Slashdot Mirror
Yellowstone Supervolcano Larger Than First Thought
drewtheman writes "New studies of the plumbing that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park shows the plume and the magma chamber under the volcano are larger than first thought and contradicts claims that only shallow hot rock exists. University of Utah research professor of geophysics Robert Smith led four separate studies that verify a plume of hot and molten rock at least 410 miles deep that rises at an angle from the northwest."
Wait until the global cooling due to the super volcano blowing!! Cool!!!
University of Utah research professor of geophysics Robert Smith led four separate studies
Abstract:
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
and probably seeing the sun.
If that goes off, waiting for a world killing asteroid won't be necessary.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Save this before it is mysteriously "disapeared" from the Word Wide Web. Haven't I always warned that the Italians were planting Volcanic melten rock underneath our Homeland in order to spread their Italian islamo-communist terror campaign through seismic blackmail?
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
IF this thing will eventually blow (spewing movie credits all over the northern hemisphere, some might say), is there a way to stop it from happening? Can the volcano be "tapped" to allow the molten rock to ooze out and relieve some of the pressure? Can underground formations be "cracked" with explosives to, perhaps, add additional room underground for all this hot rock?
While we all go on about climate change, this is something that (from what I understand) could pretty much wipe out North America, and may go off without warning (any help here? I'm not a geologist).
-
So is it even theoretically possible to, say, dig a big shaft into it to slowly release the pressure under controlled conditions over decades or centuries?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That is pretty deep, it extends well below the earths crust which is about 30 miles thick below the continents, so it goes well into the mantle of the earth. This could be a similar hotspot feature to hawaii, however may manifest in a different way on the thicker continental crust compared to the oceanic crust beneath hawaii. Other similar features of this kind are the New England Hotspot which produces a series of volcanos in Quebec which have become series of hills including the one Montreal is named after. That hotspot is now inactive and off the coast of africa (the crust moved, not the hotspot).
Given that if this thing blows it could do some serious damage to the country, maybe we should start drilling some holes to release some of the pressure. The cheap geothermal energy would be a bonus.
at the precipice of become spacefaring people. Mega volcano? Mega landslide in Hawaii? Defrosting Russian permafrost? Global warming? Comet? Meteor? Gamma ray burst? Solar flare?
Pick one and we're screwed. Sadly all we care about it the latest trinket to amuse our monkey brains while we imagine we are safe from all danger. somehow. maybe.
Several have suggested that we try to come up with a way to release pressure from the Super Volcano, but I can't see that helpful. The life of this planet depends upon this changes in the mantel and the crust, and trying to divert what happens in nature may cause larger problems for our population on this planet later. It amazes me that we think as a people that our lives on this planet are somehow more significant than other life forms. Yes we are evolved, and that would lead many to argue this point, but the reality is we are like ant to this planet. We've infested it with our population growths. The planet will do what the planet will do, and we're really just along for the ride.
I'm not a volcano expert nor am I any renound scientist, I'm an average person looking at the possiblity of life as I know it ceasing to exist. I don't look forward to a massive kill-off of the many life-forms on this planet. I don't, but I do feel that by messing with nature we will cause more problems than if we don't. But hey, this is only my take on the situation described. Meh!
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Not if, but when is it going to blow? That's what matters most. Are we any closer to understanding that?
Well, that's great. We'll get the CO2 balanced and spend the trillions to do that, deal with overpopulation, and then the Earth will open up a Siberian traps style lava flow and kill 90% of all life on the planet.
This is my sig.
We can drill 12km down and that is a very small hole indeed, the distances involved here are a bit larger. And that is DRILL, not dig. If you drilled into lava/magma the drillbit would melt, get stuck and the hole be plugged with your drill. Even if could drill a hollow hole, the moment the magma flowed in it would cool and get stuck on its way up. It would be like trying to bleed to dead from a needle puncture. (which doesn't happen by the way, before I start a new internet scare)
Digging that deep, well there are mines that go down 1km and seems to be the limit for now.
