Curiosity (2011) s01e07 Episode Script
How Will the World End?
Jackson : On this angry planet, disaster can strike in an instant.
13 centuries ago, Mayan priests wrote a warning that the world will end in apocalypse.
''They climbed to the roofs of the houses, but the houses crumbled under their feet.
They tried to mount to the tops of the trees, but the trees hurled them from them.
They sought refuge in the caverns, but the caverns closed before them.
'' These keepers of primeval mysteries calculated time on a grand scale unimaginable to other ancient cultures.
But after 5,1 25 years of counting, their calendar stops deadon a very specific date -- December 21 , 201 2, Mayan year zero.
Surely, it's just a story.
Amazingly, those ancient Mayan legends mirror 21 st-century thinking.
Scientists are constantly alert for new evidence of potential disaster.
l have an obligation to society that comes first.
That scientific knowledge, of course, we're always building up.
Jackson : What the scientists are looking out for are the five cataclysmic events most likely to devastate our world -- An arkstorm An asteroid impact A megaquake A megatsunami And a super volcano.
They know that some have struck before The brilliant flash of 1 ,000 Hiroshimas all in one place at one time.
Jackson : and they believe that others will hit us in the future.
Waves 60 to 1 00 feet high along 1 0,000 miles of coastline.
Jackson : Figuring out which disaster is coming next may answer the toughest question of all -- how will the world end? Jackson : California -- population 37 million, all regularly threatened by earthquakes.
But there's a worse danger here.
Our first disaster -- the most likely of all to happen -- is a weather catastrophe on the scale of Noah's flood.
Scientists call it ''an arkstorm.
'' l have a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old.
There's a very strong likelihood that something like this could happen in my children's lifetimes.
lt would create an enormous amount of damage over a very, very wide area.
lt would be like having two or three Katrinas at once.
lf you don't take action, you're going to die.
Jackson : Flood waters drown whole cities, landslides make high ground just as deadly.
On a smaller scale, it's happened before.
Late December, 1 861 .
Sacramento, California.
A monster storm blows in from the Pacific, raging for biblical 40 days and nights and more.
1 0 feet of flooding devastates the state capital, transforming 3 1 /2 million acres of California's Central Valley into an inland sea.
The 1 861 storm remains the worst in California history so far.
But scientists are calculating the odds of a storm even worse.
Everybody thought that a major earthquake was the biggest problem for California.
But nobody really ever thought of a major storm.
Jackson : They believe the threat is real enough that the public should prepare.
We need to get people's minds around the magnitude of a storm like this.
Since it's not in anyone's living memory, how do we get people to prepare themselves? We have bottles of water and we have a lot of canned food.
We could be better prepared.
Half of the cans are probably outdated anyway.
l have absolutely no plan, but l'm assuming l'll have candles around.
Jackson : An arkstorm drops 1 0 feet of rainfall, 1 00 times more than a normal winter cloud burst Everyday weather in an extraordinary mix.
Air pressure drops lower than normal, strengthening winds from the ocean.
Temperature and humidity rise, so clouds carry more rain.
Then the system stalls over coastal hills.
More storms catch up with the first.
The result -- one vast superstorm Day after day of torrents.
This is not your everyday storm.
This is not the storm you remember from 1 995 that was catastrophic for you.
This is something we have never seen before.
lf you saw this on a satellite picture, it would look like a river -- very long and narrow, high concentration of moisture.
One of these can produce, on a daily basis, something like seven times the flow of the Mississippi River.
You can see massive amounts of runoff and lots of flooding.
This is a storm that is in your future.
An arkstorm in California would be catastrophic.
We're talking about blackouts, we're talking about mud slides, we're talking about fires.
All these things, all at once.
Jackson : All these disasters will unfold when a killer storm hits California.
Hurricane-force winds and unprecedented rainfall will engulf the entire state.
newscast: A severe thunderstorm warning remains in effect, and we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
lt's the catastrophes that take us by surprise.
People don't think about those sort of things until it's right upon them.
radio: Do not wait before taking cover.
We've seen it in Katrina, and we can see it in Sacramento.
Jackson : lmagine that the ancient Mayans had seen what we've seen in the last few years -- hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, volcanos in lceland and Chile.
Our planet is locked in mortal conflict with the forces of nature.
5:35 p.
m.
The epicenter of the storm makes landfall 60 miles south of San Francisco.
But torrential rain inundates a strip of California coastline 200 miles wide.
The rain may be an inch or two an hour.
We're talking 30-foot waves.
From where we're standing, we will probably be under 1 0 or 1 5 feet of water in the arkstorm.
There will be 1 00 mile-an-hour winds along this coastline.
Jackson : The arkstorm's onslaught on California is just the beginning.
Hurricane Katrina lasted five days.
An arkstorm will rage for more than a month.
Co x: The waters rise, they start overtopping the levees.
The levees break.
And at that point, it's just chaos.
The bay delta is inundated.
Dams would come down.
Sewage treatment plants are overflowing, causing pollution for 23 million people in California.
Lots of people would have to be evacuated in a situation like this.
There's many homes flooding in this scenario.
Businesses are shut down.
There's no way to get goods from point ''A'' to point ''B'' because the roads are flooded.
[ siren wails .]
Strong winds and a saturated ground -- that's where you get the landslides, and we start taking out some of the highways and that takes out a lot of the power lines.
You get massive power outages.
