So the world is supposed to end tomorrow. I just got some new information that, supposedly, the rapture will occur at 6 PM. Not just 6 PM EST, or 6 PM UTC, or 6 PM GMT, but 6 PM EVERYWHERE. Apparently, the first place it becomes 6 PM in the world will experience an earthquake that will ripple around the world. I can only assume that the 6 PM mark isn’t precise, because of fluctuations in the density of the earth and inconsistencies in time zones, not to mention that an entire time zone wouldn’t experience it at the same time if it was moving westward. But let me address this further.
The smallest reasonable time zone in the US is in Oregon. It spans a distance of 290 miles. In order for an earthquake to travel that distance in an hour, it would need be going 290 miles and hour (how simple is that?). Well, as it turns out, generally seismic waves travel about 3 to 4 miles a second. That would mean that even at an unreasonably slow speed of 1 mile a second, the earthquake would only take about 5 minutes to travel from one time zone to the next.
Lets now take it from a different perspective. The largest time zone in the US goes from the eastern most point, in Maine, across Canada and stops in the Michigan peninsula. We’ll generously call this 1130 miles. Again, being generous, we’ll give the earthquake an unreasonably slow speed of 1 mile a second. With this new data, that means the earthquake would cross this immensely large time zone in about 18 minutes. Not quite the proverbial hour, is it?
In reality, an earthquake with enough seismic force to travel around the earth would do so in about 7 hours. This is nowhere close to 24. It’s not even a third of that time.
So in conclusion, we can not only debunk these rapture warnings because they are crazy, but also with simple math an statistics.
