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Yellowstone Supervolcano Even Bigger Than We Realized
The Washington Post reports that the "supervolcano" beneath Yellowstone National Park (which, thankfully, did not kill us all in 2004, or in 2008 ) may be more dangerous when it does erupt than anyone realized until recently. Scientists have today published a paper documenting their discovery of an even
larger, deeper pool of magma below the already huge reservoir near the surface. From the article:
On Thursday, a team from the University of Utah published a study, in the journal Science, that for the first time offers a complete diagram of the plumbing of the Yellowstone volcanic system.
The new report fills in a missing link of the system. It describes a large reservoir of hot rock, mostly solid but with some melted rock in the mix, that lies beneath a shallow, already-documented magma chamber. The newly discovered reservoir is 4.5 times larger than the chamber above it. There's enough magma there to fill the Grand Canyon. The reservoir is on top of a long plume of magma that emerges from deep within the Earth's mantle. ...
“This is like a giant conduit. It starts down at 1,000 kilometers. It's a pipe that starts down in the Earth," said Robert Smith, emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Utah and a co-author of the new paper. ... The next major, calderic eruption could be within the boundaries of the park, northeast of the old caldera. “If you have this crustal magma system that is beneath the pre-Cambrian rocks, eventually if you get enough fluid in that system, enough magma, you can create another caldera, another set of giant explosions," Smith said. "There’s no reason to think it couldn’t continue that same process and repeat that process to the northeast.”
Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom.
Seems like these stories always come with quite a bit of fear mongering. We all died without the new findings, and we still die with them. *shrug* Kind of like fretting about a giant asteroid impact. Some things are out of our control, and fear/panic won't change that.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's been an oil producing area for over 100 years
And maybe mitigate or eliminate a possible extinction event down the road.
That's what I keep thinking: too bad we can't mine all that energy such that we'd be killing two birds with one stone: getting energy AND draining the heat from that spot, reducing the risk or magnitude of a volcanic explosion.
It's kind of like using ocean water to solve coastal droughts: all that water sitting right next to us, but no practical way to turn it into potable water. It's a tease; at least with current technology.
Table-ized A.I.
That's been mentioned before, but apparently the very act of drilling could weaken the structure to force it to erupt.
Having said that, one might be able to drill from a decent angle to maintain structure integrity as I've shown here.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Chile's Calbuco volcano erupted on April 22, "at around 1800 local time". The second picture in this article shows the eruption at sunset. From that picture, you can see that the ash and smoke from the eruption have begun to spread. According to this web page, sunset in Chile these days is about 7:10 pm. So about an hour after the eruption, the clouds of dust and smoke had already started to spread.
Does anyone know if the smoke and ash particles are magnetic? If so, then maybe we can cut down on their spread through the atmosphere, by putting billions of magnetically-charged balloons into the atmosphere above Yellowstone, just before the eruption. Hopefully they would attract some of the smoke and ash particles, and eventually fall back to the earth.
(Of course, this assumes that we'll have a few hours warning before the eruption, and that the balloons are all ready to go.)
Living just northeast of Yellowstone means never having to worry about saying goodbye. It'll be over so fast you'll miss it.
Build a trench from yellowstone to the grand canyon.
I have a question. Just what is being consumed to keep such a monstrous magma chamber X2 burning? Coal? Oil? something is keeping it molten.
The souls of the damned.
A super volcano could be extinction event if it is big enough.
Not unless it is a lot bigger. The one that occurred around the time of the extinction of the Dinosaurs gave rise to the Deccan Traps.
To put the scale of this extinction-level eruption in context the article mentions that the new, larger chamber under Yellowstone contains enough magma to fill the Grand Canyon which according to here is 4,170 cubic kilometres. The Deccan trap eruptions produced 512,000 cubic kilometres over 30k years. A Yellowstone eruption would certainly cause a lot of devastation over a large area of North America but its peanuts compared to an extinction level event.
Thank goodness the republicans have cut funding for projects like these out of the new NSF geosciences budget.
