It’s been 12 months since we counted down the last minutes of 2019 and joyfully shouted ‘Happy New Year’. We were so blissfully unaware of what was to come in the coming days.
For those who have lost their livelihood, their health, or most tragic of all, their loved ones, there is no silver lining that could make up for the overwhelming grief caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Or the damage caused by this year’s major forest fires and hurricanes.
Some of us have had a little more luck. Aside from inconveniences like the need to ration toilet paper or put on pants for your next Zoom meeting, 2020 was more weird than sad. After all, it really could have been worse.
How much worse? Well, we can be grateful …
Yellowstone’s super volcano didn’t explode
About 640,000 years ago, more than a thousand cubic kilometers (about 240 cubic miles) of rock, soil, and trees were thrown high into the air when a bubble of magma and hot gases blew wide open a continent.
That same molten rock caldera, now known as the Yellowstone caldera in North America, is technically too late for a repeat occurrence.
Now there is a lot ‘technical’ in that word. Technically the last book in the Game of Thrones series is too late. But the timing of previous releases is just not a reliable indication of when to expect a sequel.
Still, every shake and shock of the national park’s scenery has left people wondering if Another Big One is nearby.
Last June, a series of a dozen earthquakes saw the region shake in quick succession. And just in October, the regular ticking sound of the geyser known as Old Faithful ceased to be so faithful and fell suspiciously silent.
No one would have been surprised if Yellowstone had chosen to explode in 2020.
None but most of the world’s volcanologists. Research suggests that the Yellowstone supervolcano was much more active in the distant past, and we need to adjust our expectations about when it might blow.
Whenever that year is, 2020 was not.
An asteroid did not hit the Earth
All eyes were on a nugget of mineral called 2018VP1 earlier this year, which had a 1 in 240 chance of impacting the Earth on the day of the US election.
At barely 2 meters (about 7 feet) wide, 2018VP1 falls well behind the 140 meters (460 feet) NASA sets as a bare minimum for rocks we really need to worry about. It’s a pebble compared to the 10-kilometer behemoth that wiped out the dinosaurs, and even it hit the planet in the worst possible way.
Still, any fast-moving rock that comes within 3,000 miles of the planet is good reason to consider the risks we face from dangerous asteroids near Earth.
On Nov. 13 – no less than a Friday – the Asteroid Terrestrial impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii warned sky watchers of the passing of a rock the size of a small house.
Just 400 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, the sighting set a new record for an asteroid’s closest pass. Worse, since it was obscured by the sun’s blinding glare, we had no idea it existed until hours after it was over.
It’s not that we should have been too concerned if it got hit. The rock was not much bigger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that famously exploded over Russia in 2013.
But the close shave indicates that under the right circumstances, we could easily be blinded by an unexpected cosmic sniper. And if we were blown back into the Stone Age by an asteroid, 2020 would have made sense, right?
Needless to say, no asteroids of any concern hit Earth this year. Yes!
We were not roasted alive by solar radiation
Betelgeuse is a red giant star more than 600 light-years away that we all wish would just hurry up and die because the resulting light show would be fantastic.
Earlier this year, everyone got a little excited when the star darkened from what we all thought was an evocative wink. It happened again in August. Were those the first notes of his swan song?
No. In at least one instance, it was likely a penetrating veil of dust – about as exciting as a cloud passing the sun on a cold winter’s day.
Then we found out that Betelgeuse was probably a lot younger than she first looked, so wouldn’t go supernova for a long time, and we all turned our attention to other gloomy topics. If Betelgeuse had exploded, it would still be too far away to do us much harm.
But if the star were a lot closer – such as only 65 light-years away – its death could strip our planet of its ozone and expose us.
Indeed, we are more concerned about the frequent bursts of fast-moving charged particles from our own sun. Fortunately, we have a nice magnetic shield that protects us … that is still firmly in place, right?
This year happens to mark the beginning of the star’s 25th solar cycle. Hip hooray! Right now we are at rock bottom in his mood swings, and that’s nothing special. We see this kind of silence every 11 years.
Aliens never invaded
Remember when our solar system was visited by a ridiculously fast asteroid in 2017?
We still have to triple check our spelling of ‘Oumuamua, but since it was the first confirmed visitor from outside our solar system, it didn’t take long for the word’ aliens’ to be mentioned. Throw in the fact that it’s a weird shape and a reddish color, and it’s a History Channel documentary in the making.
So to our absolute and utter surprise, it turned out that they were not aliens. Go figure.
No worries; late last year, we had our second confirmed interstellar visitor in the form of a comet called 2I / Borisov, so we had hope again.
Astronomers have been watching it closely until 2020 and we learned a lot about the object. It’s also a good thing. Given the chaos Earth has endured this year, our planet would be ripe for an alien takeover. They would no doubt even bring their own supply of masks.
Armies of the undead have never risen from the grave
It is rare for archaeologists to find intact Egyptian tombs with sealed sarcophagi that have remained untouched for centuries, let alone millennia. But when they do, that’s cause for excitement.
The secrets they hold can show us not only what our ancestors looked like, but also what they sounded like, how they lived, and how they died.
But this is 2020. So when the sealed coffins kept coming this year, we were sure it would end like that; in a wave of parched corpses waving their bandages angrily as they rage through the streets, right?
With 2020 officially over, we think we can safely admit that hordes of the undead are unlikely to be on the way, and any secrets we find in Egyptian tombs will ultimately benefit humanity.
However, let’s not open graves in January. To be sure.