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In Bolivia, a Supervolcano Is Rising
dutchwhizzman writes "Uturuncu is a Bolivian supervolcano. Research suggests that it has an eruption frequency of roughly 300,000 years and the last eruption was, give or take a few years, 300,000 years ago. Research suggests that it started rising in a 70 km diameter by 1 to 2 centimeters per year, making it the fastest-growing volcano on the planet. Break out the tin foil hats, and store plenty of canned beans, because it may just erupt before Yellowstone pops its cork."
This'll make the price of cocaine skyrocket, harming innocent consumers the world over.
I thought tinfoil hats are to protect you from government mind-rays, not lava. Though tinfoil is pretty amazing stuff.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Looks like I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's 70km across, not circumference.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
The Mayans are on to something...
If they both erupt the "is man effecting climate" argument would become moot.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I am coming at this from an uneducated viewpoint, but would appreciate an answer from someone a bit more educated...
If we were to drill into this forming volcano, use geothermal energy to create electricity, could you delay, decrease or prevent the volcano from erupting? It seems like a really good win/win situation where you get almost free energy and prevent a small country from getting obliterated.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...at least that'll cool off the globe by a few degrees. I guess I won't sell my Hummer just yet.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Supervolcano? Is this like one of those... what did they used to call 'em,... caldera's?
May the Maths Be with you!
In Russia, a Supervolcano Is Sinking.
"It's not a volcano that we think is going to erupt at any moment, but it certainly is interesting, because the area was thought to be essentially dead," de Silva said.
Is it too late to start investing in coffee futures?
300.000 years isn't very long. Now if it were 300,000 years, that's a whole different story...
Wasn't just the Mayans predicting the end of the world in 2012.
Jimmy Buffet also predicted the world would end with a volcano.
I don't know!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
After all, when one of these super volcanoes goes off, there will likely be some seismic consequences and if the other volcano is ready to pop, that might just provide enough omph to make it go too...
(Insert hysterical sounds here)
Global warming! Global warming!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Good, now I will resolve the defect about my time counter being 32 bits and going to over flow in y2k32 as "not worth fixing."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Serious question, could bombing it reduce the pressure (causing it to erupt before critical pressure) and safely spew out the dangerous stuff?
What about a channel for the flows to the ocean / safe zone? Perhaps constructed by Mike Roark, using concrete barriers and a bus?
...it'll blow up on Dec. 21 2012.
If only because it'll be bloody inconvenient as we won't be able to shut up the 2012 doomsday nuts...ever.
The Wikipedia article linked from the /. summary states that the volcano last produced lava "between 890 and 271 thousand years ago". I'm not sure that really qualifies as "give or take a few years, 300.000 years ago".
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
times 130 equals what we humans are doing to the planet.
Mt St Helens was only one volcano.
You do the maths.
The actual volcano in question ISN'T a super volcano. It's a conventional volcano as it has a mountain peak. A super volcano never forms a mountain because of the size and speed of the eruption can't pile lava up to form a mountain peak. All there is of a super volcano is a large caldera at ground level, or perhaps in a valley (like at Yellowstone). However there ARE extinct super volcanos in the area (perhaps not so extinct?).
USA has been losing the drug war. After trillions of dollars spent with 3 (almost 4) decades of losses the WoD UStrategy has moved to mother-nature manipulation to initiate volcanic activity in global regions that produce and export drugs to US for power and profit. Finally a WoD UStrategy that will destroy the organic source of the problem. No more crops, way less consumers, and the end of another underground economy.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
except that volcanic soil is some of the most fertile, atleast, when it cools.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I need an aclaration, When an event, be it astronomical or geological is said to be occurring once every xxx years, and therefore is due, does it mean that there is a cyclical underlying cause which generates periodicity (accumulation of something etc) or does it mean that every year there is about 1/xxx probability of occurrence?
