John Barnes. My memory of the plot is rather different, however; the “Mother” was the after-effect of a UN strike on some rogue-nation/terrorist underwater missile silo bank up in the arctic circle. They used something like newfangled antimatter warheads or very clean nukes, ironically to avoid environmental impact.
Problem was, the strike freed up the millions of tons of methane trapped in ice crystals and such at the seafloor up that away, and it all burped up into the atmosphere. Short-term greenhouse boost; since the oceans act as a giant heat dump, and hurricanes arise from the earth’s way of equalizing that out, the following hurricane season created Mama Storm.
IIRC, the Big Mama never exhausted itself naturally; a crash-course space program ended up killing it by skipping discs of comet ice over low orbit in patterns that blocked sunlight over big swaths of its path–taking away the ocean heat the storm needed to keep rolling on.
Barring such a massive never-ending storm system, though, I would think the worst natural disaster is a sizable tidal surge, for anyone on a coastal area. More immediately, having grown up in Wisconsin, tornadoes don’t worry me so much. I’d really very much prefer the New Madrid fault to not do anything major for quite awhile.
(AWW, CRAP! i just typed twice this all out, and then my 'puter crashed. oh well. here we go again!)
ohh, now i remeber that book! i think i must’ve spliced in another story about a giant hurricane. but i was so sure that it was a weather control device…
Mother of Storms was the one with the mindjacks and all the sex shows, right?
and the plot about changing the world from it’s rot with a special facet of the mind interface system?
and, especially, the really neat linear accelrator spacelaunch system the one cybernetic intellect cooked up?
spacelaunch system:
the main spaceship started acting as a factory for zero-gee stuff. earth sent resources out as packages lined with magnetics, and the spaceship sent product back as rings of the same mass as the packages, with magnetics lining the inside of the rings. the rings accelerated the packages out and themselves in.
to stop, the system just started launching waste mass forward at relatavistic speeds, recalling the whole stack of rings.
that system would make a great method of getting long distances away. it would accelerate packages to relatavistic speeds and…
hmm. i should start that neato system it’s own thread.
anyway, i’ve had that neat system bouncing around in my head for ages, and now i know where i picked it up! thanks, Drastic!
[sub]IMHO or GD, IMHO or GD…
IMHO.
GD people scare me.[/sub]
Oh, i just noticed that last bit to your post.
You do know that New Madrid is 20 years overdue for a 7.0+ quake, right? And that it’s about time for a really major discharge from it… As in, flatten cities out past KC(where I live). Though i might’ve gotten some of those numbers wrong…
Just making your day a little brighter!
Maybe this should be in a new thread in GQ, but what the hell. I wonder about those fault lines that don’t run along the edge of a tectonic plate, like New Madrid. Since plates aren’t moving there, what caused the fault?
Scientific American a few months back mentioned the possibility of a giant undeersea landslide along the Atlantic U.S. continental shelf. It was predicted that this would raise an enourmous tsunami over much of the east coast, with similar effects along the coasts of Europe and Africa.
For commonly occuring natural disasters, typhoons/hurricanes seem to cause the most damage, especially in crowded, low-lying areas like Bangladesh. Personally, though, earthquakes are what make me wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
And Kyla, there was a discussion of no-fault earthquakes a few weeks back in this GQ thread. Basically, nobody knows why they happen.
tsunami’s? earthquake’s? PFFT !..strapping a piece of buttered toast to a cats back (butter side up) and dropping it, now there you have the potential for something truely devasating.
that’s not devastating, it just opens a rift in reality after thirty feet of fall distance.
hmmmm…
there should be a way to tap the power of that arraigement…
maybe, if you set the cat and the toast on opposite sides of a large wheel, it could be used as a weapon. as in, both sides want to pivot down to face down, it will accellerate continuously. so, perhaps a space based system of relatavistic-speed kittycannons!
or, you could tap the rift…
maybe, drop a multitude of kitty-toast arraingements and test each rift for properties and it’s target.
it could be kitty-based transport! or, perhaps, a tap for unlimited energy if a rift opens into the heart of a sun!
Also, meteorite impacts are not beyond our experience. There were two major ones last century (Siberia in 1908 and one in the Amazon basin in the 1930s). Both almost certainly killed people; the latter may have wiped out whole tribes. There have been many deaths from impacts over the centuries; read “Rain of Iron and Ice” to get an idea.