The last thing we need to do is learn about the risk associated with living on our planet. No doubt it will be far better if the residents of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and points east never worry about science and certainly a lot cheaper just to refer to such potential catastrophe as the "rapture". After all, who needs scientists when we have Michelle Bachmann?
The most recent VEI8 was Taupo, only 24,500 years ago. Previous was Toba, 74k years ago, Neither was an extinction event.
We've had quite recent VEI7: Tambora (1815), Samalas (1257), Taupo {again) (180) and Thera (1620BC). None of these was remotely an extinction event (though it probably sucked to be a Minonan at the time).
If Yellowstone pops at VEI7 it will suck to be near and there will be a long, cold winter or two, worldwide. VEI8 will be worse, which is to say very bad. But the Southern Hemisphere should be slightly better. Note that the Aborigines have been in Australia for over 40,000 years, so they survived the nearby Taupo bang.
Uh, Maine is still there.
I thought it was widely known that when Yellowstone finally does go up, that will be an extinction-level event. Most of the planet will become completely uninhabitable for decades.
Not true. We need to remember that there are more than 100 known caldera eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot as it migrated from eastern Oregon to its present location over the past 16 million years. None of these eruptions, including the big eruption of 2 million years ago, are tied to known global extinction events over this time period.
Sure, if you were a plant or animal with a limited range too close to one of these supervolcano eruptions, you were out of luck, but we don't see global impact over the known lifespan of the hotspot. If it were remotely as bad as you claim, we would have seen some obvious signs of it in the fossil record, which we don't.
Further, why would the Earth's atmosphere become unbreathable? Sure, there's a lot of ash and gases released in a supervolcano eruption. But the Earth's atmosphere is much bigger than that and most of those gases, aside from carbon dioxide and other relatively insoluble gases, would wash out in rain. The remnant that remains in the stratosphere wouldn't have much effect precisely because of how little there is in the stratosphere.
Prepping for this is a joke. No power, no running water, no crops, no breathable air on the surface, for years and years. Your basement shelter won't keep you alive for a month under those conditions.
Enough lead time and you can prep for anything nature throws at you other than universe-scale problems like the heat death of the universe. Maybe even that can be managed successfully though I'm not feeling up to it.
Be sure to save game first - you may need to re-load if you don't get it quite right.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Enough lead time and you can prep for anything nature throws at you other than universe-scale problems like the heat death of the universe. Maybe even that can be managed successfully though I'm not feeling up to it.
Yeah, so we know that the sun will burn out in ~5 billion years. Get cracking.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Just wait for winter, it'll snow a lot at Yellowstone and that should put the volcano out.
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Some forms of life on Earth have survived these eruptions before, but there are no guarantees humans would be so lucky.
Having said that, one might be able to drill from a decent angle to maintain structure integrity as I've shown here.
I fully expected goatse or rickroll or something - very disappointed!
I read that the first time as 5 million.
Had me in a bit of a panic for a moment.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Here's to hoping they don't find any oil there, given the earthquakes it's caused in OK.
The magma is so close to the surface that there won't be the usual layer after deeper layer of hydrocarbons to go after.
Better yet: Here's hoping they find oil near the surface, extract it, and then turn the oil deposit wells into geothermal loops.
What an opportunity! We can extract high quality geothermal energy from the site AND cool the rock near the surface to prevent an eruption.
Disclaimer: I am not a geologist so this probably makes no sense at all
Maybe you will. I plan to live forever, possibly as a fish, or maybe a sentient brassiere.
1. The Russians came out last week and stated that they were specifically targeting Yellowstone with nukes as a way to take out at least 2/3 of the US. They seem to think if they can get penetration with several nukes they can kick off an eruption. Crazy Russians. Maybe we do live in a glass house after all. 2. Since we seem to be able to create earth quakes by simply dumping salt water and waste water into miles deep caverns below West Texas and Oklahoma why can't we use that water to cool and solidify and artificially stabilize the magma chamber. In Iceland they were able to cool lava flows and they have saved several towns by pumping cool ocean water on the on coming lava flows. You would think that we can truly become masters of this planet.
Paul E. Bahre