It's not a balloon; rock doesn't stretch. The pressure underneath is causing it to move. This causes a reduction in pressure. Therefore, the pressure will not build beyond the point where it causes the ground to move. There is no risk that this will erupt as long as it keeps letting the pressure off by deforming.
Can we wait until after the coming economic disaster and then zombie apocalypse is done for this natural disaster?
What people aren't understanding is Bolivia is the Saudi Arabia of Lithium. Lithium is that lovely metal that is used in all the battery tech, and one of the keys to a clean, electric future. It is also run by a hippie leftist, allied with Hugo "the tumor of South America" Chavez.
The "discovery" of this super volcano just provides an excuse for the U.S. military to send energy "advisers" down to "liberate" the Lithium before it is all destroyed in a "natural disaster".
Viva La Revolution!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Other countries swap the meaning of the comma and period compared to how we use them in the US. Considering that the submitter is named "dutchwhizzman", I think there's at least a decent chance he's not from the US.
But 300000 years to 6 digits is also an amazing precision.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Guess that trip to Bolivia I had planned just went out the window.
In all seriousness, though... will this affect me? If at all, how?
When one of these goes, say "Hello" to a small ice age, with a bit of acid rain thrown in for good measure...
If you are really paranoid, start focusing instead on large, inefficient houses for four, either tiny passivehouses, or larger houses able to house a couple generations, also passivehouse. Then turn the back yard into a nice and efficient greenhouse, designed to slump snow and ice off easily.
Worst case? Nothing happened, and you ended up with a house with no winter heating bill, and garden fresh tomatoes and squash in January.
If this thing erupts before SW:TOR comes out there is no god.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
No its not. 300000 has only one significant figure. 300000. however, is to an amazing precision as it has 6 of them.
3 x 10^5 vs 3.00000 x 10^5
In pure math, yes, they are the same number, however when dealing with measured quantities, significant figures matter. I learned it in high school but.... here you go if you are having trouble: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
#1 the volcano is not a supervolcano. It is surrounded by them, but is not one itself.
#2 it doesn't errupt every 300,000 years...it is able to build up for 300,000 years. It could have only started building up 1,000 years ago, or maybe 280,000, who knows.
A scientist on the team that notice the growth was quoted as saying "It's not a volcano that we think is going to erupt at any moment, but it certainly is interesting, because the area was thought to be essentially dead."
Since it appeared to be dead, it most likely has not been building since the day of the last erruption - there was a dormant period. It can build for 300,000 years. It last errupted 300,000 years ago. IE - evolutionarily speaking, homo sapiens won't exist by the time this thing errupts. And maybe, while evolving, we will have learned to spreading FUD.
now.
Tap it, bleed it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OTOH, it could take ten years to go from 'dormant' to 'exploding'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That if it were to start erupting. There is not one damned thing we could do about it. Nothing. Well placed nukes might change the pattern of eruption slightly, but that's about all. With a very few exceptions, we'd be king-hell fucked as a species.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
When I think of Caldera all I can think of is SCO. Can we just sink all SCO's lawyers in this thing? Whats the worst thing that could happen? At the least it would end up in 7 years of litigation before being allowed to blow up.
sure. And unicorns could pour out of it. The scientists who study these things however feel as though this particular volcano needs to be active for 300,000 years before errupting. Not dead - actively building up pressure. That it just happens to be approximately the same amount of time since last erruption as it would take to build up again is merely coincidence. Say it takes you 10 minutes to take a shower. 10 minutes after you get out of the shower, does that mean you're just about done with your next shower? No - you're no longer showering. The scientists think it takes 300,000 years for this volcano to take a shower. They didn't realize the water was turned on at all, but hey - now they know, cool, see you in a loooooooong time when you erupt, yo.
Obviously the conventions differ between countries; in Germany, 300000 has 6 significant digits (there's an official standard saying so, DIN 1333); if you want to write 1 significant digit, you have to write 3*10^5.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
USA has been losing the drug war. After trillions of dollars spent with 3 (almost 4) decades of losses the WoD UStrategy has moved to mother-nature manipulation to initiate volcanic activity in global regions that produce and export drugs to US for power and profit. Finally a WoD UStrategy that will destroy the organic source of the problem. No more crops, way less consumers, and the end of another underground economy.
