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00:00A dense forest, leveled without explanation, ravenous insects on a path of total destruction, and a massive tremor that may have been caused by human hands.
00:18Fire, floods, earthquakes, humanity has always faced natural disasters that often strike without warning, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
00:31But there are many other strange and rare events that are just as frightening and deadly,
00:37like mysterious fireballs that race through the sky, exploding toxic lakes, and powerful tsunamis that some believe can summon the dead.
00:49Are these disasters simply freak events, or could they be signs of something unnatural at work?
00:58Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
01:07The Siberian Taiga, Russia.
01:18At over 2 million square miles, it's the largest forest on Earth.
01:24And on June 30th, 1908, this remote and inhospitable landscape experienced a devastating disaster known as the Tunguska Vent.
01:37On this June morning in 1908, a massive explosion occurs over this remote part of Siberia.
01:46This became a major mystery in world history.
01:50At this period in time, this area was mostly inhabited by an indigenous group called the Ivanki.
01:57They had traditionally engaged in reindeer herding, and there were several of them who were out pretty close to the epicenter of the blast.
02:07The Ivanki herders see a bright object in the sky described as brighter than the sun.
02:14And then they heard these loud booms, louder than gunshots.
02:21What the Ivanki described was nightmarish.
02:24Suddenly, another sun appears in the sky.
02:28They hear the loudest noise you've ever heard, along with a very violent shockwave.
02:34People were blasted off their feet and thrown a distance.
02:38And then, almost as fast as it started, this fades away.
02:43And you're left wondering, what happened?
02:47There is an enormous explosion.
02:51And what happens is that something like 80 million trees are flattened over an 800 square mile area.
03:01I mean, this is absolutely bizarre.
03:04And yet, here you have this devastation.
03:07That must have been terrifying.
03:09Every single tree is flattened in the same direction.
03:1380 million of them over 800 square miles.
03:16We just see flattened trees completely scorched and devoid of any branches or leaves.
03:22What kind of explosive force had the power to annihilate an 800 square mile area?
03:29It's been estimated this would require the energy equivalent of 1,000 atomic bombs.
03:38Early 20th century theories proposed the disaster was the work of a massive meteor striking the Siberian wilderness.
03:48When the Tunguska blast occurred in 1908, and even when it was first investigated in the late 1920s,
03:54the expectation was that this must be one of the largest meteorite events in modern times.
04:01One of the early researchers was this guy, Linid Kulik, who gets support from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to begin these expeditions.
04:09In 1928, Linid Kulik expected to find a crater and a big chunk of metal.
04:19But he did not find a crater or a meteorite.
04:24Even to this day, we have not found a crater that was caused by Tunguska,
04:28or even material that can clearly be traced back to a cosmic origin in 1908.
04:37How does something smashing into Earth leave no crater and flatten 80 million trees without leaving any other trace of it?
04:45When an asteroid or comet smacks into Earth's surface, the classic thing that you get is an impact crater.
04:51Meteor crater in Arizona is a perfect example of this.
04:55But in the Tunguska event, we see no evidence of a crater at all.
05:00And so the enigma here is how do you get potentially something striking Earth, but not seemingly to strike Earth at all?
05:07In the absence of an impact crater or verified cosmic debris, attempts to explain the unnatural event have ranged from a black hole passing through Earth,
05:18to weapons of mass destruction.
05:24But 70 years after Tunguska, a strange anomaly on a small island in Newfoundland, Canada, may offer some clues to the cause of the mysterious Siberian disaster.
05:38It's known as the Bell Island Boom.
05:41April 2nd, 1978, in Newfoundland, about 5,000 residents of Bell Island suddenly, spontaneously see an enormous flash of light.
05:52And it's followed by an explosion that damages almost every building in the town.
05:58Gouts of blue fire erupt from power outlets, livestock were killed, and the sound of this blast was heard 80, 90 miles away.
06:11And initially, they thought, well, maybe this was a giant meteor impact, but there was no crater, there was no impact debris.
