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Yellowstone Super-Eruption Threat Debunked
GennyCream writes "The Internet has been all a-buzz with tin-foil-hat geeks have been in a tizzy over supposed government coverups of a soon-to-come super eruption in Yellowstone (especially see The Shadow Confederacy, but also Rense.com, or BlackVault for entertaining examples). I found an article on ATSNN.com (the Above Top Secret News Network) that cut the paranoia with the proverbial knife and went straight to the source. Their interview with USGS Yellowstone scientists covers all the angles and should inspire the mad-hatters to find something else to fear (for now)."
Have ya ever seen that commercial where the park ranger is pouring all the Metamucil down the Old Faithful? This could have serious adverse effects on the entire caldera. I mean, you can only pinch the cheeks for so long. It's bound to blow soon.
Well, my father in law follows the geology of the Yellowstone basin fairly closely because of his job as a park Ranger up in Grand Teton (his dream retirement job). In all the conversations I have had with him, he has said nothing of this. To add to that, he lives just outside Jackson Wyoming (Cheny's undisclosed location interestingly enough or at least I've seen him around the Jackson area a number of times) and one would think he would be out of there had there been any dramatic increases in geologic activity indicative of an eruption or large scale animal deaths as alleged in these rumors.
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Their interview with USGS Yellowstone scientists covers all the angles and should inspire the mad-hatters to find something else to fear (for now).
Of course they won't. If anything they'll take it as a confirmation of the big government conspiracy to cover it up! The scientists were obviously on the government's payroll... (as they probably are, of course).
"The Internet has been all a-buzz with tin-foil-hat geeks have been in a tizzy over supposed government coverups of a soon-to-come super eruption in Yellowstone (especially see The Shadow Confederacy, but also Rense.com, or BlackVault for entertaining examples)."
You seem to have forgotten this gem.
I got your tin foil hat right here!
Sigs are for losers
From the article: Large numbers of dead fish were not found in Yellowstone Lake, or any other lake in Yellowstone.
<HATTER TYPE="mad">So where were they found then?</HATTER>Their interview with USGS Yellowstone scientists covers all the angles
You'd like us to think that, wouldn't you? But everyone knows that angles were an invention brought to us by the purple skinned cat-people around the same time they built the pyramids and invented the mass hallucination that is Sweden! Nice try, though.
I subcontract in the USGS CVO (Cascade volcano observatory).
There is no big eruption planned in the continental US (don't know about Alaska or Hawaii). Otherwise I'd know.
If there's one thing you can count on, its that mad-hatters never let any facts get in their way.
There is a lots of information concerning the actual research being conducted.
I pretty much hold with the crowd that predicts massive volcanic eruptions, shifting of plates, the erosion of entire mountain ranges, massive glaciation, massive floods...big canyons being carved in deserts, cities sinking under the ocean, deserts turning to forests, forests turning to desert and every single thing you can imagine.
The sad thing is that I only get to live a human life span and will miss most of it.
BTW, there is a hot spot under Yellowstone and big cinder cones and a lot of lave flows in Idaho. I think there is a better than average changes of some major event in a short geological time frame.
Yes, this is what makes the thing so magnetically attractive to the wing nut crowd. It's true. Yellowstone is a super caldera. It will very likely erupt again. . . someday.
Maybe when the asteroid hits it. Of which there is also certainly a chance.
Simple, factual uncertainty wigs some people out more than anything else.
"My God! We're all going to die!"
Well yeah, Sparky. Get used to it. But on the whole the greatest risk you face over the next several years is your drive to work. That ought to scare you silly. Roll over in bed. See your sweetie lying there? You're more likely to die at his/her hand than by a volcanic eruption. Even if you live in Hawaii. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Dig a hole. Crawl in. Die in the cave in because you were afraid of shoddy workmanship by contractors (paid off by the government, no doubt) and did a much worse job yourself.
Either that or just lighten up, ferchristsake. Here, have a nice glass of cognac and a cigar to relax.
Hey, why are you running away?
Oh. Yeah. The government has told you that will kill you, nearly on the spot.
Ain't it funny how people chose to chose what they want to believe about what the government tells them? I can't figure it out.
KFG
One thing I have encountered is the bias, whereby someone is so in love with a theory that they are blind to the fair maden that comes along later. It's hard to let go of the comfortable setup you have built over the years, and when some fresh outsider comes along and tells you different, it gets the blood boiling.
I have encountered this with grizzled old prospectors who were positive they had found the next Sudbury or Ft. Knox, as well as 'cultured, educated' folks who have spent most of their time in the drawing room discussing theory. I have found numerous rich deposits, but due to economics, politics, or other obstacles, most shall remain ummined for now. In most cases, I dispensed with current trends and went back to the old stuff.
Too often, someone will arrive at a "conclusion" that might look good at the time, but prove to be very wrong later. So what? Someone has to get it wrong. But one has to be able to release that burning stick.
The Earth has many very serious events in its' past. We can expect more, and we have truly been living in a period of relative peacefulness. I've been to Yellowstone many times, and know what it is like to slip into a pool heated by the Earth, while Elk and Bison graze nearby. Been to Crater Lake, too. Now THAT was a big ol explosion, but it happened way before I got there. I've been in 3 volcanic eruptions, 2 in Alaska. It's quite exciting. One time I raced an oncoming cloud of ash.
