Captain Trips, is that you?

So the first case of a highly drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis hit the United States the other day. Or at least it was announced for the first time the other day. It actually was discovered a bunch of months back when a 19-year-old visiting student from Peru was diagnosed with it in Florida.

The strain, called XXDR, is highly-contagious, aggressive and almost completely resistant to the standard antibiotic treatments. It's so rare that only a handful of cases have been identified world-wide thus far. I guess we've been pretty luck to this point with containing the spread of this particular strain of a disease that still kills about 2 million people every year.  And that's the old strain.  You know, the one that can actually be treated with antibiotics.  

Great.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. Not terror attacks, financial collapse or the new Nic Cage movie.  But good old Mother Nature deciding that there are two many humans on the planet and she needs to do something about it.  Like re-introducing an old enemy who has gone back to school and learned a few new tricks.

I like to keep optimistic and I have a lot of confidence in the medical community to fight fire with fire when it comes to tackling these infectious diseases, viruses and bacterium.  But if it happens again it won't be the first time that mankind gets it's collective ass kicked by something so small that it can't be seen without a microscope.

And it probably won't be the last time, either.  If we are lucky.

So, um, Happy Tuesday y'all.

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. This is how it begins in those sci-fi flicks, anyway.

It Happened Before

It WILL happen again. It's just a matter of when. - Narrator (Chuck Heston), Armageddon

I don't think it's a stretch to say that The Day After Tomorrow might be one of the most ridiculous films ever made.  From a scientific viewpoint, I mean.  In a nutshell, the film is about a massive Ice Age that is brought on by global warming not over a period of centuries or millenia, but over a period of months or days.  The film was greeted with catcalls from those who think they know better.  Massive climate change just doesn't happen that way.

Except, ya know, maybe it does.

Turns out that the last mini-Ice Age called "The Big Freeze" or the Younger Dryas which occurred around 13,000 years ago may have gone from zero to freeze in a period as small as two months.  A bunch of Canadian scientists recently have completed some research in which they have determined that this particular mini-Ice Age was caused by switching off the North Atlantic circulation due to a large infusion of cold, fresh water into the Atlantic. 

This was caused by an ancient lake in Central Canada called Lake Agassiz which grew too fast and broke over it's banks into the Great Lake System and the St. Lawrence River basin.  All of that fresh water screwed up the circulation in the North Atlantic.  Warm water from the tropics that kept temperatures moderate in North America and Europe was suddenly mixed with cold water from Lake Agassiz and it flummoxed our entire weather pattern.  For 1,300 years or so.  And yes...flummoxed is a very scientific word. 

Why did Lake Agassiz, which was formed by melting Canadian glaciers, suddenly overflow it's banks?  Was it rapid global warming of the natural variety or was it caused by the explosion of a comet or meteor in the atmosphere somewhere above Central Canada?  These are questions that are being argued by minds much smarter than mine.  All I know is that it probably won't happen again.  Right?

Er, wrong.

You see, there is this massive ice shelf that covers Greenland.  Huge amounts of fresh water in glacial form that covers the entire island.  And it's melting.  At historic rates.  And it appears to be melting faster every year.  What if there is a sudden tipping point to the fresh water meltage rate that is currently pouring into the North Atlantic from Greenland?  What if the balance of the North Atlantic tropical circulation is about to break?  It would mean that the next Ice Age could be just around the corner.  It could mean that huge swaths of North America and Europe could be plunged into a deep winter that could last for a millennium. 

So...how you feeling today?

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. Flummoxed is indeed a scientific term.