Here you go Q.E.D.
The picture does make it look pretty dangerous though.
Yes, it is quite dangerous to drill to such depths. But just allowing supervolcanoes to explode and pretty much wipe out the Midwest is also quite dangerous, especially to Midwesterners, but also possibly to folks on the East Coast. When the downside is so high, it’s worthwhile thinking about some fairly risky options, eh?
You sure about that Q?
I have collegue here at school who is a geologist and I think he may disagree that there is absolutely no way to predict when something is going to blow. However, he is all the way across campus and I’m sure infront of a class right now. I may see him at lunch, if so I’ll ask him.
Well, in general, humanity hasn’t demonstrated a great deal of effectiveness when it comes to long-term planning involving the cooperation of vast numbers of people. There are a handful of exceptions, but by and large trying to get millions of people to agree on anything is like trying to steer eels with chopsticks.
I’ll give you three various examples from here in Seattle. First, we’ve known for thirty years that a failure to intelligently manage traffic would eventually put a stranglehold on the economy, and yet here we are, thirty years later, having done exactly zero about it. Likewise, we strongly suspected months in advance that Mt. St. Helens was going to erupt, and violently, and yet we all seemed hugely surprised when it actually happened and killed all the people who hadn’t gotten around to leaving the area yet. And we also know that Seattle (and the Pacific Northwest in general) is overdue for a devastating earthquake centered on the subduction zone along the coast, which is expected to measure between eight and nine and last at least a minute, but we’re doing fuck-all to plan for it. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I have a hard time believing we’ll do any better when faced with an event of the magnitude (and the vague timing) of the Yellowstone caldera.
And besides, what are we doing to do, really? Evacuate the whole country west of the Mississippi? When? Based on the St. Helens experience, the vulcanologists couldn’t be more specific than “sometime between a week and a year from now,” so nobody paid attention. I have a difficult time imagining a more precise prediction for Yellowstone. And even if we do get even a majority of a hundred and ten million people to pick up their lives and move, where do we put them?
No, sadly, I think we’re just going to have to let it happen, and then the survivors can stand around and blame each other while hosing off the ashes, per our standard behavior following such an event, and then, predictably, go back to business as usual while learning and doing nothing that will help deal with the next giant problem, whether it’s global warming or a killer asteroid or a giant radioactive lizard in the Sea of Japan or whatever.
While I was thinking about this thread over the weekend, something occurred to me: What separates us from the animals is that we are able to look into the future and predict and prepare for things that haven’t happened yet. What we have in common with the animals is that we don’t.
Prediction of volcanic eruptions has been given a useful tool by physicist Bernard Chouet.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/volcanohell.shtml
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/volcano/chouet.html
It remains to be seen wether this approach works for all volcanos, so far so good.
This is highly relevant
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/973040/posts
Looking at the diagram it would seem to predict that a Yellowstone event could be anything up 600 cubic miles of ash thrown out, but could also be a whole lot less too.
So you have several differant scenaria, from a Santorini/Tambora scale event at the lower end of the scale, which in mankind terms would be just a small but spectacular distraction, right up to an event that could severely inconvenience many insurance institutions and perhaps completely change human civilisation as a side effect too.
While that may be true with typical volcanoes, what we are dealing with under Yellowstone is anything but. The two types of volcanoes are so different and operate through such different mechanisms that trying to extrapolate the behavior of one to the other would be foolish.
I’m glad that we might only be facing a Mt. Tambora sized event. :dubious: It looks like Yellowstone’s ‘small’ events are much bigger though. That should be spectacular from here. :dubious:
“The year with no Summer.”
“The year of famine.”
This is pretty much as I feared, some people in the geological community think Yellowstone is going to blow up in Earth changing fashion. And, ?luckily? it might actually happen fairly soon not only geologic time, but “fairly soon.”
Um, how long can chili in cans last?
What depth of ash am I looking at here in Florida if we get “the big one”? For that matter, how much ash would blanket Russia, China, Europe, South America, and Australia?
If the whole US agriculture industry is wiped out in one big BOOM!, we’re not the only one’s starving to death within a few months.
I figure 10 years of no sun would pretty much do a number on most of the life on Earth. I guess the vent creatures would be somewhat unaffected. Or, maybe not. That’s a lot of ash being dumped in the oceans.
Random s’tupid apo’strophes 'suck. :smack:
It’s difficult to extrapolate this sort of thing, however, there was a Discovery Channel program on the last Yellowstone event which said that ash deposits up to two feet deep were found as far as 1500 miles east of the center; less to the west, due to prevailing winds. They had a neat little diagram showing the distribution of ash across the North American continent. The rest of the fine airborne ash particles would eventually settle out more or less uniformly across the globe, so I’d expect there to be about as much in Florida as in China, atmospheric currents and eddies notwithstanding.
Ashfall Fossil Beds Park in northeastern Nebraska offers a glimpse of what conditions were like 1000 to 1500 miles downwind from a supervolcano eruption. The fossil bearing deposits are tens of feet thick. The ash deposits are thought to be the result of an eruption at yellowstone, or in southeastern Idaho.
BTW, the area around the park has some great camping spots.