I was wondering where the tin-foil hats came in; should have known there was a conspiracy involved somewhere.
Obviously I have not been wearing mine enough.
It is easy... we can put a lot of sea water into that volcano and build a giant steam engine over it. The whole thing will look very mechanical but it will be awesome!
Imagine, all that steam punk novels coming to life.
Good, I can't wait. I hope it erupts right on top of me, I'm ready.
Ik vermoed dat zijn Engels beter is dan jouw Nederlands.
It may not be trillions (plural), but it's $1 trillion over 40 years.
Thats only declared federal funding, state funding is twice that value. There are also tons of indirect costs of the drug war not included in either of those numbers.
You're not counting all the extra effects from the drug war. Not only is there money spent on actual enforcement (having cops go after dealers and users, having big bureaucracies to manage the whole thing (DEA), paying to keep dealers and non-violent users in prison), there's also the less-tangible effects of having all these people with felonies on their records after they get out who now can't get a real job, and are forced to turn to further crime to survive, which means many of them go right back to prison (at further taxpayer cost), and all of them are far less productive economically than they would be if it were all just legalized. We obviously never learned anything from Prohibition.
That $15B is federal only. State and local add at least $25B more. That's $1T every 25 years, so assuming constant dollars we're between one and two trillion dollars. Ass talking parent is correct.
Man, you really need that seminar!
They want to control the drug trade not stop it, US special forces heading in to rescue Bolivian drug cartel lords at eruption.
Oh, it was the hills. Run from the Hills!
That's truer than you might think.
It's worth noting that this sort of movement isn't particularly unusual. Sites of supervolcanoes routinely see lots of uplift and downlift. A 70 km wide area of uplift at a high rate does yield some cause for concern, but for example, the Yellowstone caldera has seen similar periods of uplift (though over smaller areas).
The thing gets more serious, if it is sustained for centuries or millennia. Which might be the case for this volcano.
Even if there is an eruption, it need not be a caldera blowout. For example, Yellowstone has erupted many times since the last major caldera eruption 640,000 years ago. The last eruption, which built Pitchstone Plateau 70,000 years ago released several cubic km of lava (and the largest of these eruptions is something like 50 cubic km which could reset the clock quite a bit for a major supervolcano eruption).
You probably Googled for "War on drugs costs" to get that figure. It's correct - the federal government claims to have spent about 15 Billion in 2010 on it's own website.
Maybe you missed the paragraph just below it saying "State and local governments spent at least another 25 billion dollars." As you put it, "assuming constant dollars..." We're up to "at least" 40 Billion per year currently and about 28 years to total a Trillion, and a War On Drugs over nearly twice that time, making Trillions closer to reasonable. Just adding in that state and local component puts us nearly at multiple Trillions.
Beyond that, it's common for parts of the costs of fighting the war on drugs to be hidden elsewhere. Building Prisons often isn't shown as a WOD cost, even though a lot of it has been just that. The US typically, almost invariably, builds prisons because of overcrowding in older facilities rather than because they are wearing out. Then there's the staffing of those prisons - guards, wardens, and related cost money. That 15 Billion you quoted includes some prison costs, but the way the government calculates them assumes that a lot of prisons would be wearing out from age and so considerably understates how much of the prison building and staffing is WOD related.
Then there's foreign aid, a LOT of which is really drug enforcement when you're talking about Central America. (I don't want to suggest a lot of foreign aid in total is WOD related, as when we're talking "foreign aid in total" it's essentially an Israel/Mideast security related issue, but foreign aid to Central and South America and the Caribbean runs way above aid to, say, Africa over the long haul). When we supply, say, Columbia, with assault helicopters to track down Cocaine plantations, that's often carried in the foreign aid budget, and if we have to supply any of Colombia's neighbors, that don't provide so much raw Cocaine, with weapons (to balance the political situation we are destabilizing by giving one regional power all the neat toys), that's always carried in the foreign aid column.
