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The Earth Has a Future

¹ University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, Green Bay, Wisconsin 54311-7001, USA

An alternative to visualizing geologic time by looking into the past is to look into the future. Even geologically short future time scales completely outstrip our ability to forecast changes in human society, whereas most geologic changes in the same time will be modest. Many events that are infrequent on a human time scale, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, become commonplace on longer time scales, and events that have not occurred in recorded history, such as major ice ages, large meteor impacts, giant pyroclastic eruptions, or collapses of Hawaiian shield volcanoes, become almost inevitable in a million years.

Keywords: geologic time • process rates • geomorphology • tectonics • environmental geology