Funny, but when I read this I thought of the people I read of near Mt. St. Helens, and some friends I had in the Phillipines.
-cp-
The interview above simply debunks the idea that there are currently any clues that an eruption is imminent (although much of it seemed to say "we're not measuring that"). However, there really is a giant magma chamber under Yellowstone, and if it ever breached in the right (or wrong) way, the continental US would be toast, and the rest of the planet would experience a nuclear winter style scenario.
Depending on how you project the historical numbers, we may already be overdue for the next eruption. Then again, the margin for error is measured in millenia, so it's a little like the major asteroid strike scenario: it could happen anytime, but it probably won't.
This past semester in my geology class we did an in depth study about volcanos and this caldera in particular. My professor has a great deal of enthusiasm about this supervolcano because it is most likely going to erupt within the next 50-100 years.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
In general, they aren't. Unless one of the following occurs:
We're perfectly willing to believe conspiracies between SCO and Microsoft but we accept the government at face value on things such as this and ridicule the doubters? Why is this?
See the above list.
but I'm genuinely curious why we take such negative attitudes toward questions such as whether the government doesn't yet want to inform the public over seismic concerns in the Yellowstone area.
Mostly because nobody is able to see any reason for the government to keep it a secret. Thus there can't be a conspiracy. Who are they conspiring against? People in the yellowstone area? Why? That doesn't make sense...
If, as you say, there is "secret" research going on to find out if it's going to be dangerous there, then it's actually the opposite of a conspiracy. They are doing it in secret to prevent panic, loss of lives and property.
Human beings are simply lousy at managing long term threat. If we can't look it in the eye's we ignore it, until it bites us in the back side and leaves us bleeding with no butt... that or we end up rediculously phobic, unable to function, worrying about things that are astronomically unlikely and ignoring the sure threats that are around us daily.
The folks in Japan thought they had quakes down flat, then Kyoto showed them they were rediculously under prepared. Even now, people are building home virtually "on" the San Andreas fault in southern California, because the short term economics outweighs the long term insanity of certain disaster. The biggest threats to people, of the hand of god type, are; * Surprise boulders or snowballs from space, * Super Volcanoes (the magma chamber under Mammoth Mountain California are a lot more scary than the Yellowstone caldera, at least at present.) * Super Tsunamis (a large slope failure on the big island in Hawaii could produce a wave over a thousand feet high on the American west coast.) * A tremendous amount of methane has been discovered on the Atlantic ocean floor. If the gas that is currently locked up were to be released all at once, a disaster killing millions of Europeans or Africans would be almost certain. * A super deadly bug, currently hidden in the deep tropics get contracted and spreads around the world making SARS, HIV, Chicken Flu, and Ebola look like a walk throug the park. We know there are terrible nasties in the jungle. It's only a matter of time before somebody catches something truly grievous. We know that the human population was at one time reduced to fewer than 1,500. Around the same time about 25,000 years ago, many of our closest hominid cousins went to their final rest. This coincides fairly well with a really big supervolcano eruption in Malasia (I believe), that may have made things very difficult for hominids for more than a decade. So we know this is a real threat. The problem is that largish tracts of history pass with no sign of serious disaster then BOOM! Something goes horribly wrong. Lot's of people get pushed off this mortal coil. Lot's of people pass down legends about the hard times and people forget. After a few years it's business as usual.
Our leaders need to take realistic precautions. They need to create sound technological contigencies for real but rare threats. The work on this super disasters should be proportinal to the likelihood of serious destruction divided by the real probability of the threat... i.e. spend more on helping folks lose weight and quit smoking, than making national plans to survive a super volcano.
Within reason protect people from their own stupidity, and short sightedness. At the same time, it is important to prioritize threats, and make sure that you're addressing the ones that will more often than not bite you in the butt. Once you've got those issuesmanaged, then you have time and resources to protect yourself against the vagueries of the universe. That and you spent more time having a life that worked, than worrying about what you cannot control.
Genda
If the extraction price of oil came up by a factor of 5, we'd finally have a situation where renewable fuels like bioethanol would become more economically feasible to produce and use than fossil fuel oils. Would the price of operating your car go up? A bit, perhaps 20-30% on average, maybe more. But in fact, a bioethanol-based fuel economy would likely have more stable long term fuel prices than the crazy market we have now, and I'm pretty sure that would be better for the economy then the insanity that's gone on over the last 5 years with fuel prices up and down by more than a factor of 2.
Beyond basic automotive uses, there are still a lot of other uses for oil in the form of petroleum-derived products like plastics. I don't know the actual breakdown of uses, but I suspect that most of these products could be adapted to production from other forms of hydrocarbons as oil becomes more expensive. Or perhaps there would continue to be a sufficient supply of oil to make these products if the automotive uses were eliminated.
In short, I don't think the world economy would crash overnight since I don't think the supply will run dry overnight - prices will start rising, and people will adapt to the technologies that have already been developed. Some serious legislative intervention may be required to speed things up when that does happen. But a lot of us would be happy indeed to see an end to the privileged role the oil-producing countries play on the world political scene.