Multiple full squadrons of assault helicopters, training and basing for them, attack helicopters to protect the assault helicopters when the plantations started deploying shoulder mounted rocket launchers, high grade crypto and commo that we don't export elsewhere (because the plantation owners can afford to hack and eavesdrop on older commo), and maintenance for all that - it isn't cheap. Then we have to let someone else in the region have a foreign aid grant to buy, say, destroyer escorts from US approved firms, so that the regional balance of power is maintained. Then our conservative politicians tell their base how foreign aid is all driven by liberals.
You can find funding that's really WOD related in quite a few areas beyond prisons and foreign aid. Part of the Dept of the Interior budget is for keeping people from growing dope in national parks, giving rangers better armament and more practice time. We use Dept. of the Interior personnel to search for tunnels along isolated parts of the US/Canadian border, and even sometimes the Mexican border. There's a line in the overall Homeland Security budget that's about 1/3rd of the FBI total budget. It's for the FBI to run ranges to train all the other security agencies like BATF or Treasury in firearms use. The DEA's weapon's training is thus not carried as a DEA cost any more, since the USA PATRIOT act consolidated that cost. Then the CIA and NSA lend some of their high tech support to the WOD, and it isn't always carried openly in that '15 Billion for 2010" figure either, but its impossible to tell just how much is hidden when you're talking about agencies whose whole budget is basically a black box item. Try adding in such things, and we could make a pretty good case for over 3 Trillion. For all we can be sure of, there's WOD funding shifted to Dept. of Energy, Educ
Who is John Cabal?
Well you learn something new every day. I tried to check up on this but, the german wikipedia is the only place where I found info, and all the german I know, I learned from watching Hogan's Heros reruns as a kid.
I did find one website offering to, I think, sell me a pdf of this standard, but, if I was reading right, they were trying to charge 81 euros for it.... for which amount, I am happy to tell them where to stuff their PDF.
In any case, i defer to your claims of knowledge of international standards then.... but this is english, and I am in America, so.... the rest of the world is a bunch of drooling heathens anyway.... so my point still stands. God Bless America... and nowhere else! Now...someone pass me a bud light.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'm too lazy, but pretty sure this HAS HAPPENED in the past, maybe not to a drug cartel lord but to other anti-US figures.
...War was Beginning.
It is a StratoVolcano not a Caldera. It doesn't do Caldera type things.
mother-nature manipulation to initiate volcanic activity
I wasn't even aware this was possible at our current level of technology. Can you link to an article describing how this is done?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Why the hell wouldn't we put as much of our resources as we can into finding a way to suppress the eruption, or at the very least, find a way to turn lava into some other substance that doesn't kill everything.
Why not use a nuclear bomb or something else with a lot of explosive power to blast a big hole in it and let out some of that pressure early?
Its amazing that we have all these "problems" and yet still somehow as a planet we always thrive. Why not focus on that for awhile?
The planet thrives, because life is surprisingly resilient. Individual species, however, are much less so. Historically, supervolcanoes are extinction or near-extinction events, there's plenty of evidence for that.
Perhaps we could offset the nuclear winter by putting out more greenhouse gasses? :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
yet another Ubuntu derivative?
A good reason to get our act together and throw parts of our civilization out into space, perhaps? I mean, better do it now before something like this cripples our space-travel abilities forever and war for resources wipes out the rest of us.
You could argue about whether it matters if we survive as a species or not, but I would argue that we are almost obliged to try our best at doing just that. What else could be more important, if you at all care about anything except your short-term survival and enjoyment of life.
But it isn't worth expanding into space! Oh no, we have to get our problems here on Earth figured out firs... wait, what's that big cloud of ash rising all about?
Nothing really depressing about that. Just shows what a random insignificant piece of this whole puzzle we really are. Which is again not depressing, but rather amazing that we can do so much, given that fact. Sure we have limitations, but that's ok.