There's very little you can do if you're trapped in your home when a mud slide occurs except to stay inside and hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
The mud can destroy your home or it can actually pick up your home and move it from its foundation.
Jackson : The latest federal disaster study predicts that 1 /4 of all California buildings will be flooded Some to a depth of 20 feet.
You've got to be prepared to literally ride this out for one month on your own without anyone helping you out.
Flood waters rushing to your house.
lf you're gonna survive, you've got to move towards your roof.
You're gonna need fresh water and some sort of shelter.
l have an emergency kit in my car that my mom gave me because she's kind of freaking out about that.
Have clean water to drink, something to eat.
lt's not really clear what the city or state government would do, if anything.
Jackson : The odds of an arkstorm striking -- 1 0% within the next 50 years.
An estimated 380,000 dead 1 ,1 40,000 injured $7 25 billion of damage.
The arkstorm would be 35 times more expensive than California's most costly quake -- Northridge, in 1 994.
There are slightly longer odds on our next disaster striking sooner, but its impact will be far, far worse.
Jackson : We've lived through floods and famine.
We have witnessed natural disasters of epic proportion.
Yet, there's a threat to our existence that will strike us like a thunder bolt from the gods.
Now, scientists can calculate the devastating power of nature's forces.
They have found another time bomb -- it's still ticking.
And this one is impossible to defuse.
To scientists, it's an impact event.
To everyone else, it's Armageddon.
Lives vaporized in a flash as an asteroid strikes the Earth.
The scary thing is it's happened before Which makes many astronomers certain it'll happen again.
Events of this scale happen someplace on the planet Earth on time scales of tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
They're rare but they do occur.
Jackson : Meteor Crater -- 36 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona A scar 4,000 feet wide 507 feet deep A rim blasted 1 50 feet above the desert floor.
The explosion was 50,000 years ago, but scientists can figure out what happened.
A 1 50-foot wide iron-rich space rock strikes with the force of a 1 0 megaton bomb as much energy in that instant as the U.
S.
A.
uses in a day.
lt slammed in to the ground at 50,000 miles per hour.
At that speed, you're creating a sonic boom in the rock itself.
And so, that creates an immense explosion that really excavates out this huge hole in the ground.
Jackson : The question is, what are the odds of this doomsday coming soon? There's nothing you can do, right? You're pretty screwed.
Jackson : Lowell Observatory, Arizona.
Brian Skiff hunts asteroids, acting as an early-warning system for our planet.
A telescope 1 00,000 times more sensitive than the human eye scans for asteroids in the night sky.
There are a large number of near-Earth asteroids that are orbiting the sun, sometimes coming close to Earth.
We know of pretty much of all of the big asteroids, but we still have the small bodies that can come in and make something like Meteor Crater.
So those are still out there waiting to be discovered.
Jackson : Located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, the Asteroid Belt contains billions of rock -- some no bigger than a grain of rice, and some a lot bigger.
The asteroid that hit Arizona was relatively small.
Bigger ones are still out there.
[ siren wails .]
An object could be discovered on an impact trajectory just months before its impact, and in that case, quite frankly, there's not a whole lot we can do.
All you know is that it's near the Earth.
lt's not like the movies where somebody looks at the image and says, ''Oh, it's gonna be hitting the Earth next week.
We've got to get out of the way or do something.
'' lt's not like that.
We may not know exactly the site of the impending impact, but instead a trace of potential impact places across the planet.
Jackson : After decades of studying the skies, astronomers can figure the odds.
A child born today stands 1 chance in 20 of seeing a large asteroid hit the Earth.
An asteroid like that, as much as 450 feet wide, could be on its way right now -- target, Washington, D.
C.
8:55 a.
m.
The first signs of the impending impact itself would be this blazingly bright -- brighter than the sun -- light in the sky.
Jackson : Directly in its sights -- Constitution Avenue at 1 2th Street, the heart of the Federal Government.
Anybody in the immediate pro ximity is going to be literally ripped apart by the blast.
The roads, bridges, all these things -- hospitals, none of these things would be intact.
Jackson : Up to three miles away, even steel-framed multistory buildings will collapse.
The crater would pepper the entire landscape with boulders the sizes of houses and small buildings.
Jackson : The odds of this happening? Again, 1 in 20 in our children's lifetime.
An estimated 60,000 dead 200,000 injured $50 billion of damage.
An asteroid strike is a real threat.
But it may not be the next threat we face.
Because a third end-of-the-world scenario is looming, and it will wreak even more death and destruction.
Jackson : Our fragile blue planet -- a place of beauty, mystery, and wonder.
But its 4.
5 billion years point to a violent and destructive past.
Asteroid strikes, ice ages, mass extinctions -- dinosaurs, mammoths, dodos, whole species wiped out.
Nothing survives here long -- not even us.
The underground bomb that's primed and ready to go in our third disaster is a megaearthquake in the Midwest.
The story of one of America's most deadly earthquake zones starts in an unlikely place -- the peaceful town of Tiptonville, Tennessee Population -- just 4,464 A mere speck on a map, hundreds of miles from major coastal fault lines like the San Andreas.
And yet, the scene of three of the largest earthquakes in American history Earthquakes that spawned one of the strangest of all geological phenomenon Sand blows.
ln the winter of 1 81 1 , three quakes measured at magnitude 7 to 8 rocked the ground here.
The shocks were felt for 1 ,000 miles around.