So no, not really. There might be ways in the future, but for now we just have to hope that future has a change to happen.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I did my undergrad approximately an hour from Yellowstone...the big buzz in 2003 was a 100 foot tall "bulge" under Yellowstone Lake. This was dismissed as a not-issue since it was geothermal activity, not volcanic activity. While this finding is volcanic in nature, it hardly makes much of a difference as far as the public safety is concerned. As the article points out, the real mystery lies in the region between 10 and 50 miles below the surface...this has yet to be modeled.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
If we had been scared we would still be in our tree screaming "the ground is lava!"
There are two kinds of monkeys, those that cower and those that say "here kitty kitty" to the tiger... oh and the third is the one who runs the fastest once the tiger pounces. The heroes are the first to land on Omaha, the ones who had sons were in the second wave.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A crazed DJ looking like Woody Harrelson has just confirmed that these findings are fabrications created by the government, man!
Why did you give America the worlds reset-button?!
What were you thinking?!?!
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
"Is the movie 2012 a documentary ?"
Yeah, its a depiction of what happens when Palin/Beck win the upcoming election.
...Cheney quietly moves his home away from home...
LHC Super Black Hole larger than first thought.
So I can mod you insightful!
(Oh wait...)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
This super volcano may be responsible for the rich farm land we have in this country. If it weren't for volcanoes our atmosphere would be much thinner or non existent. We depend on volcanoes even though they do kill.
Actually, the worlds' deepest mine is just under *4* kilometres deep, so you're off by a bit there. The miners are being extra vigilant for tectonics, and their biggest challenge (apart from fresh air to breathe) is heat coming off the tunnel walls.
Scary stuff, if you ask me.
"Good news, everyone!"
The people in the first wave were selected to be the ones who would keep going regardless of what happened around them. They were more likely to respond properly in an emergency. And in the case of my father and his crowd, they were shall we say motivated not to hesitate when firing at Germans. As Max Hastings has pointed out, in traditional wars 90% of soldiers were cannon fodder. They were there to stand around and get shot, acting as a kind of camouflage while the other 10% won the battle. Me, I'm a second wave type.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One thing this new extended magma body explains is the vigorous eruptions in the Craters of the Moon region in central Idaho. This is a series of basalt eruptions over the past 14,000 or so years. What's significant about them is that basalt is very hot magma. It demonstrates some sort of relatively quick outlet for hot magma below. Given that the magma plume flattens to the west as it nears the continental crust, these series of eruptions are now explainable as being convenient exits near the western end of the magma plume.
I wonder if such eruptions help to vent pressure from the underlying magma body postponing a eruption or contrarily are indications of building pressure in the underlying magma body that will only be released with a supervolcano eruption.
This is not some dark energy thing. This is pretty low science. Heat, energy, melting points, volume. I don't think Moore's Law applies here. Whatever we might develop then should be developed now. Or else, it's just too freaking large scale. Better to develop sensors to monitor, and political alteration beams to figure out how to survive as a race. THAT's a technology which might take 500 years to reach beta.
Hehe I am sure it wouldn't be free once it got to your door. the corporations that love you need to get paid.
I'm not very qualified to talk about this branch of science, but to further the controlled release idea that's been suggested by many users: Most responses have denied it as a possible solution due to the huge depths that these plumes reach. Some people are making a hidden assumption that you'd have to drill to the bottom of the plume. I don't know why. Secondly, from Wikipedia: "Supervolcanoes can occur when magma in the Earth rises into the crust from a hotspot but is unable to break through the crust. Pressure builds in a large and growing magma pool until the crust is unable to contain the pressure." and from the earth's crust article "the oceanic crust is 5 km (3 mi) to 10 km (6 mi) thick[1] and is composed primarily of basalt, diabase, and gabbro. The continental crust is typically from 30 km (20 mi) to 50 km (30 mi) thick, and is mostly composed of slightly less dense rocks than those of the oceanic crust." So, actually, I forget what the quoted number was for the furthest we can currently drill, but with at least a little bit of research it doesn't seem that implausible. Further, just thinking about it a little bit, precipitating a super-eruption by doing this might actually be a real concern but I think it depends on many factors: hole size, number of simultaneous holes, and composition of the plume. If there's anybody that's actually qualified to give advice on this topic, please feel free to correct me.
