# Yellowstone Supervolcano Timing Question
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [April 5, 2015, 8:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864 "2015-04-05T08:56:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)
#### Post date: [April 6, 2015, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/41 "2015-04-06T22:35:04Z")
A timely XKCD What-If (scroll halfway down): [Digging Downward](http://what-if.xkcd.com/135/)
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### Author:  [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)
#### Post date: [April 6, 2015, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/42 "2015-04-06T23:13:46Z")
This is the kind of thing that makes me start asking a lot of really speculative questions. Forgive me.
Could we scoop up the ash and turn it into bricks? Because otherwise, if we scooped it up we’d just have a pile of ash.
Do we know what plants, bacteria, fungi, etc. are best at colonizing volcanic ash, and could we stockpile any of them? Would spraying sewage (treated or untreated) help rehabilitate the ash?
How much trouble would be caused by cemetized ash covering all of the survey monuments in the core area?
After Mt. St. Helens blew, you could buy blown glass Christmas ornaments that were ‘colored’ with the ash. If Yellowstone blew, how many ornaments could you make? OK, that last one is more of a What If? question.
And, sadly, now I’m thinking of art installations - a series of small (say, ten foot) towers holding the seeds, spoors, whatever that are needed to colonize the ash. The towers could be peppered around the core area of effect. Method to drigger disbursal to be determined. This way at least some of the work of encouraging colonization can be done before the eruption. (Sort of like backing into your parking spot so that you can pull out quickly when you leave.)
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### Author:  [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)
#### Post date: [April 6, 2015, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/43 "2015-04-06T23:58:15Z")
> [@Yllaria](#):
>
> Could we scoop up the ash and turn it into bricks? Because otherwise, if we scooped it up we’d just have a pile of ash.
Sure. The Ancient Romans used to incorporate volcanic stone and ash into their concrete. You’ve seen the Colosseum? Pantheon? Surviving Roman bridges and aquaducts? A lot of them incorporate volcanic ash/rock cement in their construction.
> [@](#):
>
> Do we know what plants, bacteria, fungi, etc. are best at colonizing volcanic ash, and could we stockpile any of them?
Sure, we have identified lots of such species - but most of them are adapted to particular island chains (like Hawaii) or specific locales. No one knows how effective ash colonizers from, say, the South Pacific would be at rehabbing a temperate continental area like the American West/Midwest.
> [@](#):
>
> Would spraying sewage (treated or untreated) help rehabilitate the ash?
Maybe.
> [@](#):
>
> How much trouble would be caused by cemetized ash covering all of the survey monuments in the core area?
Lots.
A lots of them probably would never be uncovered, it might be more expediant to simply build new ones on top of the mess in some regions.
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### Author:  [@get\_lives](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/get_lives)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/44 "2015-04-07T03:03:24Z")
Nobody has addressed my question about building a large water reservoir over the deadly part of Yellowstone.
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### Author:  [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/45 "2015-04-07T03:28:35Z")
> [@get\_lives](#):
>
> Nobody has addressed my question about building a large water reservoir over the deadly part of Yellowstone.
There already is water in parts of the Yellowstone caldera. That’s what’s responsible for geysers, hot springs, and other geothermal features. Volcanic hot spots manage to erupt from under literally thousands of feet of ocean (as in Hawaii), so I really doubt more water would keep it from erupting.
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### Author:  [@get\_lives](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/get_lives)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/46 "2015-04-07T03:38:20Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#):
>
> There already is water in parts of the Yellowstone caldera. That’s what’s responsible for geysers, hot springs, and other geothermal features. Volcanic hot spots manage to erupt from under literally thousands of feet of ocean (as in Hawaii), so I really doubt more water would keep it from erupting.
The issue isn’t preventing the eruption. I’m just tslking about keeping the ash contained. The blast itself would mostly kill animals and plants, since it’s a rural area. The ash and other light ejecta is much more of a problem.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/47 "2015-04-07T04:52:00Z")
> [@md2000](#):
>
> Thanks; interesting, and not quite as apocalyptic. …Even the 100mm (4 inch) zone is not that big.
As someone who lives in the 4 inch zone, I’m not quite so sanguine. :eek: Four inches of ash would likely take out farming and ranching in the Prairie provinces for decades, based on the info from the USGS posted earlier in this thread. That would have a huge impact on the provincial economies.
> [@md2000](#):
>
> They evacuated people well ahead of time, so only stubborn old coots (coot?) who refused to leave ended up doing the Pompeii cavity thing
I believe you’re thinking of [Harry R. Truman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Randall_Truman), who refused to leave his lodge on Mount St Helens. He and his sixteen cats are presumed to have died in the eruption. His remains (nor that of his cats) were never recovered.