06:18So people thought immediately of similarities with Tunguska.
06:21One possible explanation for the Bell Island Boom is what we call a Super Bolt.
06:28We think that Super Bolts are basically lightning bolts, but they're far, far more powerful than a normal one.
06:34They release trillions of watts of energy instantaneously.
06:38So that leads scientists to wonder, could a Super Bolt be responsible for this Bell Island Boom?
06:43Was an extremely rare and powerful lightning strike the cause of both the Bell Island Boom and perhaps the Tunguska event?
06:54Well, it's a matter of speculation.
06:57And many scientists believe the real answer came even more recently and much closer to where the Tunguska event took place.
07:05Chelyabinsk, Russia. This major industrial center near the border of the Siberian Taiga is one of the largest cities in Russia.
07:19On February 15, 2013, at approximately 9.20 a.m., residents record incredible footage of a meteor the size of a house rocketing through the sky.
07:33Sometimes an asteroid or a comet can come in at a very shallow angle, parallel with the surface of the Earth, to blow up in the atmosphere.
07:44And it's there where you can get something we call an airburst.
07:49In 2013, there was just such an airburst.
07:53It was about 14 or 15 miles up. It came in, heated up, turned into a fireball brighter than the sun, and left a huge cloud through the atmosphere.
08:05Hello.
08:07And people filed outside to see what the bright light was caused by.
08:12And little did they know, that whole time, through the air, was an invisible shockwave carrying the sound and the force of that blast, half a megaton.
08:20And boom! Every window in town is shattered. Every car alarm goes off at the same time.
08:29Thousands of buildings were damaged, thousands of people injured, and this was a small-scale Tunguska that we got on video.
08:36We now think that the most likely explanation for the Tunguska event is that an object hit Earth's atmosphere at extremely high velocity and exploded.
08:49And that energy release was enough to flatten those trees, scorch the ones nearby.
08:53And rather than excavating a crater, it basically just blasts out a wave of energy that flattens trees.
09:01And it may be that the Chelyabinsk event explains all of the eyewitness testimony of people back in 1908 reporting what they saw.
09:09It's our best explanation right now, but we may never know for sure what caused the blast in 1908.
09:14East Africa, this dry and arid region encompassing Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, is famous for its dramatic mountains and vast savannas.
09:34But in 2019, it became ground zero for a locust swarm of unimaginable proportions.
09:44The most famed or infamous locust is the desert locust of Africa.
09:49Where they land, it's utter devastation.
09:52They are descending in order to feed, and you can watch your fields disappear before your eyes.
09:59So, to understand locust swarm, you have to kind of go back a few months or a few years.
10:07The parents of these locusts would have appeared as garden-variety grasshoppers.
10:14But then the conditions change. It becomes drier.
10:19And they undergo a Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde transmogrification.
10:23And instead of their offspring looking like their parents, they're like mobs of small, wingless locusts that march across the land, just eating whatever they encounter.
10:36And then, after about three weeks, they molt into adults, winged adults, and they rise into the sky, and they appear to be kind of a glittering storm cloud on the horizon.
10:49And if you're a farmer, you watch your crops melt in front of you, so it looks like a wildfire is swept through.
10:59Nothing is going to stop them until they're done.
11:02They leave nothing behind except misery and hunger.
11:06The East African locust swarm of 2019 destroyed an estimated $8.5 billion worth of crops, resulting in a food crisis affecting nearly 25 million people.
11:20But history's most devastating and mysterious swarm of locusts assembled nearly 150 years before the Africa disaster, this time in the United States.
11:36The Great Plains, 1875.
11:42From the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River, American farmers struggle to survive.
11:49Years of harsh weather conditions and drought creates hard, dry prairie soil, difficult to farm.
11:56But even more devastating is the freakish mega swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts that have assembled on a biblical scale.
12:07This wasn't just any locust swarm.
