It’s been twelve months since we counted the last minutes of 2019 and we scribbled ‘Happy New Year’. We were so utterly ignorant of what lay ahead for us in the days ahead.
For those who have lost their livelihood, their health, or sadly at all, the loved ones, there is no money line that can compensate for the horrific grief of the COVID-19 pandemic. carried out. Or the damage done by wildfires and hurricanes this year.
Some of us have been a little luckier. Preventing inconveniences such as the need to flush toilet paper or putting on pants for your next Zoom meeting, 2020 was more bizarre than sad. It could have been worse, after all.
What’s worse? Well, we can be thankful…
The Yellowstone supervolcano did not explode
About 640,000 years ago, more than a thousand cubic kilometers (about 240 cubic miles) of rock, dirt and trees were thrown high into the sky when magma bubbles and hot gases of an open continent erupted.
That same caldera of molten rock, now known as the Yellowstone caldera in North America, is technically late for repetitive performance.
Now, a lot is packed into that word, ‘technically’. Technically the last book in the Game of Thrones late series. But the timing of previous calls is not a reliable indication of when a sequence is expected.
Still, every move and shake of the national park landscape has made people wonder if another big one is near.
This past June a series of twelve earthquakes quickly shook the area. And just this October the regular ticking of the geyser called Old Faithful stopped being so loyal and it fell silent silently.
It would not surprise anyone if Yellowstone chose 2020 for an explosion.
Well, nobody but most of the world’s volcanologists. Research suggests, if anything, that the Yellowstone supervolcano was much more active in the past, and we should keep our expectations of when it would blow.
When that year, 2020 was not there.
An asteroid did not hit the Earth
All eyes were on a lump of miner called 2018VP1 earlier in the year, which had a 1 in 240 chance of smoking into Earth on US election day.
At nearly 2 meters (about 7 feet) across, the 2018VP1 falls very short of the 140 meters (460 feet) that NASA sets as a minimum for rocks we have to worry about. It ‘s a peak compared to the 10 – kilometer behemoth that destroyed the dinosaurs, and even that one happened to hit the planet in the worst possible way.
However, any fast boulder approaching within 5,000 kilometers of the planet is a good reason to think about the impending dangers from dangerous asteroids near Earth.
On November 13 – Friday, at least – a terrestrial impact Alert Last Alert System (ATLAS) investigation at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii warned astronauts about passing a rock the size of a toilet .
At just 400 kilometers across the Minch, the view set a new record for the nearest pass to an asteroid. Worse still, since it was obscured by the glare of the solar wind, we had no idea it would be there until hours after it had already passed.
Not that many of us had to worry, if it had hit. The rock was much larger than the famous Chelyabinsk meteor that erupted over Russia in 2013.
But the close cut suggests that we could, under the right conditions, be blinded by an unexpected cosmic sniper. And if we had been blown back to the Stone Age by an asteroid, 2020 would have made sense, right?
Needless to say, asteroids of no concern hit the Earth this year. Yay!
Solar radiation did not keep us alive
Betelgeuse is a big red star over 600 light years away and we all want to hurry and die, because the resulting light show would be wonderful.
Earlier this year everyone got a little excited when the star went down with what we all thought was a sugary wink. It happened again in August. Are those the first notes of his swan song?
Nope. In at least one case, it may have been a brutal dust shadow – about as interesting as a cloud passing the Sun on a cold winter day.
Then we learned that Betelgeuse was much younger than she first looked, so we would not go supernova for a long time, and we all turned our attention to other grim subjects. If Betelgeuse had exploded, it would still be too far away to do us much harm.
But if the star were a little closer – like just 65 light years away – its death could affect our planet of the ozone and leave us exposed.
In fact, we need to be more concerned with what we see from our own sun of fast-moving grains. Luckily we have a nice magnetic shield to protect us … which is still secure in place, right?
This year marks just the beginning of the star’s 25th solar cycle. Hooray hip! Right now we are at a low level in his mood swings, which is not so special. We see this type of lull every 11 years.
Aliens never attacked
Remember back in 2017 when high speed was visiting our Solar System?
We still have to do a triple check of our spelling of ‘Oumuamua every time, but since it is the first confirmed visitor from outside our Solar System, it wasn’t long before a reference was made. call the word ‘aliens’. Throw in that it’s a weird shape and it’s red in color, and it’s a Channel History documentary in making it.
So to our complete surprise, it seems that they were not strangers. Go figure.
Not to worry; late last year we had our second confirmed interstellar visitor in the form of a comet called 2I / Borisov, so we regained our hopes.
Astronauts have been keeping a close eye on it throughout 2020, and we’ve learned a lot about it. It’s a good thing too. With the chaos that the Earth has survived this year, our planet would be ripe for alien takeover. Of course they would even bring their own supply of masks.
The forces of the undead never rose from the grave
Archaeologists rarely find Egyptian tombs containing sealed sarcophagi that have not survived for centuries, let alone thousands of years. But when they do, it’s a cause for excitement.
The mysteries in them can show us not only what our ancestors looked like, but how they sounded, how they lived, and how they died.
But this is 2020. So when the seal coffins were just coming this year, we were sure that this was how it would end; in a wave of abstract bodies shaking the bandages about angrily as they ramp through the streets, right?
With 2020 now officially over, we believe we can safely admit that undead tags do not appear to be on the way, and any mystery we find in Egyptian tombs will be beneficial to humanity at the end.
However, we will not open any graves in January. Just to be sure.