very simple

The constant turmoil keeps the plates from fusing into a single immobile plate. Assuming things continue much as at present, the Atlantic Ocean will expand until eventually it is much bigger than the Pacific. Much of California will float off and become a kind of Madagascar of the Pacific. Africa will push northward into Europe, squeezing the Mediterranean out of existence and thrusting up a chain of mountains of Himalayan majesty running from Paris to Calcutta. Australia will colonize the islands to is north and connect by some isthmian umbilicus to Asia

And then there’s this little nugget:

There are many surface features that tectonics can’t explain….Australia, meanwhile, has been tilting and sinking. Over the past 100 million years as it has drifted north toward Asia, its leading edge has sunk by some six hundred feet. It appears that Indonesia is very slowly drowning, and dragging Australia down with it.

The confluence of my reading materials and life circumstances has happened to me before. When I went backpacking through Europe between college and law school, I spent the summer reading V. by Thomas Pynchon (it’s a really dense book). One of my favorite things to do was to schedule my museum viewing during the ridiculously long siestas when everything but the museums were closed during the summer, so I would also take my book and find a seat to read for a few hours, when there was nothing else to do. Anyway, I ended up sitting in the Uffizi in Florence, in front of the Birth of Venus by Botticelli, when I ended up reading the chapter where they attempt to actually steal the Birth of Venus out of the Uffizi. It was somewhat surreal.

Let’s just hope that this is all some really big coincidence, because I just finished reading the chapter on the possibilities of an asteroid striking the earth and wiping out all of civilization.