Why not get Zalman to create the worlds largest heat sync and place it on top of the volcano -- combined with geothermal-tech you could effectively cool down the core of the volcano and harness some pretty good energies from it too.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
With a very few exceptions, we'd be king-hell fucked as a species.
Um, dude, 300,000 years is a long time but not THAT long. Early humans would have been around when that thing blew up last and there are obviously plenty of creatures still here.
It will certainly screw with our society (darkened skies aren't going to help agriculture or solar power) but it's still only South America that needs to really worry about it.
meh, we're like roaches. some of us would survive.
the genetic bottleneck from inbreeding would probably change us as a species... be interesting to see what walked out the other side... we might not even recognize the resultant organism as "human" anymore!
About 15 -20 years ago in California there was a several year rising of a mountainous area in middle of the state. I forget the name; it was near or on the San Andreas fault. It lasted several years. Fears that it was portending The Big One were unfounded. Eventually it faded away.
Anonymous....because I read slashdot. (but mostly just too lazy to register for yet another site)
I'm waiting for the Long Term Support version of Uturuncu to come out, but I can't find any release date announcement on Canonical's web site. What gives?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yup. It's pretty much Game Over when that caldera erupts.
Detonating nuclear weapons into or around a volcanic eruption will only spread the joy faster. In addition to having hot ash and sulfuric aerosol compounds spreading around the world's atmosphere, we would have radioactive fallout --boosted by the force of the volcano's blast.
I wish we had put more stock into finding a way to live off-planet. You know, 20/20 hindsight and all that rubbish.
As it sits today, we -humans- are at the planet's mercy.
(I guess Mt. Toba didn't teach us enough.)
How's your lava-surfing skills?
Just 1 of these SVs erupting wouldn't eradicate humans. However, do sign up for notifications from the usgs really earthquakes-this exploding will cause the earth to move :)
The last mass extinction event happened 440 million years ago and this thing erupts every 300,000 years. Doesn't sound like it's quite that cataclysmic.
Obviously I have not been wearing mine enough.
Dude, if you're not wearing it all the time, that's not enough.
Do you think the New World Order stop their mind manipulation rays just because you take a shower or go to sleep?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yeah, they'd make it radioactive lava, which would add an extra element of fun.
Nah, not that bad. We'd survive quite happily. Our civilization might to hell in a handbasket, but our species would be just fine. As an aside; you know when people say "I couldn't possibly live without [insert technology]?"
They're wrong.
Yes, we disagree. Think longer and harder about the pre-requisites required for producing our technology. It all interlocks and interconnects, and pull out enough, and most of it will collapse.
Also, I think the knowledge would disppear pretty quick. You can't really read a CD if you don't have a working computer.... And microchip fabs and CD factories are very complicated affairs, that basically sit on the pinnacle of our technology.
--PM
I suspect whenever they refer to themselves as "indios" they are
(1) speaking ironicly, or
(2) filling out a government form, or
(3) both.
Y soy un gringo.
--
If this is a war of wits, I'm a conscientious objector.
and yet still somehow as a planet we always thrive
We as in dinosaurs? We as in what? Geologically speaking bad shit happens to species all the time. Study mass extinctions that have killed a large percentage of all species. They are rare events, but they do happen. Will it be tomorrow, next week, next 1 million years, that we don't know. The problem is we as humans know extinction events exist, but events occur at timescales that the human mind doesn't easily comprehend. We tend to live in today and worry about tomorrow, therefore if an event will occur in the future our worry says that's tomorrow.
a great venue for relocating the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
There's been a lot of great banter back and forth about mitigating the eruption, altering the force/volume of the eruption, diverting the eruption, degassing the magma at depth, so on, so-forth, ad infinitim. The "let's change-it theorizers" have lost their battle: it's much too big for humans to manage or alter.
The fantastic theories of somehow keeping the Uturuncu world-killer at bay are simply that: fantasies.
