By: Haris Ahmad[1]
As I explained in my last blog, many threats to us can wipe us all out. Nature is a very surprising thing and can help us as
well as kick us but humans are more dangerous and are not even trustworthy. In
my opinion, the greatest enemies of humans are humans themselves. We have
fought a lot of wars on this planet although very few strong weapons were
used. However, now humans possess extremely dangerous weapons. We
should stop fighting in between ourselves and should live together as the
peaceful inhabitants of planet Earth.
The first threat that I am going to talk about is volcanoes.
According to Google, the meaning of the term volcano is a mountain or hill,
typically conical, having a crater or vent through which lava; rock fragments,
hot vapor, and gas are or have been erupted from the earth's crust. In basic
terminology, these things spew out magma from the cents that are below Earth’s
surface. Some of you may have watched the movie Pompeii. The volcano that
erupted in the city of Pompeii is known as Mount Vesuvius. Although it was a
small volcano, it still caused a lot of damage as it spewed magma till 4 cubic
km. However, some super volcanoes can spew magma more than 500
cubic km. These supervolcanoes form ash clouds, which block the sunlight
causing a drop in temperatures and preventing plant/crop growth.
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| Image Source: https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/supervolcano-wipe-out-united-states-kill-billions |
The last supervolcano eruption occurred 25,000 years ago in New
Zealand. Researchers predict that these eruptions occur every 30,000 to 50,000
years.
The second threat I am going to talk about is overpopulation.
Some of you may be wondering how can overpopulation even cause
extinction on humans? Well, when the population increases at a very high rate,
the Earth’s capacity to produce food deteriorates and there is not enough food
to feed all the people. Therefore, this leads to starvation, which kills all
humans eventually. Moreover, the more the population, the more the diseases
spread causing an increase in pandemics, which can kill huge amounts of people.
The third threat I am going to talk about is climate change. The
temperatures worldwide are significantly increasing due to global warming. If
global warming continues to stay on the rate it is on today, by 2100 the
temperature on Earth would increase by up to 4 degrees Celsius. This would melt
the ice/glaciers on the planet consequently increasing seawater levels. This
would cause floods that would displace or kill millions of people and if
continued, climate change would wipe out humans. I have explained about climate
change in one of my previous blogs.
This blog is the second
of its kind that I have written. I will write one last blog of this series in
which I will explain two of the biggest threats to the extinction of the human
race. Some of you may even know about one or both of them.
[1]
Haris Ahmad is currently studying in 9th grade (O levels) in The
City School Islamabad.
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