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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."
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?
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).
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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).
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.
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Likely, if you forget about Murphy...
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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.
A better solution would be to install several large geothermal power generation plants...
But this would "ruin" the park.
Ahh well who wants to save the world and get nearly free electricity out of the deal.
Meh, doesn't have to kill off everything to doom the human race.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
In what weird alternative reality is screwing up North America not the end of the world? You're either with us, or with the volcanoes.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Probably not. Imagine this as being like a new oil well... A real gusher, stuff flies up hundreds of feet into the air.
Now imagine that oil is hot enough to melt the rock you're standing on, and the machinery you just used to dig the well.
Oh, and there's 800,000 cubic miles of it. (rounded from D x W x W (410*45*45) from article, not accurate).
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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.
wouldn't the volcano blowing kinda ruin the park as well? im just sayin..
This thing goes down 410 miles. Geothermal wells go maybe a mile. Even the deepest well in the world is only about 20 miles. I doubt we're going to release any pressure with even our best efforts.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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.
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Ok, you've convinced me.
Where do we start the drilling?
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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.
But it is entirely possible that it won't be a super eruption, but just a smaller blow. These have happened some times within the last 100.000 years.
If this went off and killed, say 65% of the North American population (I won't go 90% because not even an all out nuclear exchange with the USSR would have killed 90%). Yes, there would be enough resources to keep things in check.
Chemical plants aren't the issue, its the nuclear cooling ponds from what I've read and seen on TV. There isn't much around Yellowstone to be consumed by lava, its going to be the ash fall out that is the real killer here. 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.
Once the ash falls there will be record agricultural output for years without need of fertilizer, the collapse of the fishing industry will lead to resurgent ocean stocks.
From what I hear, life is doing BETTER around Chernobyl than in other comparable, non Nuclear Disaster areas. This is probably due to the lack of humans in the area, but it goes to show how resilient life is -- living things really, really, really want to keep living and will do whatever it takes.
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You should stop getting your science facts from news outlets.
It won't destroy the world, or even come close to killing a significant percentage of people.
It might kill, maybe, 100 Million people with another 20 million as the results of disruption of service.
And that's worse case, OMG I can't believe we were this unlucky scenario.
Unless of course we are bombarded by magic neutrinos from the sun.
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You don't have to drill till its hot enough for your drillbit to melt.
You just have to drill till it's hot enough to turn pressurized water into superheated steam. Then you have a source of energy.
The other option of course is to drill without a drillbit:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090912144809.htm
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats
living together... mass hysteria!
No one lives far away enough from Yellowstone if there is a supervolcano eruption.
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It won't mean human extinction. Period.
It may or may not mean the end of human civilization (for the time being). Whether it actually does depends on just how dependent the rest of the world is on the USA. If the collapse of the USA disrupts the rest of civilization enough to bring the whole house of cards crashing down, then civilzation falls.
If, on the other hand, the world has sufficiently recovered from WW2 that the USA is no longer crucial to civilization (note that "not crucial" is NOT the same as "not important"), then civilization will be damaged, but will recover in a relatively short time (say, 30-50 years, like the recovery from WW2).
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Depends who you talk to.
"Once the ash falls there will be record agricultural output for years without need of fertilizer,"
The bad part is that for a few years before that happens there will also be record agricultural output... almost non existent.
The sun being kinda important for crops to grow.
Might be some problems with cattle too. I hear they like things like grain or corn or grass to eat.... could be a problem for a couple of years.
The fish might recover after a while, the oceans having there alkalinity levels changed massively after having a billion tons of ash washed into them by the storms... They too would experience very hard times. The sun being blocked for even 1 year would result in massive die offs of fish. I guess algae works off of sunlight too, the smaller fish eat the algae the bigger fish them so the cycle gets broken for a bit.
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.
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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.
Then why aren't you posting the facts that prove it a hoax? Put up or STFU!
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.
