Ironfall
Dreamed 1859 by William Henry Hudson
William Henry Hudson was eighteen years old when he woke from a dream so frightening it was vivid for him fifty years later. In the dream, he was standing on the plain outside his family's house in the Pampas, on a sunlit day, under a brilliant blue sky, but something was terribly wrong. "Looking up," he wrote,
I saw a dark object like a cloud at a vast height, but coming swiftly down toward the earth. I then perceived that it was no cloud but something solid, and as it came lower it resolved itself into iron, in bars about twice the thickness round of a hogshead [barrel], the bars being a mile or two in length. When the lowest, which were very distinctly seen, were near the earth, I could see that they extended in a stream of bars--tens of thousands or millions of bars--far up into the heavens until they faded from sight. Gazing up at this swift-coming torrent, I said: This is the end of everything; all life will be killed on earth by the shock, and the earth itself will be driven out of its orbit.The next day, he found he wasn't alone. The Hudsons and their neighbors in the surrounding countryside had all bolted awake at about the same time, and some had heard a sound like an immense thunderclap. In a sense, Hudson's dream was likely correct: a fist-sized meteor had probably exploded overhead, shattering into a cloud of metallic vapor and tiny fragments that rained down on the plains. But the scale of his dream seems eerily prescient now, almost as if a memory embedded in the earth itself had seeped into his sleeping mind. A century later, scientists realized that something very much like Hudson's dream did in fact happen, though not in his lifetime, or any human lifetime.
If we slide Hudson's dream back sixty-six million years, north by about five thousand miles...
SOURCE: A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg, 2012, p.73-4; his source was A Hind in Richmond Park by William Henry Hudson, 1923, p.225.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Meiburg is of course alluding to the Yucatan impact and the death of the dinosaurs. But the idea that Chicxulub Crater was the last great impact is false. Just 2-3 million years ago and just 1500 miles southwest of W.H. Hudson's childhood home, a rock about 3 km across hit the ocean off Chile, blasting 30-km (18-mi) Eltanin Crater in the abyssal floor. Eltanin wasn't alone; about 770,000 years ago, an even bigger rock hit Australasia somewhere, leaving tektites all over, though the crater itself hasn't been found yet. And less than 5 million years ago, at Kara-Kul in Central Asia, a strike left a gigantic crater (90 km wide--55 miles!)
Hudson wasn't just a novelist (Green Mansions, etc.), but a fine naturalist. He thought ecologically, before the word even existed. I don't think it's chance that his dream extrapolated from a small meteor with no serious consequences to the potential for a worldwide extinction event.
At the time, the only two schools were Biblical catastrophism and scientific gradualism. But Hudson's dream foresaw what even Darwin did not; scientific catastrophism. In a violent universe, extinction can be sheer bad luck. And instant. And total.
--Chris Wayan
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