Geological sleuth Professor Roy Van Arsdale is unraveling the mysteries of the Tiptonville quakes.
We're at the epicenter of the first of the three great earthquakes of 1 81 1 -1 81 2.
We're starting to see some patches now, that l suspect are sand blows.
There's a very large white patch right to our right down here.
Jackson : Sand blows are caused by intense underground shaking.
The shaking compresses water trapped within the sandy soil, creating a saturated mixture resembling quicksand.
Rising pressure forces the wet sand and water mix up through cracks in the rocks.
The pressure becomes so high that it literally blasts a hole through that clay layer, kind of like mini volcanos.
Jackson : Helping to investigate the Tiptonville quakes is geologist Oliver Boyd.
He's discovered underground layers of soft sediment which shake easily when an earthquake strikes.
The sediment amplifies the seismic waves, making the earth shake even more violently throughout the Midwest.
lmagine if you were to bump into a bathtub that was full of water and that water would just slosh around and shake around.
And that's sort of like what these sediments are over top of this hard rock.
So the earthquake kind of jolts the sediments, and then they just keep moving.
Jackson : The amplified shock waves make Midwest quakes more dangerous than elsewhere.
No wonder the great quakes of two centuries ago made the Mississippi burst its banks.
Near Tiptonville, 1 .
5 billion cubic feet of water tore through the landscape.
lt formed the largest lake in Tennessee -- Lake Reelfoot.
You kind of get a better idea of the scale when you're actually out on the lake.
You know, it feels enormous.
Really what we've learned here with the 1 81 1 -1 81 2 earthquakes is that they're very large earthquakes, between magnitude 7 and 8.
They can produce very strong ground motions over very large areas.
And they occur much more regularly than we would have imagined.
When the fault ruptures again, because those earthquakes cover such a large area, they would affect a huge number of people -- millions and millions of people.
The early warning you have would be a matter of seconds.
Jackson : So when could a Midwest megaquake strike again? The sand blows offer vital clues.
The chemical remains can be dated to different earthquakes across thousands of years.
And they tell a terrifying story.
The seismic disturbances are getting more and more frequent.
As far as l'm concerned, it's not the smart thing to do to ignore a pattern that seems to be characteristic of the New Madrid seismic zone.
We cannot safely assume that this pattern will not continue.
Jackson : 9:30 a.
m.
, Tiptonville.
Three miles underground, the fault line breaks, releasing energy equal to 1 ,000 Hiroshima bombs.
St.
Louis, 1 60 miles from Tiptonville.
Population -- nearly 3 million.
Within 4 7 seconds of the quake, the Gateway Arch begins to shake, the tallest man-made monument in the United States.
42,000 tons of steel and concrete crash down.
The kind of injuries that you sustain during an earthquake can be very severe.
Severe lacerations, avulsive wounds where you tear the flesh off of your body, injuries to the eyes, and even burns.
Jackson : Chance of a Midwest megaquake striking within 50 years -- 1 in 1 0.
Could this be the next one to strike us? 600,000 die And 2 million casualties across five entire states.
But scenario number four brings even more ruin to an even wider area -- the entire east coast -- from a catastrophe 3,000 miles away on the other side of an ocean.
Jackson : The Mayans were obsessed with calculating time.
1 ,000 years after they disappeared, their lunar calendar is still accurate to 34 seconds.
And they predicted the end of time before the end of 201 2.
Can we afford to ignore them? Today, scientists make predictions based on empirical evidence, and they have their own dire warnings for us.
Megaquakes in the Midwest And arkstorms in California are just the beginning.
There's another potential danger that threatens the entire eastern seaboard.
A cataclysmic disaster that defies belief [ people screaming .]
rising from the sea Bringing death and destruction to millions.
At odds of just 1 ,000 to 1 , this could be the next apocalyptic disaster.
And we already know where the danger will come from -- 3,000 miles away On La Palma in the Canary lslands off the African coast.
The island is the tip of a huge undersea volcano.
But the threat to millions of us in America doesn't come from a volcanic eruption.
The real danger is worse A mile-high tsunami with the power to cross an ocean.
Geologist Simon Day searches for clues to the threat inside ancient tunnels deep under the volcano.
What worries him is this -- the soaking-wet trigger for a disaster.
We have large volumes of water trapped within the volcano.
And this means that when hot magma ascends from deep within the Earth on its way to erupt at the surface, the trapped water gets heated, tries to expand, it can't, the pressure goes up, just like a pressure cooker, and the flank of the volcano gets pushed off towards the ocean.
Jackson : The pressure cooker of La Palma has already damaged the island in previous eruptions.
6,000 feet up, Dr.
Day finds a split in the rocks.
Day: When l look in La Palma, l see a disaster waiting to happen.
Something very unusual is happening here.
All the rocks on the western side are moved down by about six feet compared to the rocks on the east side.
The whole of this side of the island is moving down and towards the sea, and the volcano seems to be almost splitting in half.
Jackson : And that's the danger to America.
When half an island falls into the ocean, it makes a splash -- a splash big enough to start a tsunami.
4:55 p.
m.
local time.
La Palma volcano erupts.
Steam pressure inside the mountain splits the island.
1 ,250 trillion tons of rock slide into the ocean.
A tsunami wave races across the Atlantic at 500 miles per hour, as fast as a jumbo jet.
At 2:00 a.
m.
Eastern Standard Time, news breaks in the U.
S.
The death wave is just eight hours away.
l have citizens band radio.