Who cares as long as Bliz keeps the servers up. I never see the sun anyway, and all my food is frozen in my freezer.
With the loss of New York as a financial center
New York would survive. Estimates are that it would be covered in about 35 cm of ash.
Here are pictures of two eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano: The Huckleberry Ridge Tuff and the Lava Creek Tuff. The areas shown are not wind-blown ash; that's where the pyroclastic ash will reach, at about 200 miles per hour and over 1000 degrees F. You can see that everyone from Nevada to Missouri is dead.
But New York...eh, they might make it. Poor bastards.
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Yes, very informative, moderators.
I think he's probably referring to this accident. According to Wikipedia, the estimates of the death toll seem to range from 15000 to 35000. That's only "millions" in RIAA math.
Despite our best efforts, man-made disasters are pitiful compared to what nature has managed to do.
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Tambora's 1815 eruption seems to have led to a Little Ice Age. It was a seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.
Yellowstone rates an eight, at ten times the magnitude.
"A few years" of hardship seems like a really conservative estimate.
No, "Let there be light" was the first sentence spoken. The first thought was: "It's pitch dark here. I'll have to do something so I won't be eaten by a grue."
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Actually, that's not quite true. An eruption of the magnitude of some of Yellowstone's earlier ones is believed to be a mass extinction event.
So, yes, it wont kill off all the large land animals... it will only kill off most of them (studies show figures speculating 70-90%). Sadly, I have yet to see a study that shows how much more of the human population will be killed off by each other in the fight for resources.
It is also believed that such an eruption will kill off most plant life on the planet, which will then take years to regenerate. While the initial explosion may only kill off millions or hundreds of millions, it is the subsequent damage that will cause the mass extinction event. Once the plantlife near entirely dies out, so do most of the livestock, and thus us (those of us who survive the initial explosion). In addition, our current infrastructure is not designed to filter out the massive amounts of sulfides that will rain into the water for many years... ie: very little drinking water for most. If you have drinking water provided by ground wells in deep aquifers, great! But most drinking water is provided by reservoirs, which will become highly contaminated.
Keep in mind, Yellowstone has had numerous "violent" (understatement) eruptions... most people forget about the truly "violent" ones such as the one 600,000 years ago.
Two of Yellowstone's caldera forming eruptions are among the largest eruptions ever known to have occurred on Earth. Smaller eruptions by other volcanoes have accounted for mass extinction events hitting the 65-70% extinction level.
Most people don't have the slightest clue just how explosive an eruption Yellowstone can have (or has had in the past). A simple look at the geography (or lack thereof) of the region that Yellowstone's caldera sits in and that the hotspot has moved through will reveal this though. As a matter of fact, that lack of geography is what originally led explorers to not notice the massive caldera... it wasnt until one realized that the lack of specific geological features (and realizing the massive lake he was observing were the rest of the geological features) was indeed the volcano itself.
For instance, what you will find missing along the Yellowstone hotspot's line of travel are... oh, such minor things as... an entire section of the mountain range it sits in.
Unlike "conventional" volcanoes, Yellowstone does not build mountains... it reduces them to near nothingness, leaving depressions in the earth where they used to exist. The hotspot alone is bigger than some of our smaller states, and the caldera is big enough to fit whole towns and small cities in it - or even decent sized cities/boroughs... like Brooklyn - IN the caldera. 34 MILES by 45 MILES in size... and that doesnt count the hotspot below it which is much more massive - that's just the size of the "opening" created in the last volcanic eruption.
I guess, technically, you are correct... it wont be the end of the world... but it will be the end of almost all land dwelling life on it. Then again, there are theories that a truly catostrophic eruption may be the end, or close to it, of the world, as the stresses shift the planet's orbit and/or create severe damage to the tectonic plates...
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Curiously, I could not locate the paper referred to in the link you pointed out.
I did find this paper talking about two particular bird species that seemed to avoid nesting in highly contaminated sites, which factor might be reflected in the study your article quoted.
