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."

Comments

Re:I'm gonna miss yellowstone..

[jameskojiro]

Yellowstone has gone off in the past and it didn't kill off all the large land animals, sure it screwed up North America for a whiel and lowered global temps several degrees, but it isn't the end of the world.

Re:Controlled release?

[ZeroExistenZ]

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?

Likely, if you forget about Murphy...

So many extinction level events yet we linger

[assemblerex]

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.

Re:So many extinction level events yet we linger

[thisnamestoolong]

To be fair, most of the things you mentioned would not be extinction level events -- it would take quite a bit to fully extinguish humanity from this planet -- we have more knowledge and technology to help us survive than any other species in history. We can build underground bunkers powered by nuclear reactors and grow plants by the soft glow of UV lamps, for instance. For humans to become extinct, something will have to hit us really hard and really fast. I do agree with your main thesis though -- we need to get our asses into space while we still have the chance. In any of these cases, we would, at best lose hundreds to thousands of years of potential progress. If we had kept up the momentum we had in the 1960's, 2001 would have been a pretty accurate depiction of the year in question, methinks. It's a pity, really.

Re:So many extinction level events yet we linger

[danbert8]

I don't know if you've noticed, but we have managed to get off this rock. The problem is finding another rock that we can survive on. So far, even the most catastrophic disaster short of the sun blowing up will still leave the earth more likely to support humans than any other planet (or moon) we've discovered.

Re:Controlled release?

[Aeros]

wouldn't the volcano blowing kinda ruin the park as well? im just sayin..

Re:I'm gonna miss yellowstone..

[localman57]

Even if society totally collapsed, there would be enough information left over for people to rebuild eventually.

The problem as I see it is that the Earth we've created isn't the Earth it was 100 years ago. Asssume for a moment that the population is reduced to 10% of what it is now. Would there be enough resources to keep all of our nuclear reactors, chemical plants, etc from leaking unprecidented amounts of poison into the environment. While the orignal volcano/virus/starvation/flood/PickYourCatastrophe probably wouldn't finish us off, perhaps the slow rotting of our own creations would.

Someone write "we are all going to die!"

[Snaller]

So I can mod you insightful!

(Oh wait...)