12:11There were more than 12 trillion locusts that made a swath that was 1,000 miles long, and basically you can think of a swarm the size of California munching its way across the American Midwest.
12:26And these locusts were so ravenous, they not only absolutely annihilated all the crops in the American Midwest, the locusts began eating anything else they could find that was organic.
12:39That includes the wool off of live sheep, it includes wood structural elements of houses, and it includes clothing that people were wearing.
12:52And so this was terrifying. These things were alive and they were hungry.
12:55This mega swarm of 1875 is the largest recorded swarm in human history.
13:04It was 2,000 times larger than the next largest known swarm of locusts on planet Earth.
13:12Something that summer coalesced them into this mega swarm.
13:19It was a natural disaster of unimaginable scale.
13:23500 to 1,000 tons of vegetation have to be consumed every day to fuel that swarm.
13:31Much of the Midwest was going to face hunger. People are going to die.
13:36But we don't really know very much about what led up to it.
13:42Over the course of three years, the ravenous insects devoured $116 billion worth of crops and property,
13:49leading to widespread starvation and complete financial ruin for countless families.
13:56And based on this unfathomable devastation, many wondered,
14:01was this mysterious disaster a grim judgment from the Almighty?
14:06If you read the newspapers from the time, it really conveys the terror that these farming communities felt
14:16as these locusts completely destroyed their livelihoods.
14:20And of course, many of these God-fearing people looked to the Bible and thought,
14:25well, Pharaoh in Egypt was punished with locusts.
14:30Surely we're being punished for our sinfulness.
14:33We have done something wrong and we are now facing divine retribution.
14:39That's what many people thought.
14:40Governors in five Western states declared days of prayer.
14:46And then you say, well, God helps those who help themselves.
14:52What do you do in the industrial age to fight nature?
14:58Build a machine.
15:00All right. Machinery must be the answer.
15:02All kinds of machines are built.
15:05One was called the King Suction Machine.
15:08A belt-driven, gigantic vacuum that would suck up the nymphs.
15:14These are the wingless immatures and bag them.
15:17You might try various rolling devices to crush these locusts.
15:23One of my favorites was basically a flamethrower to torch the locusts.
15:28Not very effective, but it probably felt pretty good.
15:33Now, did it make a dent in the locusts? Probably not.
15:36But it did give the people a sense of being in control.
15:40Well, we still don't know what caused the largest, most destructive locust swarm in history.
15:46What's even more perplexing is that by the year 1902, just 27 years later,
15:52the Rocky Mountain locusts completely vanished from the face of the earth.
16:01It was only a couple of decades after this titanic storm of locusts that the Rocky Mountain locusts went extinct, disappeared forever.
16:09You talk about a dynamic contrast.
16:11It went from effectively swallowing the country to vanishing without a trace.
16:18And why?
16:20Well, perhaps it was loss of habitat and human civilization's advance just meant the conditions weren't favorable for them anymore.
16:27We don't really know.
16:28Another theory was they didn't go anywhere. They're still here.
16:33It just so happens that the right conditions have not happened again.
16:37That would transform an existing grasshopper into the Rocky Mountain locust.
16:43We still can't explain what caused the rise of the Rocky Mountain locust swarm and ultimately what caused their demise.
16:51And it may forever remain a mystery.
16:57It's baffling to think that trillions of locusts swarming over an area more than a thousand miles wide could suddenly vanish into extinction.
17:08But that's not the only mystery of nature that continues to defy scientific understanding.
17:13For example, there's a lake in Cameroon that may be part of a network of toxic ticking time bombs.
17:26Northwestern Cameroon, August 21st, 1986.
17:32The sun rises over the hills surrounding an ancient body of water known as Lake Nyos and reveals an apocalyptic scene.
17:44In nearby villages, lifeless bodies are strewn about as if a mysterious forest had swept across the land, killing nearly everything in its path.
17:55There was a terrifying geological catastrophe that occurred.
18:00Something disrupted this lake.
18:03Locals reported a rumbling sound and what might be described as an explosion.
