Looking for a screenplay topic where a lot of small, seemingly meaningless science events suddenly cascade into a doomsday scenario (along the lines of Deep Impact or Independence Day)?
How about “The Leap Second” talking about this little known international body, the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS), whose job it is to monitor the miniscule slowdown in the Earth’s rotation due to tidal breaking (and other forces) and to announce leap seconds, which correct for time between the imprecise rotation of the Earth and far more precise atomic clocks.
You see, an amateur would notice that there was no leap second in June and that there will not be one in 6 days (they normally come at the end of June or December). In fact, the last leap second was at the end of December 1998. These 4 years (and counting), then, are the longest period without the introduction of a leap second since the first one was introduced in 1972.
So, it would turn out that the IERS was either a government conspiracy to slow down the Earth in order to cause huge changes (like when Lex Luther wanted to sink California to make Nevada ocean-front property in Superman) or (my preference) an elite groups of scientist/special forces who are Earth’s only hope to prevent massive tidal waves et al caused by natural (but unpredicted) slowing. Since the prediction service of the IERS is run by the Navy, you could do a Peacemaker-style pairing (Mimi Leder again) of a George Clooney-ish Navy Seal and a Nicole Kidman/Denise Richards character (both played physicists, Richards in the role of a Bond chick) as the smart ass scientist who’s also his boss.
To keep current (and environmentally-friendly), maybe they would need to stop the Three Gorges Dam project in China, since dams are thought to affect the Earth’s orientation. Add in the effect of earthquakes (think Superman again), and there’s plenty of opportunity for death, disaster, and redemption.
What launched me on this is that some great background on time keeping and notation (did you know that a tiny C program based on Zeller’s congruence can tell you the date from the day of the week without using a calendar?) is RFC 3339: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps.
Eiji Hirai | 29-Dec-02 at 4:13 pm | Permalink
One of the seemingly innocuous but worst disasters that could hit the world is the reversal of the earth’s magnetic field. We’re overdue for one. Unfortunately, there isn’t much civilization can do about this.
Here’s a Guardian article about this:
Sun’s rays to roast Earth as poles flip
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,837058,00.html
and here is Hollywood’s solution to this problem, coming to a theater near you in March 2003:
The Core
http://www.thecoremovie.com/