It all sounds pretty scary. I think perhaps Yellowstone should be considered another target in the War on Terror, Homeland Security Division. Please remit payment of $90,000,000,000 (per quarter) to Tom Ridge.
Yep.
I think this is the third time I’ve tried posting to this thread over the past several days, but the hamsters are evidently gunning for time and a half.
For a little background, in an attempt to qualify the anecdotes I’m about to throw out (cite? huh? what is this, GD or something?): I spent my undergrad career working in a paleoeco lab, which included a summer in the field plotting a future seminar entitled “On the Trail of the Yellowstone Hotspot.” Naturally (and don’t tell my PI), I’ve forgotten most of it, but at one point I was pretty damn well jammed full of catastrophic info. What it all boils down to is already posted above. Screwed. Doomed. Take your pick. On the optimistic side of things, though, Yellowstone is “due” on the geological time scale. So we’ve got a pretty good chance of wiping out “civilization” ourselves, first.
Anyhoo…time for the anecdotes. Good for cocktail parties and the like.
No.1 (which I suspect Squink beat me to, but is cool nonetheless) A relatively “recent” previous eruption buried a herd of buffalo in Nebraska or thereabouts under 12 ft. or so of ash. That’ll be a bitch shoveling the driveway.
No.2 ellis finishes pitching tent, etc., and gets filled in on the lay of the land from the PI. (Newbury, in SE Oregon, IIRC)
PI: “We’re now in one of the first craters the hotspot created.”
ellis: “What crater?”
PI: “Look around, idiot.”
ellis: “Well, that mountain over there on the horizon looks sorta volcano-ish. That what you mean?”
PI: “And that one. And that one. And that…”
Uh, yeah. Entire freaking horizon = rim of crater. All those billions of cubic feet of ash have to come from somewhere.
ellis
hmmm…on preview, I’m gonna go ahead and blame the hamsters for stealing the vim and vigor out of the post. Not exactly cocktail banter, I know. Still, hopefully y’all will derive some interest.
I’m considering beans, chili, soup. I guess those Army rations keep for a while. Note: must buy seeds. Must buy seeds. Must buy seeds.
There was a big impact which wiped out the dinos down around fun-in-the sun Cancun, right? Before that there was a HUGE impact down around South America which caused a mass extinction, right? Furthermore, Yellowstone is one of (if not the?) largest calderas in the world, it blows occasionally, right? Then you have the Canary Island underwater landslides that should give me a nice ocean view here in Orlando. These are just the biblical-divine-wrathful-type things of ‘local’ interest that I – layman – know about.
What about stockpiling huge amounts of food – I mean by the governments of the world, not just private citizens – for long periods of time? To me, that’s the only reasonable option for most of these mega-tsunami-volcano-asteroid type things. Realistically, given our success in moving things around in space [sub]except the moon landings which were faked, of course :rolleyes:[/sub], our only chance to alter our fate would be to move an asteroid from a collision course. The whole caldera phenomenon seems too big to alter.
Hey? What happened to my last post?? I’m going to blame the hampsters. Maybe that’s what we need for yellowstone – more hampstes – seems like they can stop any big news event from ever seeing the light of day.
Seriously, I posted a few bits of information on Mt Tarawera which blew in 1886 here in NZ. Mt T is the central cone in the middle of a large caldera in the midst of a field of maybe two dozen of them in a small region. Mt Tarawera is a little unusual – caldera floor is lopsided: uneven collapse. Tarawera itself was an unusual eruption – combination of rhyoplitic and basaltic. Great pyroclastic flows, lots of pumice, a heap of mud (the bang came up under a lake in places) nice stacks of ignimbrite. But towards the end of the eruption there was a whole lot of basaltic scoria. Non-standard crater too. Blasted a rift 200 yards wode at the widest and 5 miles long. Anyway it was a reasonably major rhyolitic explosion in a caldera recorded in recent history. I don’t know of any others. Does anyone else? Particularly if they can tell us about a classic caldera eruption.
1886 was preceded by a couple of earthquakes. Other symptoms included a bit of a geyser increasing in frequency and puffing a jet of steam and hot water to 150 metres. If that sort of thing begins to happen in Yellowstone then it might be time to book tickets for the european holiday. (That’s if you don’t want to nip down to this corner of the globe.)
My feeling is that if the Yellowstone event holds off for a century or two – an eyeblink, geologically speaking – we’ll have the tech to prevent it or ameliorate its effects to such an extent that it won’t be a problem. So the margins are kinda fine right now. Asteroid crashes, might be a matter of two or three centuries.
But just be the Red States, so the Dems would have a pretty good chance come election time. Any chance Anne Coulter has a ranch in Montana?
Oh absolutely. I’m just not sure at the present time that we have the capability of drilling down that far. There’s a crapload of pressure down there, and what with the resulting (probably massive) eruption, I think we’ll only be able to drill one hole before it becomes impossible to wrork in the area anymore. And I don’t think one hole is enough to keep the gas pressure down, especially considering the area is already full of natural holes. We need a big ol’ space laser, is what we need.
No, but if you start a fund, I bet people would be willing to move her there.
But — that’ll increase our problems with the glowing orange soul-eating ghosts!
Or a 19-
no. I’m sorry, I just can’t. shudder