Picture a communication and Spanish major sitting in geology class twirling her baby hairs listening to her professor harp on about human population and plate tectonics. That was me the first few days of class.

Today sparked an interest for me, though. My professor, an avid earthquake tracker and storm chaser, pulled up stats concerning Houston's damaging storm: Hurricane Harvey. I feel it's difficult to grasp how unbelievably large these natural disasters without having any comparison. Sure, today's technology provides actual footage from these hurricanes, tsunamis, whatever it may be. They're impactful, of course, but what would something like that look in the viewer's own area?

My professor pulled up a diagram of the storm in Texas on the SmartBoard, then dragged over a map of South Carolina.

"Look at all of the lakes from Charleston to just above Columbia," he said circling the area with a pen.

"Those lakes would come pouring down to the Low-Country and absolutely destroy Charleston if we were in Houston's situation. Remember Hurricane Hugo from the 80s? That was a category 4, and look at all of the damage even that did. With the way Hurricane Harvey hit, it would have been even worse. Today our waters' temperatures are rising because of global warming, forcing these waves to do damage like none ever before. Just look at all of the costs of Katrina and Sandy: two storms that caused indescribable destruction in the last two decades."

A category four hurricane in Texas is almost unheard of, and the way it hit caused massive flooding that Houston was not prepared for. It's hard to comprehend everything that goes into making a hurricane as strong as it is, but I now definitely know one thing: we could have prevented a storm this size.

The world struggles every day because of global warming; today's issues weren't even a thought just 25 years ago. If our ice caps weren't melting and our waters weren't warming, who knows if Hurricane Harvey would have caused (and would continue causing) so much damage?

It's important to keep in mind our ecological footprint, especially with seven billion humans walking the Earth (and boy, is that number still rising.) Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Conserve. Sustain. We have more impact on the Earth than perhaps we thought.