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Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano About To Blow?
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, Yellowstone National Park has been having a very unusual number of earthquakes. Many of the most recent tremors have been deeper underground, an ominous sign. Combine that with a rapid rise in elevation over the past three years, and the possibility that earthquake activity from surrounding areas could trigger such an eruption on its own, and you've got the possible warning signs of a supervolcano eruption that would wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental US, plunge global temperatures, and wipe out a very significant chunk of world food sources. Here's a little more info to make your New Year brighter!"
Suddenly the economy doesn't sound like such a big problem after all.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
After the fact.
It's more likely to cause global cooling, as TFS and TFA state.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
It would more likely knock out all human life in the USA and burn/melt most of the populated areas of Canada and Mexico. Don't forget it will cause a huge drop in temperature which will cause a mini ice age Doesn't really matter where you are in the world as everyone will most likely starve to death in a couple years anyways. I think it was Mt Toba that went off last time... which dropped the human population down to 10,000 and kicked off a mini ice age 75,000 years ago.
The linked articles do not really raise any cause for concern. The title sure has a ZOMG!!! factor to it, but in reality it's just a bunch of what-ifs. Move along, nothing to see here.
blah blah blah
Jesus Christ, the summary is a bit alarmist, no? "Wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental United States?" Uh, no. It would leave half the United States under a dusting of ash. That's not the same as "wiping it out". Because, see, once the ash is cleaned up, the people, places and things underneath are all still there. At worst, it'll mean some clogged pipes and some really dirty shoes for a week or so.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 left approximately 1/3 of the United States under a dusting of ash as well. Guess what?! We're all still here! In fact, after a couple of weeks, it was like nothing had happened. During the eruption things got a little scary for those who were very close (and deadly for those who were very, very close), but it was just more annoying than anything else for those who dealt with the ash clouds further away. It was basically like just having a big pile of dirt slowly emptied all over a big swath of the country.
As apocalyptic predictions go, this one's pretty benign.
Well, this is true, but what you have to remember is that those "mathematical models" were created by imbeciles who believed that all events in the financial market were independent (i.e no event in the market affects any other event), that the market can grow forever without limit, and -- worse -- still believe that when an event that the models say is a once-in-a-hundred-years event happens three times in six months, it's not an indication of a basic flaw in the model, but rather a rare fluke that means it's now statistically certain it'll NEVER happen again. The global financial sector's "mathematical models" are worthless, and always have been. They built a house of cards using imaginary money as cards, and the question was only one of when the house of cards would collapse.
The financial market and the Yellowstone basin are hardly related. Our models of vulcanism are incompletely understood, and based on what is -- on a geological scale -- a very short period of observation, a mere century and a half or so in the case of Yellowstone. But they are at least based on observation and study, not wishful thinking. Yes, many of the models indicate that there could be another supervolcanic event at Yellowstone "any time now". But on a geological timescale, that "any time now" could be a thousand years away.
This is interesting news, and absolutely bears close monitoring, but I think it's a little premature to run around shouting that the sky is falling. But regardless of the actual risk from Yellowstone, I don't think that the failure of the consensual delusion passed off as mathematical models of the global economy constitutes anything that can be used as evidence for anything except for how stupid a whole lot of ostensibly really smart people can actually be, when they're blinded by greed.
The Toba eruption is generally thought to have been larger than any of the Yellowstone eruptions. The largest Yellowstone eruption was pretty close, though. Source: http://www.armageddononline.org/known-super-volcanoes.html
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
You elect an imbecile to the most powerful office in the world. Twice.
You spend/borrow your way into a financial crisis.
You alienate and disgust 99% of the rest of the world with (just off the top of my head) Guantanamo, bombings inside Pakistan, extraordinary renditions, the whole Iraq fuckup, Kyoto, etc.
You remove more and more of the basic rights of your own citizens.
Apart from that, please think about the majority of humanity around the world, count your fucking blessings, and shut the fuck up. Try living just one day as an average Somali, Haitian, Zimbabwean, or Burmese.
I'm sure you're posting to Slashdot from an average Somali, Haitian, Zimbabwean, or Burmese household. On a high horse, no doubt.
That is why you always hear about towns and ancient cities being wiped out by a nearby volcano. After the town gets plastered with ash and dust the remaining in the air lingers on getting into people's lungs putting them to slow death.
We have the means to quickly get away from it but at a large scale such as Yellowstone it's going to affect ALOT of things including livestock that we feed on.
Those who survive the initial blow will have a long battle of finding food and keeping warm.
Seems the only real safe place would be aboard the international space station but can't stay there forever either.
So I would stock up on canned food and water. And plenty of seeds for replanting because you are on your own when it happens.
Actually, the number of deaths would be negligible. Yellowstone sits in the most sparsely populated region of the U.S. The actual direct destructive power of the volcano would only effect a 40 square mile area, which except for Jackson Hole, is largely empty.
Laramie, Cheyenne, Bozeman, Billings, etc would be hit hard by ashfall, but Denver would only get about a foot. Folks know ash collapses roofs. So, gasp, folks would clear the ash as it accumulates. Many or most people would evacuate anyway.