Magma motion quakes look like long continuous sine waves. Regular Earthquakes have impulsive starts for each of the elastic wave types.
How is this 'larger than first thought?" The first thought was "Let there be light" and that was a biggie
Never mind the big rock falling out of the sky. Never mind global warming. Never mind peak oil. Never mind growing hostility between various nuclear powers. Never mind the USA's enormous mind-numbing debt. THIS is what's going to kill us all, and I for one, welcome our new volcanic overlords.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Saw this in a movie once.
1. Call Bruce Willis
2. give him a nuke.
3. Get Aeromsmith back together to play a cheesy song
4. Lunch
5. Have Willis set off nuke
5. Profit is in there somewhere maybe commemorative pieces of Willis sold on ebay?
6. Nap
Your welcome
You're either with us, or with the volcanoes.
Bio and nuke bad guys are so yesterday. He must be new kind of geoterrorist!
While a supervolcano explosion would kill hundreds of millions of people, mostly indirectly, it doesn't take such a large eruption to rain on the earth's parade. A Tambora- or Taupo-sized eruption would lower temperatures a few degrees causing famine in the developing world for years and killing millions.
WWW
That thing is huge, it has enough energy to supply current mankind needs for a few hundred thousand years. How do you propose we deal with the energy? We can't simply let it out.
Now, the good news is that maybe, if we release just a (relatively) small amount of energy, we may increase the tikness of the crust enough to let it resist the pressure indefinitely, that means, untill some other problem arrives :) The bad news is that if we make enough holes there, we may reduce the crust resistence and make it blow. I have no idea on what is more likely, nor I know if anybody knows it.
Rethinking email
Even if you managed to drill directly into the magma chamber and create a path for magma to escape, it wouldn't be particularly successful at reducing the risk. According to our current understanding of supervolcanoes, the stuff making up the majority of the chamber is very viscous and with a high gas content - it WILL erupt explosively. If you're lucky, the drill would only produce a St. Helens sized eruption and then stop. That wouldn't take a very significant amount of energy out of the system though.
Trapped at the bottom of the chamber is very hot and less explosive felsic magma that is coming up from the hotspot below and feeding the whole system with energy. Again assuming the possibility of such a drill, you might be able to drain some of this off from systems outside of the actual caldera (so you don't have the rest of the explosive magma chamber in the way). Super volcanoes tend to do this on their own periodically; it creates massive plains of flood basalt - and as far as I know, still doesn't reduce the changes of a super eruption.
Quite simply, the last super-eruption contained more than 10 times the force of all the nuclear bombs ever created.
The ENTIRE US consumes about 400 petajoules of energy each year.
But the Yellowstone explosion that formed the crater used up 3,661,000 petajoules. That's over 9 thousand times the energy. So lets say we really go all out and find a way to safely handle ALL the energy the US normally uses in a year. We drain 400 petajoules each year from yellowstone. Granted, most of that power would be wasted as you lose energy when you transport it long distances, but lets pretend we care more about removing the energy than using it. I doubt we COULD drain that much energy, but lets assume we could.
So, each year we drain about 1/9000th of the energy. Assuming it is about to blow (as it has been a VERY long time since it has blown), in 4,500 years, we will have halved the size of the explosion.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You sound like you actually know what you're talking about, so I'm glad you responded. Maybe instead of drilling into these already full chambers, we could somehow spot potential ones and drill them as a preventative measure? Also, I wonder if there's an advantage in being able to choose the orientation of the drilling line. I wonder if it'll be at all possible in the future to create, say for example, a network of channels before finally trying a controlled release. Shouldn't there be some sort of government agency out there asking these questions?