However, there were others who died who didn’t fit the stubborn old coot category, like [Reid Blackburn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Blackburn), a photo-journalist who was covering the event.
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### Author:  [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/48 "2015-04-07T05:54:11Z")
> [@get\_lives](#):
>
> The issue isn’t preventing the eruption. I’m just tslking about keeping the ash contained. The blast itself would mostly kill animals and plants, since it’s a rural area. The ash and other light ejecta is much more of a problem.
No, it would do squat to keep the ash contained. Plenty of ashy volcanoes have erupted mid-ocean, if the Pacific can’t hold down the dust neither can any reservoir we could build.
And I guess you missed the part about how about 90% of everything within around 1,000 km will be killed/destroyed - for you non-metric types that’s around a 620 mile radius. The includes, Helena, Montana; Denver, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah among other cities. The death toll in the immediate beginning of the explosion would be enormous and only go up from there.
You don’t seem to grasp how enormous a major Yellowstone eruption could be.
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### Author:  [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/49 "2015-04-07T12:07:57Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#):
>
> However, there were others who died who didn’t fit the stubborn old coot category, like [Reid Blackburn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Blackburn), a photo-journalist who was covering the event.
Also [David Johnston](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Johnston), a volcanologist.
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### Author:  [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/50 "2015-04-07T12:24:40Z")
Water plus the extreme heat generated by volcanoes can be explosive. Adding water to the Yellowstone caldera is not necessarily going to make the eruption less explosive.
Also, if you did want to create a large reservoir in Yellowstone, where are you getting the water from? Water is at a premium in the West. You can’t easily bring water in from elsewhere in large quantities, it’s at an elevation of 8000 feet.
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### Author:  [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/51 "2015-04-07T13:16:47Z")
How much warning did Krakatoa give everyone?
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### Author:  [@get\_lives](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/get_lives)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/52 "2015-04-07T13:33:40Z")
> [@Broomstick](#):
>
> No, it would do squat to keep the ash contained. Plenty of ashy volcanoes have erupted mid-ocean, if the Pacific can’t hold down the dust neither can any reservoir we could build.
>
> And I guess you missed the part about how about 90% of everything within around 1,000 km will be killed/destroyed - for you non-metric types that’s around a 620 mile radius. The includes, Helena, Montana; Denver, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah among other cities. The death toll in the immediate beginning of the explosion would be enormous and only go up from there.
>
> You don’t seem to grasp how enormous a major Yellowstone eruption could be.
What would be an example of an underwater volcano that ejects significant ash into the atmosphere?
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/53 "2015-04-07T15:42:26Z")
> [@get\_lives](#):
>
> What would be an example of an underwater volcano that ejects significant ash into the atmosphere?
[Here’s one](http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/pacific.submarine.volcano/). Ash sent up to 40,000 feet (and that’s not including the 1,000 feet underwater that the volcano was the whole time). Luckily that one was short-lived.
[Some](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capelinhos) [aren’t](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surtseyan_eruption) that short-lived. And if not, they don’t _stay_ underwater for long.
I don’t think people have an intuitive understanding for how _extremely_ fucking hot lava is. You think “Aah, have some water over it, it’ll stop the ash clouds” - No. Now you just have clouds of ash _and superheated steam_. Well done. And _then_ it breaches the surface and can get on with business…
Mixing water and magma makes [eruptions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreatomagmatic_eruption#Deposits) [worse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreatic_eruption), not better.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/54 "2015-04-07T15:55:12Z")
> [@MrDibble](#):
>
> Mixing water and magma makes [eruptions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreatomagmatic_eruption#Deposits) [worse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreatic_eruption), not better.
To clarify - I mean, here, worse in terms of ash generation compared to that same magma composition _without_ water. The worst eruptions are still the [gas-saturated](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_volcanic_eruptions#Plinian) ones.
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### Author:  [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/55 "2015-04-07T16:21:08Z")
[The magma in the Laki eruption in Iceland in 1783](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki) interacted with groundwater. That didn’t keep it from putting out enough poisonous gas to kill 50% of the livestock in Iceland, nor did it keep it from spewing enough sulfur dioxide into the air to affect global climate for a few years (and kill more than six million people).
Lava from volcanoes in Iceland regularly interacts with ice. It doesn’t stop the lava. [It doesn’t stop the volcanoes from ejecting ash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_disruption_after_the_2010_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull_eruption):
> [@Wikipedia](#):
>
> The large amount of glacial meltwater flowing into the eruption vent made this eruption so explosive that it injected its ash plume directly into the jet stream
That sure doesn’t sound to me like the water made things better.