18:08As the lake suddenly came to life and anyone who was caught in its path instantly dropped dead.
18:18The death toll was staggering.
18:20It's estimated around 1,700 people and 3,500 animals were killed across a 14-mile radius.
18:31With no obvious cause of death, an international team of scientists, including American biologist George Kling, was dispatched to investigate.
18:41We really didn't know what had happened, what had caused this, and the lake itself was very reddish orange, like a rust color that we really don't see very often in lakes.
18:58And there was a lot of damage around the shoreline from some large wave that must have been produced with enough force to wash away all the vegetation and soil down to bare rock.
19:11And lakes just don't explode like that.
19:15What exploded out of Lake Nyos, killing everything in its path?
19:20Given that the lake was formed in an ancient volcanic crater, investigators feared that an eruption deep underground released a surge of deadly gas.
19:31Many of the survivors reported smelling rotten eggs or gunpowder, and that's an unmistakable smell of sulfur.
19:41And they reported feeling warm.
19:43And we know volcanoes produce a lot of sulfur gas and a lot of heat.
19:49But when we started analyzing our samples, we found no sulfur in the lake water.
19:53We found no excess sulfur in the plants around the lake that had been exposed to this gas cloud.
20:03And when the Army pathologists did autopsies, they found no evidence that people were poisoned by sulfur gas.
20:12No poisoning by sulfur gas?
20:15Experts were left wondering if the cause of this deadly disaster was even geological at all.
20:20Local rumors swirled about chemical spills, weapon tests, even stories about vengeful spirits in the lake.
20:32But George Kling found something intriguing buried in old medical reports.
20:39A clue pointing to a rather unlikely culprit.
20:44A gas that we all produce when we exhale.
20:47We ran across some older medical literature that had used high concentrations of CO2 to test for oxygen stress in fighter pilots.
21:04And it turns out that CO2 above concentrations of about 6% acts as a sensory hallucinogen.
21:11And one of the most common reports from the fighter pilots was that they smelled rotten eggs and gunpowder and that they felt very warm.
21:20So we knew that this was a CO2 release and we suspected that the gas was held in the lake.
21:29It turns out that the lake itself could hold a huge amount of gas in the bottom waters.
21:35Kling's tests reveal that Lake Nios was primed for disaster.
21:42Over centuries, the lake had become a pressurized chamber of carbon dioxide.
21:48And when that chamber exploded, it released a massive wave of suffocating gas that raced across the land at over 60 miles per hour.
21:58Lake Nios, as it turns out, was supercharged in carbon dioxide, much like a soda can if you shook it up before you opened it.
22:10So anyone unfortunate to be caught in its path couldn't breathe.
22:15One of the things that made this event so deadly was that this CO2 gas cloud was enormous, first off.
22:26But because it was heavier than air, it flowed out of the lake and down the river valleys very quickly.
22:33So even if people had seen the cloud coming, they couldn't have gotten out of the way.
22:37And people just essentially died in place.
22:40Lake Nios was vulnerable to this kind of an event because it was formed by volcanic activity.
22:49And it's also very deep.
22:52So those deep waters could store a lot of gas.
22:55But once we have the gas build up, we have to have a trigger.
22:59And this could be any number of things.
23:01For example, it could be a landslide that caused the gas burst.
23:06But we'll probably never know for sure what triggered this disaster.
23:12Based on Kling's discovery, Lake Nios is now monitored around the clock to help anticipate another deadly gas event.
23:22But solving the Lake Nios disaster reveals a far more terrifying question.
23:29With more lakes potentially primed for the same kind of catastrophe, when and where could this happen again?
23:38Lake Kivu in East Africa is the nasty big brother of Lake Nios.
23:46It's 1600 times larger.
23:49It has a thousand times more gas in it.
23:52And because there are millions of people living around the shoreline of that lake, it's the largest ticking time bomb in the world.
23:58There are active volcanoes in the area, and these volcanoes could destabilize it and trigger a gas burst.