And if there's an emergency, then l'm supposed to go to channel 9.
And then they'll give us instructions from the city as far as what to do for our neighborhood.
Jackson : But there simply won't be enough time to evacuate a metropolis like New York.
Unfortunately, it's not a survivable event.
You've got to have escape routes out of the city.
And you're not gonna be able to do it in a car if you wait too long because the traffic is gonna be enormous.
So you're gonna have either move on foot or you're gonna have to move by bicycle or you're gonna have to move by public transportation and get out as quickly as you can and find the highest area that you can find.
Jackson : 6: 1 5 a.
m.
Eastern Standard Time.
The wave now stands 1 00 feet high.
You're talking about flood waters that are gonna move into the city, some places 40 miles inland.
And in some areas in the city, you're gonna see water levels that raise up almost to the top of this building.
Jackson : From New York to Miami, the monster wave drowns the land up to 40 miles from the coast.
$400 trillion worth of damage.
Yet, when the waters recede, America's problems are just beginning.
The aftermath of a tsunami is going to be lots of overturned cars, collapsed buildings, and other even larger structures.
lt's gonna be very dangerous.
ln a lot of cases, water treatment plants and sewage -- it's gonna be to xic.
The ground's gonna be to xic.
The soil is going to be to xic.
Jackson : The chances of La Palma blowing within the next 1 00 years are 1 in 1 ,000.
This time, it's not just one state, not even five states.
Destruction is total along the entire eastern seaboard.
Estimated death toll -- 4 million.
The megatsunami could kill more people than any natural disaster on record.
But maybe we should be worrying more about the final disaster in our countdown.
lt could be upon us sooner.
lt affects not just one coastline but the whole country.
Jackson : A fifth and final calamity, our entire continent threatened, the end of civilization.
Deep under Yellowstone Park, a smoldering giant awakens -- a super volcano.
An area the size of Connecticut, more than 5,000 square miles, becomes a bubbling cauldron of super-heated lava and to xic gas.
An ash cloud 25 miles high blots out the sun.
Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.
Geologist professor Robert Smith tracks movement in the caldera, the vast dormant crater at the heart of the park.
Seismometers identify swarms of hundreds of earthquakes The dots seen here in red.
Smith : We're watching Yellowstone with our new instruments.
We're measuring the Earth's stress.
And we're very aware of its volcanic potential or earthquake potential, or most importantly, of both.
We created a three-dimensional picture.
We are learning a lot more about the physical properties, about the temperature and the composition of the magma body that creates Yellowstone's heat.
Jackson : Semi-molten rock below the volcano fills a chamber 50 miles wide and 400 miles deep.
The magma it holds would fill Lake Superior, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie all to overflowing.
That was an unexpected find.
Jackson : Another unexpected find is that the land sometimes rises.
From 2004 to 201 0, we saw uplift rates in the caldera of up to about three inches per year.
lt's the fastest we've ever recorded.
Jackson : The number of earthquake swarms has also ballooned.
Farrell : 201 0 swarm is over here in the western part of the caldera.
These swarms are occurring on distinct planes under the surface.
The Yellowstone system is a very fractured system, so there's a lot of cracks that don't necessarily manifest themselves on the surface.
Jackson : Earthquake swarms form a key part of the Yellowstone volcano hazard response plan.
Earthquakes are very persistent in this area, and we frequently get big swarms of earthquakes right here.
Tens of earthquakes per hour.
Jackson : As earthquakes occur in Yellowstone, the data arrives in real time at the University of Utah.
Large magnitude and frequent earthquakes could foretell an eruption.
Quick swarms form a key part of the Yellowstone volcano hazard response plan.
l know, based on my experience of working here for 50 years, the next couple of years, we're gonna find something new.
Jackson : The end of America as we know it could start just like this.
Across Yellowstone Park, the number of earthquakes steadily rises.
The geysers and fumaroles grow more active.
2:53 p.
m.
1 20 miles underground, a mass of molten rock as big as Los Angeles soars towards the surface.
lt's 1 ,500 degrees, enough to melt the surface rocks and set off dozens of earthquakes.
Lava jets burst from 1 00 fissures all over the park.
The eruption passes the point of no return.
The scale of the coming blast defies comprehension.
The eruption equals 1 ,000 Hiroshima atom bombs every second 1 ,000 times the power of Mount St.
Helens, ejecting 240 cubic miles of ash and red-hot lava, 1 0 times more than the volume of water in Long lsland Sound.
Within hours, the death zone covers a 600 mile radius from Yellowstone.
ln here, 9 of every 1 0 people die.
And that's just the start.
All aircraft are grounded as ash blankets 3/4 of the country.
Across the continent, volcanic dust causes long-term and deadly lung damage.
lt's going to basically envelope the entire planet because that ash is going to circle the planet with the jet stream.
lt's going to affect everything that we do on the planet.
So this is as cataclysmic an event as they come.
ln terms of global geophysical events, this is the big one.
Jackson : With an estimated death toll of more than 1 00 million, it could be the end of America.
A Yellowstone super volcano has erupted, on average, every 600,000 years.
The last one was 640,000 years ago and counting.
Our planet is a hostile place, threatened by arkstorms, earthquakes, megatsunami, asteroid impacts, and a super volcano.
For the scientists who study them, each is a credible real threat.
But unlike the Mayans, they can't say exactly when the world will end.
We could be fine for years, even millennia.
