Ragnarök

Ragnarök is Revelation and Genesis. Both have a god of thunder and a giant dragon who opposes him, but Revelation suffers from a mix of numerology and astrology and it has nothing to do with science. It’s very personal, subjective, the view of one man. That said, I'm all in favor of allegorical writing, though it drives some readers up the wall. It was important to Wagner, to Brecht, to Tolkien, to J.K. Rowling, several of whom have taken a crack at Ragnarök. The image below is Surtr (“the black one”) smashing a hole through the sky...

Or it's the Eagle Nebula taken by the Hubble Telescope. It reminds me of the vortex you see when a rocket is fired from Vandenberg in a late afternoon sky in Los Angeles.

The Vikings who followed the ways of Odin and Thor lived above 55 degrees latitude and it was understandable that they believed the end would come from the south, not the north. The north led to the Bifröst and to Asgard and the snow giants, but there wasn’t much point going that way. The threat would come from the south or south-east and so in those days Surtr could have meant an enemy like the Romans or Charlemagne or the Christian missionaries creeping northwards.

Yet the threat from global heating seems also to come from the north, as the polar ice caps and the tundra melt... This is the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), taken by the James West Space Telescope.