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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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