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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."
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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I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Maybe in 400 to 500 years we will have developed the science. Right now, all we can do is pray.
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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.
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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wouldn't the volcano blowing kinda ruin the park as well? im just sayin..
A megaton (of TNT) is 4.184 × 1015 joules = 4.184 petajoules . You average Hydrogen bomb has about one megaton. The world has only about 70,000 nuclear bombs (rough estimate, USSR has about 16,000, the USA has about 33,000 - and most are much less powerful than an Hydrogen bomb). So the previous eruption was equal to more than 10 times ALL the existing nuclear bombs.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
Robert Smith is the singer of The Cure, "The first time I saw lightning strike, I saw it underground." is a line in a Cure song ("Hot Hot Hot" I believe.)
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
No one lives far away enough from Yellowstone if there is a supervolcano eruption.
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This is because the hotspot now sits under a much thicker crust (the rocky mountains). But as I saw one geologist quoted, "I wouldn't bet on it either way".
OK, so I thought I was pretty safe from the Yellowstone Supervolcano where I live, and now you tell me I have to worry about a frikkin Rocky Mountain landing on me?
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There has been some evidence that the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia nearly wiped out Homo Sapiens and contributed to a genetic bottleneck.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011652.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
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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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.