Well, then it really depends if you're reducing the pressure buildup by drilling into it. The energy figure you're quoting is that of a super eruption, which you'll only have to worry about dissipating if the thing blows. So, when you talk about drilling into it without it blowing and then trying to dissipate all of that energy afterward, I would think that if by drilling into it there's less pressure than before, and it didn't blow before you drilled into it, then you might be in a safer place than before... Again, wild speculation on my part but what the hell, this is slashdot isn't it?
As I read this my desktop wallpaper changed into a nuclear explosion / mushroom cloud, go figure lol.
Visit my Forums?
Supervolcanoes can occur when magma in the Earth rises into the crust from a hotspot but is unable to break through the crust
I think that is the crux of the solution right there. You don't need or even want to concern yourself with the whole area of molten rock that is under Yellowstone. You want to tap into and bleed off energy from the hotspots. Do this using lateral drilling with liquid cooled drillbits. Once you hit molten stuff, you will basically be creating a pipe of hardened magma as you progress through the center of the hotspot. If the surrounding heat threatens to overpower your cooling system, just stop the progression of the drill until the cooling system can make the pipe walls thicker.
The removed heat can be used to drive turbines to create electricity.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I too was thinking about the possibilities of using the heat as a source of energy.
"I have faith, the big chemical, nuclear and power companies have alot of plans written up and I believe they'll secure things to their best ability."
Yes, that's exactly what you have, Faith, because that line is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.
I, on the other hand, have Experience. Because the Universe has a ripping sense of humor, I've lived through two major disasters and gotten to see two others from a hop-skip-and-a-jump away. Not all the grey in my hair comes from age.
Those "men-in-charge" you're placing such faith in will not only not do the Right Thing, they will almost certainly Make Things Worse.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Boy, my rural farm land in Southern Chile sure would go up in value fast if Yellowstone erupted. It is going to go up in value anyway as most of the population of the World lives in Northern hemisphere anyway, and seems hell bent on screwing up that half of the earth sooner or later. Yellowstone would just make it a whole lot sooner.
Living in Chile
Hmm, trying to spot potential new super volcanoes is quite a technological challenge. We only have really rough ideas of what's going on under the surface in even the most closely monitored volcanic situations. We're getting better and better at this as time goes on though.
The biggest issue is the time scale. A super volcano develops on a geologic time scale; Yellowstone has been active since before our species even existed in its current form. The entire time, it's being constantly fed with a massive amount of heat from the mantle plume/hotspot that's underneath it. What will eventually, on a geologic time scale, cause it to cool down and become dormant, is the movement of the continental plate above the hotspot. It will be cut off from its source of magma and slowly cool into rock. That's probably millions of years in the future though.
I can think of a single instance where humans were able to bleed off energy in an attempt to manipulate volcanic activity. There was an island near Iceland; an eruption destroyed their city and a lava flow was slowly blocking off their harbor, which would have made the island useless. They got every boat they could and kept a constant flow of sea water on the lava. The flow was already coming to a stop though, so no one really knows how much of an impact they had on the lava. Also consider that the amount of energy within a single lava flow is completely insignificant compared to what's resting in a magma chamber of any size, especially a super volcano.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimaey
If we want to spend resources on reducing the risks of a super eruption, we should work on developing better technology to monitor all the known dangerous areas, and have extensive plans as to how to react to such an eruption.
Wow, the fortune cookie is pretty optimistic today!
The human race never solves any of its problems. It merely outlives them. -- David Gerrold
The presence of totally incurable and deadly Chagas disease throughout that area has always held down land values. Get a cure or a way of eradicating it and your land values will soar. But don't hold your breath. Decades of research has come up with neither a cure nor a cost-effective large-scale method of eradicating the vector. Maybe Bill and Melinda Gates' Foundation will come up with the money to get an answer.
I'm with the volcanoes, they have hot liquid "magma", how are you going to compete with that.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I wonder what a scientist floating around in the ISS would say if they saw this go down outside the window...
"Uh - oh...!"
Those new LED TVs from Best Buy are the bawm! Crystal clear 1080p can render 2012 in full accuracy.