This is alarmism. At its worst, there will be an immense disruption of the electrical and telecommunications grid, immense expense from ash damage and removal, alot of immediate deaths and some ash deaths.
Damn you ironic moderators!
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Everyone will starve to death?
Not quite that level of an apocalypse.
It'd kill off, say, a few billion people. Places such as Mexico could still farm food, enough to sustain hundreds of thousands of people.
And the situation would recover fairly quickly - we'd almost certainly see a complete crash of global economy, energy prices soaring like never before and cannibalism becoming a viable survival strategy, but the end of the human rice? Hardly.
But this was human civilization from 75,000 years ago, which intellectually and technologically pales in comparison to human civilization today. Wouldn't the advancements we've made since the Toba eruption help us to endure the effect of another mega-eruption?
I think most of our advances would be the first casualties. The amount of fine ash (powered glass-like substance) would ruin many of the things we depend on, like power generation, plumbing and sanitation, food distribution... all gone for a considerable period. It may be impossible to grow crops for several seasons due to acid contamination, there is a lot of sulfur in the type of magma under Yellowstone. As a race, we might survive in bunkers if they still exist... sadly the people that will have access to those facilities are not the people I would want to repopulate the world with... not the "fittest" genetically or even mentally, just the ones with political clout. Carpenters, farmers, doctors and paramedics are some of the people I would want to see survive, raising the odds for the species a bit.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
True, but I was thinking about technologies like consumer available solar power, water filtration, thermal clothes, and hydroponic vegetables. My end-of-the-world scenarios have been the product of '70s and '80s apocalyptic films like The Day After, Threads, and The Road Warrior... okay that last bit is a stretch.
Obviously life post-ELE will be bleak, but would it be any better because of these tools without considering what desperate people with guns and missiles do.
evacuated to where exactly? and by whom? you saw what happened to katrina do you really think we're any more prepared for anything like this?
A "few meters" of ash covering most of the US would be a pretty major issue. Almost none of the roofs are rated to carry that. All the planted crops, except trees, are killed. All trees less than a few meters die, naturally. You can't plow it. Most plants won't grow in it. Cars won't run for very long when it's in the air and nobody's digging a car out of a few meters of ash without patience, and if you did there's no where to drive it where you won't get bogged down in soft crunchy ash. The ash is suffused with toxic gases, some of which precipitate as acids. When it rains it kills all the life in all the rivers, and the silt changes the course of major rivers and minor streams. When it gets to the Atlantic and the Gulf it kills almost all of the fish in the ocean. It interferes with cell phone reception, TV and radio. A few meters of ash is enough to clog every hydro power plant, every nuclear power plant in the country. It blocks all the railways and all the highways of course, and that's how we move food around. And if you're not directly affected but you don't like America, that would be a fine day to attack. In summary, it's a big deal. Lava? A local issue where a good plan is not to touch the lava, not to get downstream of the lava. Ash, though, it'll wreck your whole week.
Link. A few inches of ash is a big deal. I've been there. A few meters? It boggles the imagination.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yellowstone will erupt in this dramatic fashion. The Siberian Traps will too. The 1.5km-diameter (or much more) space rock will definitely strike earth in the future. A comet will too. These aren't tinfoil hat ideas - everybody in the related sciences agrees that these events will occur. It's just a matter of time. Maybe it will be a long time, as we think about it usually, or maybe it will be a short one. Each of these events is neither more likely nor less likely to happen on a particular Monday a million years hence than they are on July 4, 2012.
They will happen and when they happen there's a good chance they'll wipe out all human life still on the Earth. Events like these don't have to wipe out mankind. We can choose to not let that happen. Or not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
you saw what happened to katrina do you really think we're any more prepared for anything like this?
Despite the bunging of Katrina's aftermath, what I saw in *advance* of Katrina was quite useful. The Mayor BEGGED people to leave town on local television. Everybody had several days' warning, they just chose not to leave. And it's the idiots that didn't leave that were starving, peeing on and raping each other in the stadium a week later.
It would be terrible if it happened - I have a good friend in Montana, but if warnings were as good as Katrina's, I'd be just fine. As a Californian, if I see Arnie telling NorCal folks to bail, I'm gone in 60 seconds, with my kids in the back, laptop and backup drives in hand!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Nice sounding idea. There's lots of energy down there. If we take it away, then everything down there ought to cool down, and become safe. Easy, no?
Well, not really. What we have here is something like a giant steam engine boiler twenty miles across with the safety valve stuck down. In the days of steam locomotives, if you thought there might be a crack in a boiler, then you filled the whole system with water and pressurized it. That way, if the boiler gave a little, the water would escape and the pressure would rapidly drop. Water is not elastic, so you have little stored energy, and you don't get an explosion. Gas is much more springy so you would get much more bang and flying bits with pressurized gas. Superheated steam is like a really compressed gas with liquid densities, so that is even worse still.