But for now, you know the facts.
So ask yourself -- are you prepared?
13 centuries ago, Mayan priests wrote a warning that the world will end in apocalypse.
''They climbed to the roofs of the houses, but the houses crumbled under their feet.
They tried to mount to the tops of the trees, but the trees hurled them from them.
They sought refuge in the caverns, but the caverns closed before them.
'' These keepers of primeval mysteries calculated time on a grand scale unimaginable to other ancient cultures.
But after 5,1 25 years of counting, their calendar stops deadon a very specific date -- December 21 , 201 2, Mayan year zero.
Surely, it's just a story.
Amazingly, those ancient Mayan legends mirror 21 st-century thinking.
Scientists are constantly alert for new evidence of potential disaster.
l have an obligation to society that comes first.
That scientific knowledge, of course, we're always building up.
Jackson : What the scientists are looking out for are the five cataclysmic events most likely to devastate our world -- An arkstorm An asteroid impact A megaquake A megatsunami And a super volcano.
They know that some have struck before The brilliant flash of 1 ,000 Hiroshimas all in one place at one time.
Jackson : and they believe that others will hit us in the future.
Waves 60 to 1 00 feet high along 1 0,000 miles of coastline.
Jackson : Figuring out which disaster is coming next may answer the toughest question of all -- how will the world end? Jackson : California -- population 37 million, all regularly threatened by earthquakes.
But there's a worse danger here.
Our first disaster -- the most likely of all to happen -- is a weather catastrophe on the scale of Noah's flood.
Scientists call it ''an arkstorm.
'' l have a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old.
There's a very strong likelihood that something like this could happen in my children's lifetimes.
lt would create an enormous amount of damage over a very, very wide area.
lt would be like having two or three Katrinas at once.
lf you don't take action, you're going to die.
Jackson : Flood waters drown whole cities, landslides make high ground just as deadly.
On a smaller scale, it's happened before.
Late December, 1 861 .
Sacramento, California.
A monster storm blows in from the Pacific, raging for biblical 40 days and nights and more.
1 0 feet of flooding devastates the state capital, transforming 3 1 /2 million acres of California's Central Valley into an inland sea.
The 1 861 storm remains the worst in California history so far.
But scientists are calculating the odds of a storm even worse.
Everybody thought that a major earthquake was the biggest problem for California.
But nobody really ever thought of a major storm.
Jackson : They believe the threat is real enough that the public should prepare.
We need to get people's minds around the magnitude of a storm like this.
Since it's not in anyone's living memory, how do we get people to prepare themselves? We have bottles of water and we have a lot of canned food.
We could be better prepared.
Half of the cans are probably outdated anyway.
l have absolutely no plan, but l'm assuming l'll have candles around.
Jackson : An arkstorm drops 1 0 feet of rainfall, 1 00 times more than a normal winter cloud burst Everyday weather in an extraordinary mix.
Air pressure drops lower than normal, strengthening winds from the ocean.
Temperature and humidity rise, so clouds carry more rain.
Then the system stalls over coastal hills.
More storms catch up with the first.
The result -- one vast superstorm Day after day of torrents.
This is not your everyday storm.
This is not the storm you remember from 1 995 that was catastrophic for you.
This is something we have never seen before.
lf you saw this on a satellite picture, it would look like a river -- very long and narrow, high concentration of moisture.
One of these can produce, on a daily basis, something like seven times the flow of the Mississippi River.
You can see massive amounts of runoff and lots of flooding.
This is a storm that is in your future.
An arkstorm in California would be catastrophic.
We're talking about blackouts, we're talking about mud slides, we're talking about fires.
All these things, all at once.
Jackson : All these disasters will unfold when a killer storm hits California.
Hurricane-force winds and unprecedented rainfall will engulf the entire state.
newscast: A severe thunderstorm warning remains in effect, and we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
lt's the catastrophes that take us by surprise.
People don't think about those sort of things until it's right upon them.
radio: Do not wait before taking cover.
We've seen it in Katrina, and we can see it in Sacramento.
Jackson : lmagine that the ancient Mayans had seen what we've seen in the last few years -- hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, volcanos in lceland and Chile.
Our planet is locked in mortal conflict with the forces of nature.
5:35 p.
m.
The epicenter of the storm makes landfall 60 miles south of San Francisco.
But torrential rain inundates a strip of California coastline 200 miles wide.
The rain may be an inch or two an hour.
We're talking 30-foot waves.
From where we're standing, we will probably be under 1 0 or 1 5 feet of water in the arkstorm.
There will be 1 00 mile-an-hour winds along this coastline.
Jackson : The arkstorm's onslaught on California is just the beginning.
Hurricane Katrina lasted five days.
An arkstorm will rage for more than a month.
Co x: The waters rise, they start overtopping the levees.
The levees break.
And at that point, it's just chaos.
The bay delta is inundated.
Dams would come down.
Sewage treatment plants are overflowing, causing pollution for 23 million people in California.
Lots of people would have to be evacuated in a situation like this.
There's many homes flooding in this scenario.
Businesses are shut down.
There's no way to get goods from point ''A'' to point ''B'' because the roads are flooded.
[ siren wails .]
Strong winds and a saturated ground -- that's where you get the landslides, and we start taking out some of the highways and that takes out a lot of the power lines.
You get massive power outages.
There's very little you can do if you're trapped in your home when a mud slide occurs except to stay inside and hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
The mud can destroy your home or it can actually pick up your home and move it from its foundation.
