New Computer Model Predicts Impact of Yellowstone Volcano Eruption

An anonymous reader writes Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have used a program named Ash 3D to predict the impact of a Yellowstone volcano eruption, and found that cities within 300 miles from Yellowstone National Park may get covered by up to three feet of ash. From the article: "Ash3D helped the researchers understand how the previous eruptions created a widespread distribution of ash in places in the park's periphery. Aside from probing ash-distribution patterns, the Ash3D can also be used to identify potential hazards that volcanoes in Alaska may bring."

Comments

Do they know more than they let on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow ... there is a lot of talk about the Yellowstone volcano. Do the authorities know more than they are saying to the public? Why all of the sudden interest in Yellowstone? Is an eruption imminent and we are not being told?

Re:Do they know more than they let on?

[niftymitch]

Wow ... there is a lot of talk about the Yellowstone volcano. Do the authorities know more than they are saying to the public? Why all of the sudden interest in Yellowstone? Is an eruption imminent and we are not being told?

As a geologist the impact, size and risk of Yellowstone has been an ongoing learning experience.

Yellowstone like large eruptions and large asteroid impacts are global game changers.
Any that wake up in the morning and think about this get concerned.

Both issues invoke magical thinking... we could make the problem go away by -________-.

What we do know is that historic eruptions did blanket North America with ash,
we also have some decent data about how many and how often and when we
might be due...

The un-interesting bit is the mumble foo about a computer program. Some think
this is adding to the knowledge but the reality is hand drawn maps from
20 years ago tell the same OMG KYAGB story.

Add regions of Indonesia to the list right along side the Mammoth Mtn. caldera in California.

These game changing big events are well beyond any FEMA planning.
Have a good cup of tea and enjoy the fireworks.

Re: Do they know more than they let on?

[Type44Q]

Yeah, like, how much would it suck to be in a deadly car crash and get struck by lightning, like, at the same time, doood??!

Re:Do they know more than they let on?

[ShanghaiBill]

isnt this what happened in pompeii?

No. Pompeii was destroyed by a pyroclastic flow, which is only a danger in the immediate vicinity of the eruption. The danger from Yellowstone is that it could blanket much of the continent with ash.

Re:Do they know more than they let on?

[Nimey]

You're trolling and not actually that stupid, right?

Re:Do they know more than they let on?

[evilviper]

Wow ... there is a lot of talk about the Yellowstone volcano. Do the authorities know more than they are saying to the public? Why all of the sudden interest in Yellowstone?

Because people got tired of hearing about extinction-level asteroids... The Yellowstone Supervolcano was just the next ready standby to scare the public and get more viewers. I suppose it was the Y2K thing that taught the media herd that terrifying the public with BS is profitable, and they've kept it up ever since.

Sure, we've got Ebola now, but it's not as visual and a bit more mundane than the crazy and exotic ways to end civilization that the media finds most profitable.

Re:Do they know more than they let on?

[david_thornley]

To repeat, Y2K was a non-event because of lots of work leading up to it. As with anything with the potential to go wrong, there was a lot of overhype, but there were a lot of real problems that were averted.

We do have the tech to take a darn good shot at deflecting an asteroid. It would be really expensive (but cheap given the alternative), and it wouldn't necessarily work, but we could probably nudge an asteroid, and if we tracked it far enough in advance of the collision that's all it would take. I don't even know how we're going to stop Yellowstone. Drilling into a caldera to relieve the pressure sounds way optimistic to me. How do you make sure it doesn't relieve all at once (possibly by freeing gas dissolved in magma)?

Pleasantly Surprised

[wisnoskij]

That the Title does not read: 'New Model Predicts You're Doom' Or: 'Volcano Going to Rain Death on Eastern America'

300 Miles context

[wisnoskij]

Putting that into context, a circle with the radius of 300 miles produces an area 282743 mi^2 or 732301 km^2. Which is moderately bigger than Texas and about 10% of the area of the continental USA.

Re:300 Miles context

[fermion]

To put it into more context, the area we talking about is so sparsely population that is should be classified as frontier and not a state. The real, short term damage, is most going to be agricultural. However long term any eruption is going to beneficial as the climate changes and the area becomes even more important important for agriculture.

Re:300 Miles context

[careysub]

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude. This would be a much bigger deal than the year without a summer, which caused mass starvation. The short term damage would be a significant percentage of everything starving to death. There would be next to no crop land left in all of North America for decades, perhaps centuries.

It is worth noting that currently the world only maintains a 74 day supply of grain. A super-eruption of this kind would effectively shut down agriculture everywhere. About half of the world's grain is directly consumed as food, so if we immediately divert all grain use (feed lots, fuel and industrial use, etc.) to direct basic food use we could double that to 148 days, then we run out completely.

Of course this ideal model of even distribution is not reality: poorer places and food importers run out much faster, richer and food producing places would last longer - maybe a year? But the dramatic cooling which prevents crop production would probably last a number of years. All of the major food crops are sub-tropical species whose productivity are very sensitive to temperature. Even after the period of outright crop failure ends, productivity will be reduced. And as lgw states, the grain belt in the U.S. (~15% of world grain production) would be out of production entirely long after the direct cooling from the ash dissipated.

Another reference point is the Great Famine of 1315-1317 presumably caused by the eruption of Mt. Tarawera in New Zealand, which ejected about 6 cubic kilometers of ash, only 0.6% of a Yellowstone super eruption. The Great Famine resulted from two years of crop failure, with normal food supplies not being restored until 1325. Depending on region 10-25% of the population of Europe died. (The Black Death showed up 22 years later, the poor health of those who lived through the famine perhaps contributing to its development and toll.)