If you have an old-fashioned boiler with rivets, then as the pressure builds up, it will creak and the rivets will give a bit, and the steam will leak, a bit, but the whole system does not fail explosively. However, suppose you went around patching all the tiny leaks, and made the boiler rigid - it then has no way of failing other than by splitting in half. I have a nasty feeling that taking heat energy out of the weak places in the Yellowstone dome - if we could extract heat on that scale - would make it stiffer and more rigid, while the reduction in temperature may cause the gases to come out of solution, which would make the big explosion more likely.
For safety reasons, what we need a series of local eruptions that release pressure and gas like a safety valve or a weeping rivet, but that won't do the environment much good ( though if we recover some of the energy and use it to replace coal-fired power stations, it might not be that bad either ). However, you aren't going to get me to climb onto a 20-mile long steam boiler with a stuck safety valve and drill little holes to relieve the pressure.
We could build geothermal power stations, but the energy they are likely to be able to extract will be so tiny when compared to what's down there that they won't make any difference, unless you are talking of planet-scale engineering. On the plus side, I don't think we risk making things significantly worse either. Right now, and such power stations are in the wrong place for the US power grid.
Nice idea, though. I hope someone, somewhere is seriously looking at ideas like this. However, in the particular case of Yellowstone, we don't know of other volcanoes like this, so we can only look at the past history of this one. Most of the supervolcano theory is pretty young, and I don't think we really know enough about the materials at the pressures and temperatures to be able to dick with it with confidence. We know it doesn't blow up often, so we would be very unlucky if it blew up tomorrow. Right now, the best plan is probably to measure it very carefully, and learn all we can about how volcanoes work in depth. These little earthquakes tend to come in bursts, but we don't really know why.
Thank you for reading. We now return to our regular Internet schedule AAAGH! THIS IS IT OMFG WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE! And the angel sounded the trumpet a forth time and one third of the world's Zune players fell silent... Nostradamus has written: it's gonna be the Y2K bug all over again. Buy guns! Buy ammo!! THESE ARE THE END DAYS! (etc)...
In WW2, only 15% of soldiers actually shot at the enemy - and they were under fire and had been explicitly trained to kill. Even in a truly life-or-death situation, humans are not nearly as violent as disaster melodramas like to make out.
In times of hardship and disaster, the default mode of most humans is cooperation not competition. People pull together in hard times, which can be verified in Britain by talking to people alive during the war.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
once the ash is cleaned up
Um. How would you clean up a layer of ash 20 centimeters thick that spans half a country?! That's enough debris to create about 30 new Mount Everests... Well that's if it were compacted; in its dusty form it's probably more like half a meter thick. Since it tends to collect in lower areas, expect up to a meter of very fine (like quicksand) ash in the streets. This will not be cleaned up; mother nature will add add a bit of water and half the country will effectively become a massive mudslide or it will be covered under a big fat slab of concrete heavy enough to make just about any house collapse. Well, not just about any house, only the houses that are still standing after the massive mudflows...
This ash is not just normal ash either, it is like tiny splinters of glass that form a layer of concrete when water is added. Lungs are very wet places as fat as this ash is concerned...
Also, your comparison with Mount St. Helens makes no sense; if Yellowstone were to blow, it would produce 300-1000 times as much debris as Mount St. Helens did in 1980. Volcanos like Yellowstone probably produce enough debris to not only trigger an ice age, but the dust they leave in the atmosphere might very well be enough not to have any agricultural production for years. So Yellowstone might not just be big enough to wipe out half the United States, it might be big enough to wipe out most of humanity. The summary is not "a bit alarmist", it is very conservative.
0x or or snor perron?!
Maybe that has something to do with that region of Pakistan harboring the people who murdered almost 3,000 Americans?
Using that line of reasoning, is it reasoning?, the US should then be attacking Saudi Arabia. Most of the 911 hijackers were Saudis.
Kyoto is a flawed treaty. It will cripple the economy of the developed World while giving a license to pollute to the developing World (China/India). Why the hell should we cripple our economy if they aren't going to be on board with solving the problem?
Though I didn't want to see a President Gross, er Gore, I voted against Bush by selecting Gore on the ballot because of Kyoto. Having said that, after President Bush came out against Kyoto something he said provoked me to do some research. I didn't know it before but Kyoto did not have limits on GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions on either China or India. And both countries are building a lot of coal fired power plants. So from one perspective Bush was right, however he still could have encouraged or pushed businesses to cut emissions and develop renewable energy sources. What does he do? He instead tries to relax emission regulations, so power plants can emit more pollution.
You remove more and more of the basic rights of your own citizens.
Citation?
Warrentless wiretaps and searches as well as the PATRIOT Act.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
It is widely documented that during natural disasters people organize themselves and help each other.
Some people in the US have an irrational love of guns, violence and oppression as a way to confront any major crisis.
In most situations what is required is human kindness and good organizational skills.
The brutes that will try to go hunting and make themselves strong, will not be allowed back in the village and will be left to rot psychologically by being ignored by the rest of the new community. Or will be organized by the clever people (i.e. politicians) as they had always been.
People with a gun just become the tool of somebody else's bidding.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.