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### Author:  [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/56 "2015-04-07T16:59:36Z")
> [@Yllaria](#):
>
> This is the kind of thing that makes me start asking a lot of really speculative questions. Forgive me.
You might be interested to read about the recovery around Mt St Helens. One of the interesting things there is the almost paradoxical statements some people make. “It’s recovering so quickly! In just a decade, we saw…” Well, sure, by some time measurements, a decade is not so bad. Of course, if you’re trying to be the bread basket of the world, food riots will not be ended by saying “Just wait a decade or two, and we’ll have some bumper crops then!”
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### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/57 "2015-04-07T19:00:04Z")
> [@Sitnam](#):
>
> How much warning did Krakatoa give everyone?
Depends on what you mean. See here for more [1883 eruption of Krakatoa - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa)
It was erupting for a year or so. Then it got a little worse for a couple days. Then the biggest thing to happen in centuries or millennia simply occurred.
So the locals & 1880s scientists certainly knew the volcano was active. And had recently gotten a bunch worse. But it had also gotten worse & better & worse & better and … many times in the last couple years. The actual day of the blast was completely ordinary until it suddenly wasn’t. Which is pretty much what happened at Mt. St. Helens in the 1980s, 100 years later. It was active and fluctuating and then in a matter of seconds it went off the scale.
Modern science might have been able to detect extra weirdness at Krakatoa in the minutes or hours before the big kabloooie. But once you’re that close in time to something that big about to happen, an hour’s warning doesn’t help much. And that presupposes anyone would have any idea that this particular change signals the no-kidding final countdown to kablooie. Or would have any ability to predict the size of the kablooie from whatever signals it was giving.
It’s not like we have a lot of good data on events this size. Which is a good thing.
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### Author:  [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/58 "2015-04-07T19:32:46Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#):
>
> So the locals & 1880s scientists certainly knew the volcano was active. And had recently gotten a bunch worse. But it had also gotten worse & better & worse & better and … many times in the last couple years. The actual day of the blast was completely ordinary until it suddenly wasn’t. Which is pretty much what happened at Mt. St. Helens in the 1980s, 100 years later. It was active and fluctuating and then in a matter of seconds it went off the scale.
> Modern science might have been able to detect extra weirdness at Krakatoa in the minutes or hours before the big kabloooie. But once you’re that close in time to something that big about to happen, an hour’s warning doesn’t help much. And that presupposes anyone would have any idea that this particular change signals the no-kidding final countdown to kablooie. Or would have any ability to predict the size of the kablooie from whatever signals it was giving.
By the time you get a sign from a volcano that unambiguously means “it’s going to erupt big-time”, the eruption is probably already under way. That’s too late to evacuate people. Far too late if we’re talking about an eruption that will bury nearby places under several feet of ash. It’s not like it is with hurricanes, where you generally have a few days’ warning when you need to evacuate.
But you also don’t want to evacuate people at every sign of rumbling from the volcano. Yellowstone constantly shows signs of volcanic activity, in the form of varying hydrothermal activity (hot springs, geysers, etc). It occasionally has earthquakes. One of them, in 1959, was somewhere between a 7.3 and a 7.5, which is the kind of earthquake that makes even Californians sit up and take notice (that’s actually a bit of an understatement, it’s comparable to the 1906 San Francisco quake). Earthquakes and changes in hydrothermal activity would probably happen as part of the run-up to any supervolcano eruption. But there wasn’t a super-eruption after the 1959 quake. If you had ordered evacuations in several states after that earthquake, you would have damaged your credibility and done an incredible amount of economic damage, for nothing. You don’t want it to get to the point where people take warnings of impending volcanic eruptions about as seriously as they do fire alarms in middle schools.
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### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/59 "2015-04-07T19:47:53Z")
Exactly my point.
The guy I was responding to seemed to be expecting some clear and unambiguous sign which foretold a specific timetable to a known endpoint. Reality then and now is not at all like that.
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### Author:  [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2015, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yellowstone-supervolcano-timing-question/716864/60 "2015-04-07T21:31:55Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#):
>
> The guy I was responding to seemed to be expecting some clear and unambiguous sign which foretold a specific timetable to a known endpoint. Reality then and now is not at all like that.
Perhaps if a modern-day Pharaoh would lock up his head butler, his baker, and his chief bodyguard’s devout servant down in the dungeon, they would have some unambiguous dreams by which to warn us all.
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