Gather ’round, my friends. This is gonna be a rough one. 2012. I’m going to tackle this one timeline-style.
3m. Physicists in India discover that increased Solar activity is leading to lots more neutrinos being detected on Earth. Only 3 minutes in and already we need a science lesson! Neutrinos are weakly interacting particles. It’s thought that they don’t interact electromagnetically at all, but have a tiny, tiny mass. So tiny that we can only place limits on it. The overwhelming majority of neutrinos that reach the Earth come from the Sun. And there are LOTS of them. About 65 Billion neutrinos per second pass through a square centimeter of whatever is facing the Sun. You, for example. It’s wicked hard to get a neutrino to interact with anything, so these neutrinos zip right through you and usually the entire Earth on their way to infinity.
Neutrinos are a byproduct of fusion. When 4 protons fuse to become one helium nucleus, 2 protons must become neutrons and a neutrino is produced by each. This is incredible to consider. Think about the number of fusion reactions that must occur in the Sun. It takes 32.5 Billion reactions just to produce the neutrinos that pass through your thumbnail every second! Yes, increased solar activity leads to more neutrinos. Ok, back to the movie.
4m30s. “It looks like the neutrinos coming from the Sun have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the Earth’s core. They certainly act like microwaves.” Wow, okay. Let’s start with “mutating into a new… particle.” These guys are supposed to be physicists, so they should know: particles don’t mutate, they decay. Neutrinos don’t decay though–they’re about as far down the chain as you can go. So… no. Next: “…heating up the Earth’s core.” As discussed above, neutrinos have tiny, tiny mass, which means tiny, tiny ability to affect anything. The Earth’s core… well, we discussed that already. “…act like microwaves.” Microwaves are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, a.k.a. light; longer wavelength than infrared, shorter than what we typically consider to be radio. Microwave ovens heat food by emitting microwaves that cause polarized molecules to rotate, producing thermal energy. Lots of molecules are polarized, but the most common one in food is water, so foods with higher water content heat very well in a microwave oven. Metal that is bombarded with microwaves will act as an antenna, and the microwaves will induce an electric current in the metal. Sharp points of the metal can produce arcing, which is why you’ll see sparks if you leave a fork in the microwave. The Earth’s core is iron (a metal), but I don’t think the movie is implying that the core is acting like a fork in a giant microwave. I think they’re implying that the core is acting like water in a microwave. Therefore, no.
Aside: “This water tank goes down another 6,000 feet,” may be the dumbest throw-away line in any movie ever. They’re already 11,000 ft down in a mine. The deepest mine in the world, the TauTona Mine in South Africa, is only a bit deeper than that at 12,800 feet. Imagine going to the deepest mine in the world. Now imagine drilling down another 4200 feet. Now imagine building a giant tank to occupy that entire volume plus another 1800 feet above you, then filling the tank with clean water. In the movie, the water is boiling, thus demonstrating that the core is heating up. The Earth’s continental crust is 20-30 miles thick, so 17,000 feet (about 3 miles) is barely scratching the surface. Then below that is a couple thousand miles of mantle before you get to the core. The temperature at the crust/mantle interface is already more than hot enough to boil water on its own. Also, and I’m not an expert on fluid dynamics, what’s happening at the bottom of a 6,000 foot deep tank if the surface is boiling? And what’s this tank for? Neutrino detection? Or monitoring the temperature of the core? Argh! <Deep breath.> Ok, let’s move on.
12m. The first mention of the 2012 Mayan apocalypse prediction. Might as well tackle this one here. There are a lot of movies about the world ending in 2012, with many possible causes, as we’ll see. This one involves the Mayan calendar. The Maya use a calendar called the long count calendar, which divides time into days, units of 20 days called uinal, 18 uinals (360 days) = 1 tun, 20 tun = 1 k’atun, and 20 k’atun = 1 b’ak’tun. The turning of a b’ak’tun is a time of great celebration for the Mayan people. The Mayan calendar may be further divided into cycles of 13 b’ak’tuns, at which point the calendar resets and a new age of the world begins. Modern scholars put this date as December 21, 2012. One Mayanist scholar wrote that the end of a great cycle would mean the literal end of the world, rather than a symbolic and celebratory event as most scholars think. And a new industry of bilking suckers out of their money was born!
26m. The core continues to heat and, “…the Earth’s crust is destabilizing.” Why is it that just the core gets heated? The “mutated neutrinos” have to pass through the atmosphere, right? Wouldn’t they have heated that up first? Seems like that would be of more immediate concern.
31m. “Why don’t you download my blog?” Do I find that on the online?
32m. According to the movie, the Mayans predicted that there would be an alignment of the planets with the Galactic Center, and this only occurs once every 640,000 years. We’ll get to this planetary alignment nonsense in a later post since the Mayans said nothing about that. The only thing the Mayans predicted was that the a b’ak’tun would end, which happens every 5125 years or so. The film then implies that the dinosaurs went extinct 640,000 years ago which is only off by more than 2 orders of magnitude, but who’s counting?
32m30s. At this point, the film invokes the long disproved “Earth Crust Displacement” theory of Charles Hapgood, an historian with no background in geology, who developed the theory while examining old maps. I’m not going to go into the details on this one, but you can find a good writeup here. His theory didn’t have anything to do with Galactic/planetary alignment either.
44m. Faux Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California. That is all.
47m30s. Our hero drives through a building while it is collapsing.
50m30s. Then, while flying through a huge fault as it’s opening up, they fly under a subway train. Which explodes violently, presumably because the L.A. subway is fueled by tetrazene.
52m. Huge chunks of the California coast slide gracefully into the water. Look, even the nutjob Charly Hapgood thought this stuff took centuries.
1h4m. Our heroes out-drive/fly a pyroclastic flow from Yellowstone blowing its top. In an RV and a twin engine plane that can’t go more than a couple hundred knots. Pyroclastic flows can travel many hundreds of miles per hour.
1h17m. The same flying-into-a-collapsing-chasm thing happens only with a giant 6-engine Russian jet.
1h40m. So the governments of the world have been building giant ships underground in China to save some subset of life on Earth. Huge boats for holding hundreds of thousands of people and withstand giant tidal waves, piercing into glaciers, basically the end of the world. Built ’em in 3 years. For comparison, it takes more than 7 years to build an aircraft carrier.
2h27m. Eventually the whole Earth floods except for Africa, which has risen up several thousand feet. Yes, the whole continent. With pretty much the same coastline. And our heroes know this because satellites are still functioning. Time for one last batch of science, still warm from the heating of the Earth’s core. Increased solar activity doesn’t just produce more neutrinos. It also produces more charged particle emission (the Solar wind). This is very bad for lots of things, but especially satellites. The wimpy electrical systems on satellites can get knocked out by typical high solar activity. If we’re talking Earth-core-melting activity, you’d think there’d be pretty much no satellites left. Increased solar activity can also wreak havoc on the Earth’s power grid, so maybe there would’ve been some other symptoms of this impending mass extinction prior to the earthquakes. Something more than a couple of physicists with the world’s largest water tank would notice. Ah well, at least the cute kids and the dog survived.