24:07We haven't looked at every single lake in the world, but we know now enough about what kinds of lakes could be dangerous.
24:14Knowing that this is a process that the Earth can throw at us, it's natural to wonder, are other lakes susceptible?
24:22The good news is, this doesn't happen everywhere.
24:25But the bad news is, if there's one that we don't know about, we need to find it first before it lets us know it's there in all the worst ways.
24:34How many lakes around the world are filled with poisonous gases that could explode at any minute?
24:42While there's much left to learn, there are some disasters that aren't triggered by natural processes that take millions of years to unleash.
24:51Like in the case of a catastrophic earthquake, that may have been the result of human engineering.
24:57Throughout history, Mother Nature has revealed that the ground beneath our feet is far less stable than we like to imagine.
25:12In the last century alone, cities have been suddenly reduced to rubble.
25:17And nearly two million people around the world have been killed by the unbelievable ruin caused by earthquakes.
25:29Earthquakes we can observe around the world.
25:32Wherever you are on any continent, you have plenty of fault zones everywhere.
25:37Large fault zones will cause large earthquakes.
25:40And an earthquake happens if you build up stress over thousands and millions of years, and those fault zones can basically rupture at some point.
25:54While scientists can't predict when an earthquake will strike, we generally assume that they're caused by natural processes that take an extraordinarily long time.
26:04But could some of the deadliest earthquakes of the modern age be caused by human hands?
26:17Sichuan Province, China, May 12, 2008.
26:22This region is home to over 80 million people, making it one of the most populous places in all of China.
26:28But just before 2.30 in the afternoon, a massive earthquake unleashes unspeakable death and destruction.
26:41On May 12, 2008, there was a 7.9 earthquake that occurred in Sichuan Province in Western China.
26:50And about 69,000 people died, maybe 18,000 were missing that were presumably dead.
27:02And sometimes probably 10% of the population perished.
27:06The economic damage is also huge, around 130 billion U.S. dollars.
27:13And a lot of the damage was caused by landslides in the region.
27:19So the destruction and devastation caused in the region is immense.
27:26The deadly earthquake struck along a 155-mile fault line, running the base of the Longman Mountains.
27:34But when scientists pinpointed the quake's epicenter, they found something massive and man-made.
27:41The question is, what triggered that earthquake?
27:45Although we know that this region is a natural seismic region, where we have earthquakes every other hundreds of years,
27:52seismologists are able to measure how waves propagate through the Earth crust.
27:58And that's what they did.
28:00They looked at the seismic wave, they recorded, and they could see that in the first 10 to 15 seconds,
28:06most of the energy was released right in the vicinity of the Zipping Poo Dam.
28:14The Zipping Poo Dam stands over 500 feet tall, and its reservoir holds more than 296 billion gallons of water,
28:24weighing more than one trillion tons.
28:26Scientists began to wonder, did this monumental engineering project somehow trigger the earthquake that killed an estimated 87,000 people?
28:39When it comes to the idea of humans artificially triggering earthquakes to occur,
28:45if you do something to add a lot of weight to an area, like create a dam, and then generate a new lake,
28:53well, the weight of all that water can induce any number of changes, and in some areas definitely activate earthquakes.
29:00At the Zipping Poo Reservoir, it's a lot of water, and it's a lot of weight as well.
29:07And then the other indicator is about the distance.
29:11The epicenter location and the reservoir location is really uncomfortably close to each other, about six miles.
29:20So they also indicate there may be a link.
29:25Some suggested reservoir-induced earthquakes cannot be that large.
29:31But my quick response would be, why not?
29:35We calculated how much stress, how much pressure the Zipping Poo Reservoir has placed onto the fault over a period of several years.
29:45That's what led us to suggest that the pressure can't be that large, and that could weaken the fault and trigger the earthquake.
30:00While it seems the Zipping Poo Reservoir could have a role in the deadly Sichuan earthquake,
30:06the theory remains controversial and is not acknowledged by the Chinese government.