So, bottom line: Other than kissing our asses goodbye, what can we humans do when that 40-mile-wide caldera erupts?
There's been a lot of great banter back and forth about mitigating the eruption, altering the force/volume of the eruption, diverting the eruption, degassing the magma at depth, so on, so-forth, ad infinitem. The "let's change-it theorizers" have lost their battle: it's much too big for humans to manage or alter.
The fantastic theories of somehow keeping the Uturuncu world-killer at bay are simply that: fantasies.
So, bottom line: Other than kissing our asses goodbye, what can we humans do when that 40-mile-wide caldera erupts?
You make a good point. The "fantasizers" up here are quickly becoming educated to the fact that uber-Uturuncu is of such size, heat, pressure and complexity that there is absolutely nothing that any one can do to alter the eruption event or its aftermath. We haven't the technology or know how.
What we know about ultra-large eruptions indicates that if uber-Uturuncu erupts even a fractional amount of the magma in its rapidly growing chamber, earth will become inhospitable, the food chain will breakdown and much or all multi-cellular life will face termination.
As Sagan and Hawking have both pointed out, we humans still have all of our eggs in one basket. We don't yet have a way to get off-planet in order to provide continuity for humankind or any other forms of life.
Hmm. That brings up the question about the US government's recently revealed, so-called "Hundred Year Starship" project. Do they foresee the impending eruption, and is this their attempt to get off-planet in order to "save some for later?" I dunno.
My read of the situation is that life's reset button is about to be pressed again (it's happened many times before). We're faced with a problem so unimaginably large, complex and beyond our means, that we will not be able to avoid, alter or survive it. I think that nothing short of some kind of Divine Intervention will change that. And isn't it just like them to have run out of Divine just when we need it to intervene the most. Like has happened with life's earlier predecessors, we're fucked.
I just answered someone else's post about What Can We Do if Uturuncu super-erupts, and an interesting thought occurred to me.
Very recently, the US DARPA (the government's defence advanced projects wing) and NASA have announced the Hundred Year Starship project that has a stated goal of sending humans on a one-way pioneering trip to Mars. (The DARPA part of it is what interests me and I think the "Hundred Year" part of the name is a misdirection: They could do it today, if they pulled out all stops.)
Could this project be the US government's way of saying that they expect an Extinction-Level Event and are trying to get a few of us off-planet before it happens?
If I remember correctly, the Pleistocene era (the period of the "ice ages") lasted a couple of million years, and may have been preceded or brought on by extremely large volcanic eruptions like the one that we fear will come from Uturunctu. Humankind evolved from rather base forms during that time and survived into the warmer Holocene in which we now live (about 10,000 years or so).
My questions: Have we been here before? Is this what happened to humankind or perhaps other animals before? Did we or another animal form develop to some high degree and then a catastrophic event knocked us back to primitive status and then we developed again? I know that we haven't found many ancient artifact of civilizations but, then again, if we're talking about time on the scale of millions of years it really doesn't matter what we or they may have made, the remnants of those societies, the people and whatever they made would be decimated by the ravages of time and this planet's proclivities for destruction.
Am I making any sense here? Does anyone else think about this kind of thing? Is this possible or am I just way off base?
We where getting a bit too make money only ish anyway.
I thought it was a good guess for a BS-conspiracy. I mean SciFic is supposed to be fact based guesses stretched to the breaking point of sensible.
The WoD is a failure, I got that fact right. Also, the underground iconoclast drug economy and culture may subversively supplant the status quo; much like the USA prohibition rum-runners descendents that became congress-persons, senators, and presidents.
"Reality is self-induced hallucination."
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
End the WoD to help pay down the national debt, take the underground economy into the public marketplace and tax the drug-C*Os, distributors, and dealers. End the drug-war killings in the USA, Mexico .... Reduce prison over crowding, put more police on the street, reduce the size of many very large federal agencies ....
This is starting to sound like an ideal POTUS campaign agenda for US.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?