Does the world REALLY need 10 ways to end?

Ten Ways the World Will End is a what if show that appears to posit several potential catastrophes that could lead to a final global calamity. Such collections aren’t new - the sf collection Armageddons offers many potential disasters, for example, and I have many others in my own personal library.

Discovery Channel Asia’s Ten Ways the World Will End seems to follow last year’s BBC-National Geographic Channel production of End Day, which came up with four basic ways the Earth could die - from a meteorite to a black hole - with fantastic aerial views. Disclaimer: LiveScience.com, a sister publication to my won employer SPACE.com, ran their own Top 10 Ways to Destroy the Earth last year.

Ten Ways, however, may reach for more fanciful endtimes with robot uprisings, the end-all World War 3 and an Earth spinning wildly off its axis. Remote at best and wildly speculative at worst for the typically factual Discovery Channel, Ten Ways seems like yet another ploy to grab viewers hooked on the apocalyptic wave that seems to have dominated television this year. That said, I’ll probably watch it.

Photographer Arnold Genthe’s famous image of residents watching San Francisco aflame after the 1906 quake. Click to enlarge.

Now I’m from California relatively near the City, and no stranger to earthquakes – the 1989 Loma Prieta of which was the strongest I was in, but at 6.9 in magnitude, it was 16 times weaker than the 1906 temblor that rocked San Francisco – and they are awesome in their power. Not that I revel in their occurrence, I just find it amazing that with all of our technology and doodads, we still can’t match our planet’s tectonic slips.

San Francisco held a special memorial service today at 5:12 a.m. Pacific Time, when the 1906 quake struck, sounding sirens and remembering the city.

Wife and I watched National Geographic’s The Great Quake Sunday, a two-hour docu-drama about the century-old temblor, and it was a quite good chunk of infotainment. There’s a tie-in with this month’s NatGeo magazine – which I bought because I’m a disaster chump.

National Geographic’s The Great Quake will re-air on Thursday at 9 p.m. EDT.

I told wife today that we really have to get our “Disaster Pack” together in case of another emergency. Basically, it’s just a couple of backpacks with canned food, water, batteries, etcetera, stuff you’d need in case of an emergency. Both wife and I were here in New York during the 9/11 attacks, got stuck in Queens during the Feb. 2003 Blizzard, and stuck again in Queens during the August 2003 Blackout.

None of those would really have required us to abandon home and head out for ourselves, but an emergency pack would be useful to have, I think. If you’re building your own pack and have pets, don’t forget to stock vittles for your dog or cat. They need food too, you know.

But that’s all aside from the task at hand, which is the 1906 quake. If you missed it Sunday, you can catch The Great Quake again on Thursday at 9 p.m. EDT (Check your local listings, really).

The Reventador volcano’s weird plume. Credit: Armando Alvarez Sanchez, Cruz Roja Ecuatoriana via LiveScience.

Studies of the 2002 eruption of South America’s Reventador volcano near Quito, Ecuador have found that its ash plume fell much faster than expected. Fallout from the heavy ash – which differed from the regular, snow-like ash fall from most volcanoes and the destructive pyroclastic flow that accompanies large eruptions like Pompeii – apparently swept several small bridges away and destroyed an empty pipeline according to reports.

You can read all about it at LiveScience here.

Volcanoes are big this year – SciFi Channel’s Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York not withstanding.

Credit: CDC.

For those of you distracted by the war in Iraq, the President’s falling approval ratings of the Academy Awards, the Avian Bird Flu is steadily spreading across Europe, Asia and Africa and it’s only a matter of time before it reaches the Americas, scientists say.

According to an article in today’s New York Times, scientists are increasingly find it difficult to track and understand the spread of  the A(H5N1) virus – aka Bird Flu – as birds migrate. While outbreaks have been confined to Africa, Europe and Asia to date, some wading birds are known to migrate to North America and, if infected, could deliver the virus to Canada and the U.S., the Times says.

Bird flu doesn’t readily infect or spread among humans, though scientists are concerned it could acquire that capability and touch of a global human pandemic. There is no commercially available vaccine for the virus either, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), though research into one has been underway since April 2005, with clinical trials currently being performed.

CDC officials say that A(H5N1) has caused the largest amount of detected cases of severe disease and death in humans than all other avian influenza viruses to cross the species barrier. Hence, bird researchers and epidemiologists are working double time to track the disease, identify hotspots – migration hotspots where uninfected birds can contract the flu repeatedly – and rectify the situation.

The trick is that it’s not just wild bird migrations that allow the disease to spread. An outbreak in Croatia was likely caused by fertilizer made by humans from the manure of infected poultry, which was then used to fertilize fish ponds - A(H5N1) can exist in water for weeks – that are frequent stopping points for migrating birds, the Times says.