30:11But it all raises a chilling question.
30:16What other massive, man-made structures could potentially bring about an unnatural disaster?
30:24Closer to home, the Hoover Dam is among the largest reservoirs in the world.
30:30And in fact, even during its construction in the 1930s, there were quakes nearby because there are structures in the ground that are going to move.
30:40The big question becomes this.
30:43If those structures move again, are we going to have an issue with this dam?
30:50There's no doubt that whether it's caused by man or Mother Nature, those impacted by a disaster are left haunted by the event itself and the aftermath that follows.
31:02But when the tsunami of 2011 destroyed parts of Japan, some locals were affected on an otherworldly level when the living were reportedly visited by the dead.
31:16Japan, March the 11th, 2011, 2.46 p.m.
31:22A massive 9.1-magnitude earthquake strikes dangerously close to the Japanese mainland.
31:33This seismic event displaces so much water, it sends 100-foot waves barreling towards Japan's eastern shore at 500 miles per hour in an event known as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
31:50The earthquake set off a massive tsunami which struck the coastline of eastern Japan and that is what caused devastating damage.
32:02It's like the tide coming in unstoppably, massively and very, very, very fast.
32:09The tsunami smashed into villages, towns, ports, all along the coast.
32:15It caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, which turned into the second worst nuclear disaster in history.
32:26The devastation is overwhelming.
32:30Imagine turning all houses, factories sideways, spreading out all the chemicals and debris, destroying roads.
32:38Destroying roads, you have flows that are filled not just with mud and trees but cars and building fragments and rooftops.
32:46And this is spread all the way inland, many miles, and then dragged back out to sea.
32:53There were more than 19,000 people killed in this event, and it becomes the deadliest event in Japan's history since World War II.
33:01The entire region grappled with enormous loss and unimaginable trauma.
33:08And some who managed to escape death would also experience disturbing events of an otherworldly kind.
33:16Because in the months after the tragedy, tsunami survivors started to report ghostly encounters with the dead.
33:25Six months or so after the tsunami, among many people who survived it, you did begin to hear various stories about supernatural mysterious events.
33:38There were stories about mysterious figures glimpsed by the coast on the beach.
33:44And then there were also the stories told by taxi drivers.
33:52A taxi driver is flagged down by a lonely figure who got in the back of the taxi and gave him an address.
34:01And he gets there, and sure enough, there is nothing there.
34:04All the houses have been smashed to pieces by the wave.
34:07When he looks in the back of the taxi, the person isn't there.
34:12And he understands that the passenger was a ghost who wanted to go back to the place where they'd formerly lived.
34:19There was something ghostly happening along that stricken coast.
34:24Did thousands of sudden deaths unleash the spirits of those that perished in the tsunami?
34:34It's an unnerving question.
34:37Because there were also reports that these spirits possessed the living.
34:42I performed purification rituals, but also exorcism, if you will.
34:52Living people were possessed by spirits.
34:55After the tsunami, everyone around there had almost no physical or mental immunity left.
35:01So they were in a state where spirits could easily attach themselves.
35:04So our method of exorcism involved guiding them into a meditative state and then expelling it with a big breath.
35:12Strangely enough, with one woman, smoke suddenly puffed out of her mouth and the spirit left her.
35:19And when she came back to normal, she was like, why am I here? Did something happen to me?
35:23While the actual number of claimed spirit possessions is unknown, mediums, folk healers, and holy men became inundated with desperate calls for help.
35:38I was in the thick of it, facing people suffering from possession and doing whatever I could.
35:45They're in a daze, their faces blank, they're limp.
35:51It feels like their personality has changed.
35:55We performed rites to calm them.
35:58You need the power of ritual and the power of deep listening.
36:04I engage with them and release them from possession and brought them back to daily life.
36:11But facing possession takes so much out of you, to the point you feel you might die.
36:21Did tsunami ghosts roam Japan's devastated coast and possess those that survived?
