out the difference between human and geologic time scales. A thousand years from now the Mississippi will probably have changed course at least once, the San Andreas Fault will have slipped 25 meters, and most mountainous landscapes will have been lowered a centimeter or so by erosion. A thousand years, an insignificant blip in geologic time, is still three times farther into the future than Star Trek. In ten thousand years most landscapes will have changed little, but most existing human structures will have disappeared. Ten thousand years is beyond our cultural horizon, and it is quite possible that by then no word in any present language will have survived in recognizable form. By 100,000 years from now, the constellations will have changed beyond recognition, the earth may be in its next ice age, and there would be enough time for human society to collapse to Paleolithic levels and recover. By a million years from now there will have been thousands of eruptions in the Cascade Range and thousands of great earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault. In a million years the human race itself might evolve significantly. The rocks beneath the campus are 450 million years old.

The Earth Has a Future has been accepted by Geosphere, a new on-line journal of the Geological Society of America.