There is no denying that the shadow of the atom bomb has been across all our lives.
Vsauce, it is good to see you. Here just let me take this off real quick...gotta protect yourself from the UV rays.
…it’s Jake, remember, we were together in Could You Survive
a Fallout. No worries, it’s fine, I’ll put a link to that video down in the description.
Huh, here I am talking like YouTube, let alone the internet is still a thing. But at least
we survived the fallout...so we could live in this. You know what’s happening out there
right? Ah, don't worry I'll fill you in. They say war is hell, but that doesn’t mean the
aftermath is any better. I need a can opener. Do you have a can opener? Lets get a can opener!
Now, we know the effects of nuclear fallout but let’s consider something, which won’t
be hard given what we’ve been through: a relatively small nuclear war breaks out between
two large countries, 100 nukes are dropped, less than 1% that exist…20 million people
would immediately die. BOOM - gone. And that sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme
of things 20 million deaths, or 20 Megadeaths, is only .3% of Earth’s population.
But something worse happens. And it isn’t the bombs, it isn’t the fallout, it’s
what’s left for the over 99% of the population that survives…what we are experiencing right
now…Nuclear Winter.
Nuclear Winter is a fairly recent term, having been coined about 34 years ago. In the early
1980s, a team of scientists were assembled: Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan.
Together they wrote the scientific paper “Global Atmospheric Consequences of Nuclear War”.
And they discovered that nuclear war might be devastating, but the shadow it casts is
much larger, much more suffocating.
Imagine entire cities in flames, hundred of thousands of buildings, factories, parks and
forests burning. All that smoke is heated by the sun, lofted into the upper stratosphere,
and the particles would blanket the Earth. I’d love to give you an uplifting fact right
now, some ray of sunshine, but unfortunately all that soot would block enough sunlight
that skies would be overcast, everywhere, for a long time. And that’s just the start.
Obviously, a lot of this research was based on climate models because the only way to
test this theory in the real world would involve actually creating a Nuclear Winter and we
know how well that turned out…but there have been events in the past that were used
to help determine what would happen. And one of them was 140,000,000 miles away.
In 1971, the U.S. Mariner 9 spacecraft, the first vehicle to orbit another planet, arrived
at Mars to find it completely covered in a global dust storm. What scientists discovered
was the dust had been brought high into the atmosphere, absorbing the sunlight and preventing
a lot of it from hitting the surface. This brought the surface temperature down tens
of degrees (put in F).
But that happened far away on a completely different planet, so it is hard to try and
imagine temperatures dropping so drastically here because of something as small as dust
blocking out sunlight. Except we don’t have to imagine, nor did researchers, because it
had happened before …over 200 years ago.
The Tambora volcano erupted in 1815 in Indonesia. That eruption blotted out the sun and produced
global cooling of about 0.5 degree C for a year. Half a degree seems pretty insignificant…but
it wasn’t. 1816 was called the “The Year without a Summer” or “Eighteen Hundred
and Froze to Death.” In New England, frosts happened every month killing the crops, and
this was during the summer. The price of grain shot up, and with that farmers tried selling
all of their livestock since they could no longer feed them, and a mass migration began
to the Midwest of America to flee the effects of the temperature change. In Europe the stock
market collapsed and widespread famine occurred.
Using that information, they were able to conclude what would happen but that study
was done at the height of the Cold War when a full on global Nuclear War was much more
of a threat. Remember when I asked you to consider an attack with 100 nukes? Well that
would be a lot more likely and a lot more relevant to our current situation so, in 2009,
researchers used the original report as a framework and estimated the effects of a war
that used 100 nukes the size of Hiroshima’s. Even with that relatively small number, it
would still be globally devastating and it all starts with tiny particles.
At least 5 Teragrams, about 11 billion pounds, of smoke would be produced because of the
fires started by the bombs. Within two days those tiny particles would rise 7.5 miles
into our Troposphere. The sun would heat them up and they would continue to rise. After
49 days the smoke would reach a height of 31 miles and fill the Stratosphere. By this
point, the soot would cover the majority of the planet, blocking sunlight and making the
skies overcast.
Unfortunately, precipitation never reaches the stratosphere so the particles wouldn’t
be washed away. And speaking of precipitation, there would be a 10% decrease of it worldwide
since the lack of sun would cause problems with evaporation and the natural water cycle.
Taking what we learned from Mars and from the Tambora volcano, the sunlight being blocked
would drop global temperatures by 1.25 degrees C. The cold and lack of sunlight would obviously
be bad for agriculture, with crops and farm animals dying off. But something else would
also be devastating to that…ultraviolet radiation.
Even though the surface of the Earth would be colder, the black smoke in the stratosphere
would absorb the sunlight, heating it up by more than 50 degrees C. Because of that, nitrogen
oxides would be lofted further up, destroying our ozone. Over 17 months we’d go from this,
to this.
Not only would the UV radiation be incredibly damaging to plant life but it is incredibly
damaging to us. I’m not wearing this many layers and covering my skin just for fun.
It would take as little as 6 minutes for me to get severely burned outside because of
exposure. Which is why I need a can opener…I mean, not because of the sunburns but because
there are no crops, there are no fresh foods. Only cans. There is enough grain stored to
feed the planet’s population for 2 months. After that…1 billion people could starve
to death. 1 billion. Over 13% of everyone alive just…
This reminds me of poet T.S Eliot’s The Hollow Men, “This is the way the world ends,
not with a bang but a whimper.”
After 10 years the cloud would be lifted, the soot would have finally fallen from above
and temperatures would start to rise. And what would be left of us? You could call it
the end of the world. You could say all hope is lost. Or you could say something else…
Where we stand is not destroyed, we are not in ruins but in something waiting to be built.
Waiting to begin again. From these ashes we can rise and create beauty. The crumbling
walls are not a representation of our failures but a reminder of the lessons we have learned.
So we continue on. Not because we want to but because we have to. In the words of Carl
Sagan: “A new consciousness is developing which
sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed.
One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth
finite and lonely. We are one planet.” And, as always, thanks for watching.