36:30While some are convinced that this was a real supernatural phenomenon, others suggest a less esoteric explanation.
36:38After a terrible disaster like this, I think there are two impulses that people have.
36:45One is naturally to feel horror about what has happened.
36:49And I think these stories of ghosts, the sense of the supernatural bearing in on all sides, is an aspect of that, of that fear and that horror.
36:58But there was another side to it.
37:01There's a strong, strong yearning to connect with the dead.
37:05To say the goodbyes, the farewells that weren't possible in this sudden catastrophe.
37:11But to the people having the experiences, they were very, very real.
37:16And they needed to be taken seriously.
37:17Natural disasters have always threatened humanity.
37:29Some believe the danger is only growing.
37:32During the year 2000 and 2019, there were over 7,000 major recorded disaster events around the world.
37:42Nearly twice as many than the previous two decades.
37:47And scientists swore that the next major disaster could come from immense forces buried beneath the Earth's crust.
37:56One source of catastrophic environmental change we know happened in Earth's history are gigantic volcanic eruptions.
38:06If we look through the geological record, we see thousands of these events.
38:10Like we saw in Siberia about 250 million years ago.
38:14Leading to the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.
38:1898% of all species on Earth went extinct.
38:21The atmosphere was rendered almost unbreathable because of how much CO2 came out.
38:27We know that these kinds of events have happened through Earth's history.
38:31In fact, geologically, they happen regularly.
38:34And we do not have the ability to predict if or when the next one will happen.
38:39There are catastrophic eruptions that volcanoes are capable of.
38:44And Yellowstone is a great example.
38:46Yellowstone caldera is a huge depression in the ground,
38:49with an enormous body of magma at depth.
38:52Now, right now, that magma seems to be relatively stable.
38:56But we know that there were gigantic volcanic eruptions in the past,
38:59and it may yet explode in the future.
39:02Could a massive volcanic eruption unleash Earth's next mass extinction of it?
39:09It has happened before.
39:10But there are other apocalyptic forces not born of this Earth.
39:16Like the same cosmic threat believed to have killed the dinosaurs.
39:21A lot of extinctions in our past were actually caused by comets.
39:26If you were to look at our solar system,
39:28the whole solar system is surrounded by a giant sphere of old junk.
39:33Think of it as icy spare parts from when the solar system was first built.
39:39This is where all comets come from.
39:42And one hypothesis is that as our solar system moves through the galaxy, bam!
39:49A slew of comets are fired in toward the inner solar system.
39:53And so it really does make you wonder whether due to mass extinctions have to do with our galactic neighborhood.
40:01Will a series of comets soon bombard Earth like artillery shells?
40:08The fact is we can't accurately predict future disasters at all.
40:12And mankind lives and dies at the mercy of forces that are beyond our control.
40:20At some point in the future, it won't be a question of if, but when, Earth decides to clean house.
40:29But every time these disasters happen, the environment bounces back.
40:34Now I hope we won't learn this in our own lifetimes, but it will surely happen again at some point.
40:40One question we should ask is have we figured out all the ways in which these disasters might happen?
40:44Most of us understand that being prepared doesn't always help us when we're exposed to the unknown.
40:52We have to accumulate more facts, more information.
40:56Sometimes people assume that scientists have it all figured out.
40:59That they have seen everything, they pretty much understand what's happening.
41:03But these disasters have really shown us that we had no idea about major events that have happened in the past and may happen in the future as well.
41:18Is Earth overdue for an unspeakable disaster on a scale we've never witnessed before?
41:27Well, I sure hope not.
41:30And whether a massive volcano erupts, a giant space rock collides with Earth, or any number of terrible cataclysms are on the horizon.
41:40And it's clear that deadly catastrophes are inevitable as long as we call this planet our home.
41:47While Mother Nature has taught us to respect the elements, it's the unpredictable and unnatural disasters that leave us humbled by forces that remain unexplained.
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