Jackson : The latest federal disaster study predicts that 1 /4 of all California buildings will be flooded Some to a depth of 20 feet.
You've got to be prepared to literally ride this out for one month on your own without anyone helping you out.
Flood waters rushing to your house.
lf you're gonna survive, you've got to move towards your roof.
You're gonna need fresh water and some sort of shelter.
l have an emergency kit in my car that my mom gave me because she's kind of freaking out about that.
Have clean water to drink, something to eat.
lt's not really clear what the city or state government would do, if anything.
Jackson : The odds of an arkstorm striking -- 1 0% within the next 50 years.
An estimated 380,000 dead 1 ,1 40,000 injured $7 25 billion of damage.
The arkstorm would be 35 times more expensive than California's most costly quake -- Northridge, in 1 994.
There are slightly longer odds on our next disaster striking sooner, but its impact will be far, far worse.
Jackson : We've lived through floods and famine.
We have witnessed natural disasters of epic proportion.
Yet, there's a threat to our existence that will strike us like a thunder bolt from the gods.
Now, scientists can calculate the devastating power of nature's forces.
They have found another time bomb -- it's still ticking.
And this one is impossible to defuse.
To scientists, it's an impact event.
To everyone else, it's Armageddon.
Lives vaporized in a flash as an asteroid strikes the Earth.
The scary thing is it's happened before Which makes many astronomers certain it'll happen again.
Events of this scale happen someplace on the planet Earth on time scales of tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
They're rare but they do occur.
Jackson : Meteor Crater -- 36 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona A scar 4,000 feet wide 507 feet deep A rim blasted 1 50 feet above the desert floor.
The explosion was 50,000 years ago, but scientists can figure out what happened.
A 1 50-foot wide iron-rich space rock strikes with the force of a 1 0 megaton bomb as much energy in that instant as the U.
S.
A.
uses in a day.
lt slammed in to the ground at 50,000 miles per hour.
At that speed, you're creating a sonic boom in the rock itself.
And so, that creates an immense explosion that really excavates out this huge hole in the ground.
Jackson : The question is, what are the odds of this doomsday coming soon? There's nothing you can do, right? You're pretty screwed.
Jackson : Lowell Observatory, Arizona.
Brian Skiff hunts asteroids, acting as an early-warning system for our planet.
A telescope 1 00,000 times more sensitive than the human eye scans for asteroids in the night sky.
There are a large number of near-Earth asteroids that are orbiting the sun, sometimes coming close to Earth.
We know of pretty much of all of the big asteroids, but we still have the small bodies that can come in and make something like Meteor Crater.
So those are still out there waiting to be discovered.
Jackson : Located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, the Asteroid Belt contains billions of rock -- some no bigger than a grain of rice, and some a lot bigger.
The asteroid that hit Arizona was relatively small.
Bigger ones are still out there.
[ siren wails .]
An object could be discovered on an impact trajectory just months before its impact, and in that case, quite frankly, there's not a whole lot we can do.
All you know is that it's near the Earth.
lt's not like the movies where somebody looks at the image and says, ''Oh, it's gonna be hitting the Earth next week.
We've got to get out of the way or do something.
'' lt's not like that.
We may not know exactly the site of the impending impact, but instead a trace of potential impact places across the planet.
Jackson : After decades of studying the skies, astronomers can figure the odds.
A child born today stands 1 chance in 20 of seeing a large asteroid hit the Earth.
An asteroid like that, as much as 450 feet wide, could be on its way right now -- target, Washington, D.
C.
8:55 a.
m.
The first signs of the impending impact itself would be this blazingly bright -- brighter than the sun -- light in the sky.
Jackson : Directly in its sights -- Constitution Avenue at 1 2th Street, the heart of the Federal Government.
Anybody in the immediate pro ximity is going to be literally ripped apart by the blast.
The roads, bridges, all these things -- hospitals, none of these things would be intact.
Jackson : Up to three miles away, even steel-framed multistory buildings will collapse.
The crater would pepper the entire landscape with boulders the sizes of houses and small buildings.
Jackson : The odds of this happening? Again, 1 in 20 in our children's lifetime.
An estimated 60,000 dead 200,000 injured $50 billion of damage.
An asteroid strike is a real threat.
But it may not be the next threat we face.
Because a third end-of-the-world scenario is looming, and it will wreak even more death and destruction.
Jackson : Our fragile blue planet -- a place of beauty, mystery, and wonder.
But its 4.
5 billion years point to a violent and destructive past.
Asteroid strikes, ice ages, mass extinctions -- dinosaurs, mammoths, dodos, whole species wiped out.
Nothing survives here long -- not even us.
The underground bomb that's primed and ready to go in our third disaster is a megaearthquake in the Midwest.
The story of one of America's most deadly earthquake zones starts in an unlikely place -- the peaceful town of Tiptonville, Tennessee Population -- just 4,464 A mere speck on a map, hundreds of miles from major coastal fault lines like the San Andreas.
And yet, the scene of three of the largest earthquakes in American history Earthquakes that spawned one of the strangest of all geological phenomenon Sand blows.
ln the winter of 1 81 1 , three quakes measured at magnitude 7 to 8 rocked the ground here.
The shocks were felt for 1 ,000 miles around.
Geological sleuth Professor Roy Van Arsdale is unraveling the mysteries of the Tiptonville quakes.
