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

Fact for the day

[Bloke down the pub]

"Teton" is french for booby.

Re:Fact for the day

[LynnwoodRooster]

And wouldn't you know it, they're sagging too!

I'm hungry

[Abcd1234]

I mean it, really hungry.

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

[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:I'm scared

[DragonWriter]

If this happens during the winter, they might need to scrape off some ash, pile it by the side of the field, or take and put it in a big pile someplace

We're not talking about a thin layer of ash, but something that is feet thick near (and when the outer limits are the whole western US, "near" can be pretty far) the eruption site.

You can't compare the clearing of a massive wreck of twisted metal and concrete full of remains to clearing a field.

You also can't you compare the clearing of volcanic debris from the entire Western United States to clearing a field.

Re:I'm scared

[rujholla]

When Mt. St. Helens blew we had about 3 feet of ash over all our fields in Eastern WA. The problem was you couldn't really scrape it. It was too light and fluffy -- at least till the first rain fall then it was like concrete. In the end it was a combination of like he said scraping and plowing it under.

The big problem was what it did to engines -- that stuff is super corrosive well ok more correct would be super abrasive -- you have to have special filters on all your air intakes and they have to be cleaned frequently.

While not as easy as the GP makes it out to be -- farmers for the most part have the equipment to clear the fields and it can be done fairly quickly.

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.