This past Friday brought us the last weekend of January 2010, and the brightest, biggest full moon we’ll see this New Year. The perigee of the Moon (the point when the Moon is the closest distance to Earth in its elliptical trip around our planet each month) just happened to coincide with a full moon this month, which means since it’s also been clear, crisp, and freezing cold, it was perfect viewing of the winter landscape by the light of a full, glorious Moon for anyone crazy enough to stand out in the freezing night air for more than a few minutes. According to www.spaceweather.com, the conditions of Friday night gave us a 14% wider view and about 30% brighter appearance than any other full moon this year.
This really cool website, besides having fantastic side-by-side comparison photos of what we see when the moon is at apogee versus at perigee, also has a somewhat sobering chart listing the “potentially hazardous” Earth-asteroid encounters for each month. There’s a chart giving the size of each asteroid, its scientific name (usually a combination of numbers and letters, nothing as sexy as “Asteroid Wolf-Biederman” or “The Coolidge Comet”), how close it came to Earth, and the date of its closest approach to Earth.
You know, there are so many disaster movies and post-apocalyptic books that deal with asteroids hitting the Earth that I never thought much about the quite possible scenario of a large, dense asteroid hitting our Moon. After all, asteroids hit the moon fairly often. As a matter of fact, all those dimples and pits and “Seas” on the Moon’s face are referred to as “impact craters.” Most of the time, all of those space rocks hitting the Moon don’t make much difference, except occasionally to add a few more beauty marks to her face. Cue Susan Beth Pfeffer’s young adult novel, Life As We Knew It.
Without a doubt, one of the best young adult novels I read in the last year, Pfeffer’s book Life As We Knew It gives a fresh perspective to an old theme. Although the novel deals with “what-if” scenarios and earth and space science, the stories read much more like real, immediate survival stories than they do science-fiction. Indeed, Life As We Knew It gives the reader the credible, first-person account of Miranda, a junior in high school in small-town, northeastern Pennsylvania, whose journal entries reflect the normal worries of an American teenage girl – math tests, her stepmom’s announcement of a baby on the way and whether or not she’ll get asked to the prom. Miranda complains to her journal how all of her teachers are making a big deal about a large asteroid that will collide with the Moon in mid-May: all of her homework assignments, from history to French class, deal with the 1969 Moon Landing or “la lune.”
No one expects the asteroid to be anything except interesting to watch in the spring night sky. However, not even the scientists predicted that this asteroid, denser than any other that has collided with our Moon, would have far-reaching, life-changing consequences, the kind that life on Earth hasn’t seen since the last Ice Age or the great mass extinctions of the dinosaurs. This asteroid knocks the moon off-kilter, pushing it closer to Earth. The climactic changes are both immediate and ongoing, as tides abruptly shift, causing huge tsunamis, killing millions along the seaboards, wiping out entire cities, states, even countries. Next come shifting tectonic plates, and later, newly active volcanoes, as the Earth’s crust and magma respond in frightening ways to the changes in the magnetic pull between the Moon and the Earth.
When the asteroid firsts knocks the Moon closer to Earth, Miranda is scared and sad like everyone else, but she thinks her mother’s immediate plans to start stockpiling canned food, batteries, gas lanterns, firewood, bottled water, even tampons, is a little extreme. Surely, the scientists, the government, the people in charge will get things back on track soon, won’t they? They’ll have to come up with plans to take care of people, right?
Once you pick up this exciting novel, you’ll find yourself right there with Miranda, her resourceful mother, her brothers, their neighbors and friends, and the world as we knew it, as it changes right in front of their eyes. And you’ll find yourself turning pages late into the night, then creeping out into the kitchen to check on how many cans of peaches and chicken noodle soup you have in your cupboard.
“Deep Impact” or “Armageddon”? Email Hobo your survival tips at frommyshelf@epix.net. Hobo says there’s even a cat in the book, and his family made sure to store up lots of cat food, so it wasn’t so scary for him. The cat’s name is “Horton”, which is close enough to “Hobo” to make him extra-cool. Missing real victuals? Look through Hobo’s stockpiled articles at his blog, http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com.
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