Your study quoted "some areas with hundreds of animals per square meter, others with none". I can think of examples of both: right on an ant hill; and the middle of an abandoned paved lot. Without actually looking at the study, it's hard to tell if they were playing fair with the numbers. ... and sometimes not even then.
If this went off and killed, say 65% of the North American population (I won't go 90% because not even an all out nuclear exchange with the USSR would have killed 90%). Yes, there would be enough resources to keep things in check.
I wonder how correct you are... probably not at all. It's not just the explosion (to which our nukes pale in comparison - I mean, c'mon, really... nukes dont reduce mountains to nothing... Yellowstone has, on more than one occassion, leaving basins and lakes where there were mountains at one time).
It's much of the other factors that will kill off more than 65% of life worldwide (not just in North America). We've had smaller eruptions by other volcanoes that we are pretty sure have accounted for 65% worldwide extinctions... Yellowstone's previous eruptions make some of those eruptions look like a firecracker.
Once the ash falls there will be record agricultural output for years without need of fertilizer, the collapse of the fishing industry will lead to resurgent ocean stocks.
Not quite... the ash (which will fall across the globe, as it has in the past) will contain sulfides, and be falling in acid rain. It will first KILL most of the crops, vegetation and so on, that is on the planet... later, the plantlife will recover, but by then, how many animals (people included) will perish due to no food? Even meat eaters cannot survive when the plants that their meat-creatures eat are all dead - thus causing them to die too.
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Studies, by scientists who have studied Yellowstone for years, disagree. An eruption like the one 640,000 years ago, is expected to be a worldwide mass extinction event. The fallout effects (acid rain, no sunlight for years, etc) are also expected to be quite global. The effect to plant life is expected to be near extinction. The effect to animal life (especially when you realize there is little plant life to sustain the herbivores and omnivores) is thus near extinction.
Current estimates, by people far more knowlegeable than you or I, range from the 70-90% global mass extinction range.
Of course, that is assuming another catastrophic eruption. A lesser eruption, like some of Yellowstone's smaller ones, is likely to NOT have such catastrophic effects.
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We need to strike preemptively. War On Seismology! Nuke Yellowstone today!
You do realize that at least two of Yellowstone's previous eruptions are more powerful than every nuclear weapon we have times TEN. Or a "measly" 875,000 Megatons...
Check this out for some great comparisons of the relative power of volcanoes, nukes, bombs, etc...
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They invade us for territory. Their magma population has grown and they want land to spread. They don't care about resources, per se, but they sure want our land.
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For instance, what you will find missing along the Yellowstone hotspot's line of travel are... oh, such minor things as... an entire section of the mountain range it sits in.
I was wondering if you were exaggerating, so I looked up the map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=yellowstone&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.60973,63.28125&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Yellowstone,+Portland,+Multnomah,+Oregon&ll=43.47684,-113.411865&spn=5.133958,7.910156&t=p&z=7
Yeah, that's just a little bit creepy right there.
(Compare with http://geodyn.ess.ucla.edu/~hernlund/humphreys-nicemap.jpg)
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.
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Despite our best efforts, man-made disasters are pitiful compared to what nature has managed to do.
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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?
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.
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Problem with that is that Yellowstone is a suicide bomber with a deadman switch.
This is exactly right. That's why radon gas, which is radioactive, is so incredibly dangerous: every time it seeps into someone's basement, it literally blasts the occupants' DNA to pieces, though slowly. So instead of whole subdivisions of people dying quickly from this radon gas, they turn into flesh-eating zombies, and infect people in surrounding homes and developments.
Luckily, our government has been very good at containing these zombie outbreaks, eliminating all the zombies, and keeping the whole thing very quiet to avoid public hysteria. That's why you never hear about it.
Don't even get me started about the zombism caused by the radiation from dental X-rays. There's a conspiracy by the ADA (American Dental Association) to hide the truth about all the people turned into zombies by dental X-rays.