It would be safe to estimate that the majority of the world's population would die, probably a large majority.

BBC Supervolcano model

[TheRealHocusLocus]

I loved the neat 3D simulator the BBC fabricated for their docudrama Supervolcano. After the run one of the geologists (played by Gary Lewis) says, "[laughing] That's great... and if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their little green asses hoppin' around, eh? [...] You're letting yourself be spooked by a video game!"

Great TEOTWAWKI drama, decent science, I recommend it: Supervolcano Ep1, Supervolcano Ep2, and the companion factual documentary Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone which re-uses CGI footage made for the drama between interviews.

Food, water, climate change

[myid]

An article by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) briefly mentions climate change, but the article is mostly about how much ash that would fall on the continental US. The article also says, "... multiple inches of ash can damage buildings, block sewer and water lines, and disrupt livestock and crop production ...".

Those are my main concerns - Ash on the ground disrupting the production of food and clean water and getting them to people, and ash in the atmosphere causing climate change.

Re:If yellow stone blows

[Ol Olsoc]

Won't impact anyone.

10 years? We'll all have long past starved to death. Yellowstone blowing big is a mass extinction event, period, for many species. It's probably safe to say that most large carnivores, globally, wouldn't survive.

Maybe it's the Rapture.

Here is a map that shows the ash coverage.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm?clat=44.427963&clng=-110.58845500000001&r=482.8032001844076&lc=FFFFFF&lw=1&fc=00FF00&fs=true

Re:Here is a map that shows the ash coverage.

[argStyopa]

First, I'm not sure if you made that yourself, or what, but that's just a circle of X radius around Yellowstone - that might be useful if the Earth had no atmosphere, I guess?

Prevailing winds and jet stream guarantee a more distributed pattern downwind, significantly different than a simple circle.

BTW, the original article is missing pretty much anything of substance, and is written atrociously: "...In the Midwest, a few centimeters of ash is projected to be plummeted while coastal cities will have a few millimeter of ash buildup..."
"...to be plummeted..."?

AN ACTUAL MAP FROM ASH 3d:
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx...

And an actual article that explains that whole "sciencey" stuff:
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-y...
Their slightly more substantive version of the above paragraph:
"...In the simulated modern-day eruption scenario, cities within 500 kilometers (311 miles) of Yellowstone like Billings, Montana, and Casper, Wyoming, would be covered by centimeters (inches) to more than a meter (more than three feet) of ash. Upper Midwestern cities, like Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Des Moines, Iowa, would receive centimeters (inches), and those on the East and Gulf coasts, like New York and Washington, D.C. would receive millimeters or less (fractions of an inch). California cities would receive millimeters to centimeters (less than an inch to less than two inches) of ash while Pacific Northwest cities like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, would receive up to a few centimeters (more than an inch)...."

Don't worry... only a computer model

[Tanuki64]

Since computer models and simulations are rarely 100% precise one can ignore them. See climate models. There is no climate change and probably no Yellowstone volcano either. Probably not even a place with the name 'Yellowstone'.

Re: If yellow stone blows

[ovit]

It erupts every 600 thousand years... While things like bears are probably somewhat different over that span, they certainly could not have evolved completely in that time.. Which to me means there must be plenty of survivors when this occurs.

Game changing big events beyond any planning?

[Paul Fernhout]

Our current economic system has created existential risks by discounting the risks of centralization and just-in-time production and just-barely-works systems without huge margins of resiliency. One tragedy-in-the-making example is the USA recently selling off its emergency strategic grain supplies.
http://ppjg.me/2010/11/12/usda...
http://articles.latimes.com/20...

The USA could as a nation be putting in place a more distributed resilient production system (including indoors food production or even space habitats) to ensure the safety of its citizenry even under huge unexpected disasters. The USA has chosen not too because it does not fit with the current economic dogma that discount such "black swan" existential risks. Hurricane Katrina is an example of failure to systemically plan for obvious serious weather-related risks, Given that example, it is unlikely we can expect the USA to plan for even rarer risks like supervolcanoes, solar flares, pandemics, rogue AI technology, asteroid strikes, economic meltdown, civil war, or whatever else. Still, if you add up all the rare risks, taken together, the probability of some sort of "black swan" event may not otherwise be as rare as one might expect -- and they can all be addressed to some extent by creating a more resilient decentralized infrastructure and promoting more cooperation among people (rather than competition).

I find that situation frustrating because I find issues about resiliency to be very interesting civil defense problems to think about (e.g. my OSCOMAK idea), but the current notion of national security is focused on intrinsic unilateral military might, not intrinsic mutual resilient security. The "Lifeboat Foundation" and "The Living Universe Foundation" though are examples of some groups that have concerns in this area -- but with little funding and lots of competition for that funding compared with the effectively trillion US dollars a year the USA spends (or effectively incurs) annually for military-oriented defense.

Like George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/a...
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield [or a three foot deep ash field...]"

A resilient infrastructure coincidentally is also more compatible with "democracy" since there can't be real political democracy without some level of financial and material independence for the citizenry. At least the Maker movement is a bit of hope there. As are the changing economics of indoor agriculture given LED lights and robotics, even without potentially cheaper energy supplies if either hot fusion or LENR/QuantumEnergy/ColdFusion turns out to be workable.

Re:If yellow stone blows

[hierofalcon]

No, not the rapture. But it could create conditions that are described in passages of Revelation post-Rapture.