We're at the epicenter of the first of the three great earthquakes of 1 81 1 -1 81 2.
We're starting to see some patches now, that l suspect are sand blows.
There's a very large white patch right to our right down here.
Jackson : Sand blows are caused by intense underground shaking.
The shaking compresses water trapped within the sandy soil, creating a saturated mixture resembling quicksand.
Rising pressure forces the wet sand and water mix up through cracks in the rocks.
The pressure becomes so high that it literally blasts a hole through that clay layer, kind of like mini volcanos.
Jackson : Helping to investigate the Tiptonville quakes is geologist Oliver Boyd.
He's discovered underground layers of soft sediment which shake easily when an earthquake strikes.
The sediment amplifies the seismic waves, making the earth shake even more violently throughout the Midwest.
lmagine if you were to bump into a bathtub that was full of water and that water would just slosh around and shake around.
And that's sort of like what these sediments are over top of this hard rock.
So the earthquake kind of jolts the sediments, and then they just keep moving.
Jackson : The amplified shock waves make Midwest quakes more dangerous than elsewhere.
No wonder the great quakes of two centuries ago made the Mississippi burst its banks.
Near Tiptonville, 1 .
5 billion cubic feet of water tore through the landscape.
lt formed the largest lake in Tennessee -- Lake Reelfoot.
You kind of get a better idea of the scale when you're actually out on the lake.
You know, it feels enormous.
Really what we've learned here with the 1 81 1 -1 81 2 earthquakes is that they're very large earthquakes, between magnitude 7 and 8.
They can produce very strong ground motions over very large areas.
And they occur much more regularly than we would have imagined.
When the fault ruptures again, because those earthquakes cover such a large area, they would affect a huge number of people -- millions and millions of people.
The early warning you have would be a matter of seconds.
Jackson : So when could a Midwest megaquake strike again? The sand blows offer vital clues.
The chemical remains can be dated to different earthquakes across thousands of years.
And they tell a terrifying story.
The seismic disturbances are getting more and more frequent.
As far as l'm concerned, it's not the smart thing to do to ignore a pattern that seems to be characteristic of the New Madrid seismic zone.
We cannot safely assume that this pattern will not continue.
Jackson : 9:30 a.
m.
, Tiptonville.
Three miles underground, the fault line breaks, releasing energy equal to 1 ,000 Hiroshima bombs.
St.
Louis, 1 60 miles from Tiptonville.
Population -- nearly 3 million.
Within 4 7 seconds of the quake, the Gateway Arch begins to shake, the tallest man-made monument in the United States.
42,000 tons of steel and concrete crash down.
The kind of injuries that you sustain during an earthquake can be very severe.
Severe lacerations, avulsive wounds where you tear the flesh off of your body, injuries to the eyes, and even burns.
Jackson : Chance of a Midwest megaquake striking within 50 years -- 1 in 1 0.
Could this be the next one to strike us? 600,000 die And 2 million casualties across five entire states.
But scenario number four brings even more ruin to an even wider area -- the entire east coast -- from a catastrophe 3,000 miles away on the other side of an ocean.
Jackson : The Mayans were obsessed with calculating time.
1 ,000 years after they disappeared, their lunar calendar is still accurate to 34 seconds.
And they predicted the end of time before the end of 201 2.
Can we afford to ignore them? Today, scientists make predictions based on empirical evidence, and they have their own dire warnings for us.
Megaquakes in the Midwest And arkstorms in California are just the beginning.
There's another potential danger that threatens the entire eastern seaboard.
A cataclysmic disaster that defies belief [ people screaming .]
rising from the sea Bringing death and destruction to millions.
At odds of just 1 ,000 to 1 , this could be the next apocalyptic disaster.
And we already know where the danger will come from -- 3,000 miles away On La Palma in the Canary lslands off the African coast.
The island is the tip of a huge undersea volcano.
But the threat to millions of us in America doesn't come from a volcanic eruption.
The real danger is worse A mile-high tsunami with the power to cross an ocean.
Geologist Simon Day searches for clues to the threat inside ancient tunnels deep under the volcano.
What worries him is this -- the soaking-wet trigger for a disaster.
We have large volumes of water trapped within the volcano.
And this means that when hot magma ascends from deep within the Earth on its way to erupt at the surface, the trapped water gets heated, tries to expand, it can't, the pressure goes up, just like a pressure cooker, and the flank of the volcano gets pushed off towards the ocean.
Jackson : The pressure cooker of La Palma has already damaged the island in previous eruptions.
6,000 feet up, Dr.
Day finds a split in the rocks.
Day: When l look in La Palma, l see a disaster waiting to happen.
Something very unusual is happening here.
All the rocks on the western side are moved down by about six feet compared to the rocks on the east side.
The whole of this side of the island is moving down and towards the sea, and the volcano seems to be almost splitting in half.
Jackson : And that's the danger to America.
When half an island falls into the ocean, it makes a splash -- a splash big enough to start a tsunami.
4:55 p.
m.
local time.
La Palma volcano erupts.
Steam pressure inside the mountain splits the island.
1 ,250 trillion tons of rock slide into the ocean.
A tsunami wave races across the Atlantic at 500 miles per hour, as fast as a jumbo jet.
At 2:00 a.
m.
Eastern Standard Time, news breaks in the U.
S.
The death wave is just eight hours away.
l have citizens band radio.
And if there's an emergency, then l'm supposed to go to channel 9.
