Yellowstone Supervolcano Making Strange Rumblings

Frosty Piss writes "Supervolcanoes can sleep for centuries or millennia before producing incredibly massive eruptions that can drop ash across an entire continent. One of the largest supervolcanoes in the world lies beneath Yellowstone National Park. Significant activity continues beneath the surface. And the activity has been increasing lately, scientists have discovered. In addition, the nearby Teton Range of mountains is somehow getting shorter. The findings, reported this month in the Journal of Journal of Geophysical Research, suggest that a slow and gradual movement of a volcano over time can shape a landscape more than a violent eruption."

Comments

Re:Horizon

[gerrysteele]

Sadly that is not quite the case: It's a Supervolcano

one of the most destructive and yet least-understood natural phenomena in the world - supervolcanoes. Only a handful exist in the world but when one erupts it will be unlike any volcano we have ever witnessed. The explosion will be heard around the world. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.

Scientists have revealed that it has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago... so the next is overdue.

BBC Science

Anyway, have a nice nuclear winter, eithr way.

Re:I'm scared

[Jeff DeMaagd]

"due" is a relative term, because that assumes that there is a definite periodicity, when we really can't infer that from just three prior events.

A "change of pace", if it's not just a lava flow, has a chance to mean something that's massive enough to make Katrina look like someone's dog pooed in a park. It doesn't have to be, it isn't likely to be, but if it's like the previous major eruptions, then then much of the globe is in for a little trouble. The last major eruption in SE Asia basically caused there to be no summer in Europe, meaning major crop failures just about everywhere.

Re:I'm scared

[Gulthek]

Do not be scared. An eruption is not due for at least another several hundred years.


Really? Know that for a fact do you? Yellowstone could blow up tomorrow, or it could blow up in 17,000 years. All we know is that it will blow up again someday. It's tricky to predict because all the standard warning signs that we usually notice when volcanoes are about to erupt are already happening in Yellowstone.


This hotspot is just grumblinb a little. Even if it does erupt any time soon, it will be a nice change of pace.

Yeah, it would be a change of pace. What, do you think ash melts away?

Let's look at Bill Bryson's description:

Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across--roughly the same dimensions as the park--and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. It if blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.

"The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico) nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world's cereals...It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas.

Re:That's a bit alarmest

[Anonymous Coward]

You're leaving out the fact that it's erupted 3 times.
2.1mya eruption - 800,000 years - 1.3mya eruption - 640,000 years - 640kya eruption - 640,000 years - now
it isn't even "overdue", and even if it WAS, its still inaccurate.
It could erupt next year. It could never erupt again. Its most likely it'll erupt in the next 400,000 years.
Docudramas don't involve real science. don't base your slashdot posts on them, you'll be outflamed in an instant.

Re:That's a bit alarmest

[DragonWriter]

No, it's kind of like saying that it erupts at a 600,000 year cycle, and that it's 40,000 years late this time.

I've yet to hear an adequate explanation for how a 600,000 year cycle is inferred from the known eruptions at 2.2 mya, 1.3 mya, and 640 kya. You've got one 900,000 year interval, and one 660,000 year interval. Now, you could say its an average of 780,000 years, or you could say its getting shorter each time and, judging from the ratio, it should have erupted about 160,000 years ago, or a lot of other hasty, invalid, but at least consistent generalizations. But how you get "every 600,000 years", I don't know.

Re:I'm scared

[644bd346996]

It would if this were only, say, January of 1996. But in reality, you now have quite a bit of evidence that there is not a regular periodicity to collecting traffic citations.

However, in the case of the volcano, we are only 1/15th of a cycle late. It is too early to say that we have totally bucked the trend.

Re:I'm scared

[TempeTerra]

Presumably you were trying for those funny mods you got, but since you haven't had any sensible replies yet I'll chip in - you know somebody is going to take it seriously.

Volcanic eruptions are like earthquakes in that they are a release of built up pressure. Earthquakes happen at fault lines when two land masses have moved far enough relative to each other that the sides of the fault slip against each other to relieve the accumulated pressure. Volcanoes accumulate pressure from... uhh... magma upwellings or something... which is released when they erupt. Both are examples of a system in which there is a steady increase in potential energy which is catastropically released when enough energy is stored. If the rate of energy storage remains the same the eruptions/earthquakes will have a fairly regular period. Traffic violations aren't caused by any kind of build up of energy, so there's no reason to expect periodicity.