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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...
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.
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I think a caldera is just the left over empty bowl of a volcano that collapses in on itself or explodes out. Like Crater Lake in Oregon.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I suspect worrying about the legal system will be way down the list if a super volcano erupts underneath you.
I don't think you know how bad supervolcanoes are.
Think Mt. St. Helens.
Then multiply it by 1000. At once. Just for this guy. It would be bad. A lot of people on different continents would die from lack of food because the growing season would be nonexistent for many people. For years.
If the Siberian Traps go, we're all fucked. That's called an extinction event.
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BMO
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".
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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?
A supervolcano is *significantly* larger than the largest recorded volcanic eruption, on the order of ten times or more. The last one, Lake Toba, was 70,000 years ago, or so. And according to what I have read, mitochondrial DNA shows a genetic bottleneck around that time where something reduced the human population down to a few tens of thousands across the entire world. And this is back when humans were a lot better at moving around and hunting and gathering getting their own food.
It would make the current level of human climate change look like a joke in particularly bad taste.
The largest volcanic eruption in historic times, in 1815 at Mount Tambora, ejected the equivalent of around 100 km3 (24 cu mi) of dense rock and made 1816 the "Year Without a Summer" in the whole northern hemisphere. The Lake Toba explosion ejected 2,800 km3 (670 cu mi) and probably created volcanic equivalent of a Nuclear winter for years, not to mention the acidic rain and other fun volcanic stuff.
You can read most of this at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
So yeah, we are talking about an apocalyptic scenario if this thing, or one of the other ones goes off any time soon. Billions would die, absolutely guaranteed.
Meh, there are a lot of meaty animals around if we get hungry. Why, I recently heard of this one species with 7 billion members, spread all around the world. Plenty to eat for years.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Not really. The poster was explaining that volcanic eruptions have a relatively short time effect on the climate. The first year after the eruption, the effect is big, and then exponentially decays with each passing year.
This means that a volcano is not going to give any kind of relief. A small eruption only means a few cool years before the global warming resumes on the old trend. A large eruption would cause a longer cooling period, but would kill most life in the first year. Either way, we're hosed.
There are no 'goldilocks eruptions' that would bring relief from global warming for a few decades, without causing substantial harm themselves.
Surely you mean Dome-sday ;)
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#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.
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.
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I don't think you have the right concept of the fragility of our current system.
Agriculture will fail worldwide. Period. We don't have 2-3 years of food stockpiled. Period. People will rapidly eat all the food available, and anything that can be turned into food. Any "complex protective shelter" will be stormed and looted. Think zombie apocalypse, except everyone is starving rather than undead.
Any resource that *could* sustainably support a reduced population through the course of the disaster will, because of our excessive population, be used un-sustainably and destroyed, thus leaving everyone to starve.
Transport & power production will soon fail without society to maintain them. Any remaining enclaves will be too small to self-sustain technology. You can kiss technology goodbye, except for whatever remnants that can work without power.
Yes, technically, humans have the capability to survive much better than our prehistoric ancestors, IF we reduce our population to maybe 300M worldwide, and invest in massive amounts of stored food and complex protective shelters for EVERYONE.
As things stand now, I think about the only places that stand a chance would be inaccessible tropical islands where the locals limit the population to what their environment can sustain.
On a very grim note, I wonder, if we formed a cannabilistic pyramid, how many people would be left after maybe five years, when agriculture could restart? Humm, assuming you'd have to eat 5 people/year to live, after five years, we're down to 3200 people, very similar to the past genetic bottleneck....
--PM
Protip: if 5% of a species survives, it's not extinct. But even 50% of humans dying would be considered bad.
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!
Protip: if 5% of a species survives, it's not extinct. But even 50% of humans dying would be considered bad.
Depends: which 50% is my mother-in-law in?
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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?