And then they'll give us instructions from the city as far as what to do for our neighborhood.
Jackson : But there simply won't be enough time to evacuate a metropolis like New York.
Unfortunately, it's not a survivable event.
You've got to have escape routes out of the city.
And you're not gonna be able to do it in a car if you wait too long because the traffic is gonna be enormous.
So you're gonna have either move on foot or you're gonna have to move by bicycle or you're gonna have to move by public transportation and get out as quickly as you can and find the highest area that you can find.
Jackson : 6: 1 5 a.
m.
Eastern Standard Time.
The wave now stands 1 00 feet high.
You're talking about flood waters that are gonna move into the city, some places 40 miles inland.
And in some areas in the city, you're gonna see water levels that raise up almost to the top of this building.
Jackson : From New York to Miami, the monster wave drowns the land up to 40 miles from the coast.
$400 trillion worth of damage.
Yet, when the waters recede, America's problems are just beginning.
The aftermath of a tsunami is going to be lots of overturned cars, collapsed buildings, and other even larger structures.
lt's gonna be very dangerous.
ln a lot of cases, water treatment plants and sewage -- it's gonna be to xic.
The ground's gonna be to xic.
The soil is going to be to xic.
Jackson : The chances of La Palma blowing within the next 1 00 years are 1 in 1 ,000.
This time, it's not just one state, not even five states.
Destruction is total along the entire eastern seaboard.
Estimated death toll -- 4 million.
The megatsunami could kill more people than any natural disaster on record.
But maybe we should be worrying more about the final disaster in our countdown.
lt could be upon us sooner.
lt affects not just one coastline but the whole country.
Jackson : A fifth and final calamity, our entire continent threatened, the end of civilization.
Deep under Yellowstone Park, a smoldering giant awakens -- a super volcano.
An area the size of Connecticut, more than 5,000 square miles, becomes a bubbling cauldron of super-heated lava and to xic gas.
An ash cloud 25 miles high blots out the sun.
Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.
Geologist professor Robert Smith tracks movement in the caldera, the vast dormant crater at the heart of the park.
Seismometers identify swarms of hundreds of earthquakes The dots seen here in red.
Smith : We're watching Yellowstone with our new instruments.
We're measuring the Earth's stress.
And we're very aware of its volcanic potential or earthquake potential, or most importantly, of both.
We created a three-dimensional picture.
We are learning a lot more about the physical properties, about the temperature and the composition of the magma body that creates Yellowstone's heat.
Jackson : Semi-molten rock below the volcano fills a chamber 50 miles wide and 400 miles deep.
The magma it holds would fill Lake Superior, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie all to overflowing.
That was an unexpected find.
Jackson : Another unexpected find is that the land sometimes rises.
From 2004 to 201 0, we saw uplift rates in the caldera of up to about three inches per year.
lt's the fastest we've ever recorded.
Jackson : The number of earthquake swarms has also ballooned.
Farrell : 201 0 swarm is over here in the western part of the caldera.
These swarms are occurring on distinct planes under the surface.
The Yellowstone system is a very fractured system, so there's a lot of cracks that don't necessarily manifest themselves on the surface.
Jackson : Earthquake swarms form a key part of the Yellowstone volcano hazard response plan.
Earthquakes are very persistent in this area, and we frequently get big swarms of earthquakes right here.
Tens of earthquakes per hour.
Jackson : As earthquakes occur in Yellowstone, the data arrives in real time at the University of Utah.
Large magnitude and frequent earthquakes could foretell an eruption.
Quick swarms form a key part of the Yellowstone volcano hazard response plan.
l know, based on my experience of working here for 50 years, the next couple of years, we're gonna find something new.
Jackson : The end of America as we know it could start just like this.
Across Yellowstone Park, the number of earthquakes steadily rises.
The geysers and fumaroles grow more active.
2:53 p.
m.
1 20 miles underground, a mass of molten rock as big as Los Angeles soars towards the surface.
lt's 1 ,500 degrees, enough to melt the surface rocks and set off dozens of earthquakes.
Lava jets burst from 1 00 fissures all over the park.
The eruption passes the point of no return.
The scale of the coming blast defies comprehension.
The eruption equals 1 ,000 Hiroshima atom bombs every second 1 ,000 times the power of Mount St.
Helens, ejecting 240 cubic miles of ash and red-hot lava, 1 0 times more than the volume of water in Long lsland Sound.
Within hours, the death zone covers a 600 mile radius from Yellowstone.
ln here, 9 of every 1 0 people die.
And that's just the start.
All aircraft are grounded as ash blankets 3/4 of the country.
Across the continent, volcanic dust causes long-term and deadly lung damage.
lt's going to basically envelope the entire planet because that ash is going to circle the planet with the jet stream.
lt's going to affect everything that we do on the planet.
So this is as cataclysmic an event as they come.
ln terms of global geophysical events, this is the big one.
Jackson : With an estimated death toll of more than 1 00 million, it could be the end of America.
A Yellowstone super volcano has erupted, on average, every 600,000 years.
The last one was 640,000 years ago and counting.
Our planet is a hostile place, threatened by arkstorms, earthquakes, megatsunami, asteroid impacts, and a super volcano.
For the scientists who study them, each is a credible real threat.
But unlike the Mayans, they can't say exactly when the world will end.
We could be fine for years, even millennia.
But for now, you know the facts.
So ask yourself -- are you prepared?