Yellowstone Supervolcano Even Bigger Than We Realized 152
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.”
Here's to hoping they don't find oil (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's to hoping they don't find any oil there, given the earthquakes it's caused in OK.
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I was thinking to drill into the reservoir now to release pressure or perhaps drill lots of holes to pump water and create steam energy. Perhaps over time this would cool the magma into stone and reduce the reservoir size and increase distance to the surface.
Re:Here's to hoping they don't find oil (Score:4, Interesting)
Having said that, one might be able to drill from a decent angle to maintain structure integrity as I've shown here [imgur.com].
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Yes, carefully releasing pressure. That's half of it. AC below got the other half (not sure if he meant to).
Lower the temperature. I was thinking fraking the perimeter would spread the heat and the surrounding earth is his heatsink...
But what if the fracking fluid itself was some cryogenically refrigerated really cold shit? That's like, a triple whammy.
Brilliant, or worst idea ever?
Re:Here's to hoping they don't find oil (Score:4, Funny)
Just wait for winter, it'll snow a lot at Yellowstone and that should put the volcano out.
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I don't think you appreciate the magnitudes involved. Picture the biggest forest fire you've ever heard of. Here's a dime store squirt gun and a canteen. Go put it out. Good luck, we're all pulling for you.
Now realize that it's nowhere near that easy.
Re:Here's to hoping they don't find oil (Score:5, Funny)
Be sure to save game first - you may need to re-load if you don't get it quite right.
Re:Here's to hoping they don't find oil (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that, one might be able to drill from a decent angle to maintain structure integrity as I've shown here [imgur.com].
I fully expected goatse or rickroll or something - very disappointed!
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I think you need to spend a wee bit of time watching lava flows. Atmospheric ones, ones in the rain and ones under the water. Sure the out most layer cools but then it insulates the inner layers and they simply stay hot ie lava tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. So the tube walls cool and the lave at their core remains hot enough to leave the tube empty and you are simply doing the opposite. You are not cooling an out of control backyard barbecue but a major geologic formation. So how big the hole, ho
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Want to be safe from them, colony is space is the only real solution. Just the way it is.
Life on earth has survived worse things than Yellowstone eruptions. I'll stay here, if you don't mind.
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I was surprised to learn that the Toba [atlasobscura.com] caldera was the most powerful volcanic outburst of the past 25 million years, packing more of a wallop than the Columbia River Basalt flows or any resurgent caldera, such as those associated with the Yellowstone hotspot. Seems like humans, acclimated to their native environment, are really resilient.
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Popcorn.
As in "Oh, Yellowstone is erupting. I'll get some popcorn to watch until all the news broadcasters are dead. Then get on with my life."
A Yellowstone supervolcano would be devastating for the United States and most of Canada. At home, we might even get some ash fall (but we get that from Iceland already). Wouldn't be good for crops for the next couple of years, but we could probably use a 50% population drop. It'll be back in less than a century. Fuck up comms ofr a couple of y
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Cooling the magma into stone could have long-term negative effects - a lot of this magma has quite a bit of dissolved gases.
The end result is that when it erupts, the gases come out of solution and frequently drive the eruption (think shaken-up soda bottle)
Cooling the magma will stop progression initially, but will cause the gases to accumulate - this could lead eventually to an even more catastrophic BOOM.
Hasn't hurt yet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It is also a supervolcano. (Score:5, Informative)
The most recent VEI8 [wikipedia.org] 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. [wikipedia.org]
Re:It is also a supervolcano. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Yeah, so we know that the sun will burn out in ~5 billion years. Get cracking.
Move to a star that isn't burning out at that time. In five billion years, you can move the Earth as well not just yourself. Solved that problem.
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We can just use Jupiter as fuel for Spaceship Earth.
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Yeah, so we know that the sun will burn out in ~5 billion years. Get cracking.
Luckily we'll all be dead long before that.
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Maybe you will. I plan to live forever, possibly as a fish, or maybe a sentient brassiere.
Re:It is also a supervolcano. (Score:5, Funny)
I read that the first time as 5 million.
Had me in a bit of a panic for a moment.
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Me too. I was planning on living for at least 6 or 7 million years. But not 5 billion because that would be silly.
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General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have
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Oh.
Actually, that is the answer.
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Woven graphene, all the way to space. The Yellowstone Space Elevator.
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Here's to hoping they don't find any oil there, given the earthquakes it's caused in OK.
FWIW, except for the trailer-home salesmen, people here find the annual tornado problem much more inconvenient than the increase in 1.0 to 3.0 Richter quakes.
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Yeah, because there's clearly no room between trailer park denizens and the 1%.
What an idiot.
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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
Darn rabbits (Score:2, Funny)
Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom.
Re:Darn rabbits (Score:5, Funny)
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
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... that Earth creature has stolen it ...
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The zombies and dragons are coming.
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Xenu and Cthulhu are trapped there (Score:1)
whatever we do, we shouldn't let them loose.
"...no reason to think it couldn’t..." (Score:1)
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That means the odds are zero or greater, not one to one like you're implying.
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Actually, it is close to certain that this chamber will erupt eventually. Eventually, on the geologic time scale, could be a really long time from now, on a human time scale. The Snake River Plains were formed by an eruption from this very system about 11 million years ago. That was long before our ancestors became human, so it really was a long time ago. When it does erupt again, the humans might be long gone. Or, maybe not.
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True, but my programmer-side was nitpicking his assumptions from the language used.
Has Hollywood heard about super volcanoes yet? (Score:2)
The real question is, will humans still be here after it erupts....
I was around when St. Helen's blew up, and that was a relatively modest eruption. A super volcano could be extinction event if it is big enough.
Deccan Traps (Score:3)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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 [nps.gov] 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
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It would probably not cause humans to go extinct, but it could come close. It would probably be the equivalent of a fairly substantial nuclear war.
Deaths would be in the billions, although mostly from secondary effects like crop failure and disease. And yeah, you could kiss the Western USA goodbye.
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From my logic class I learned the first thing you said is called the inverse, but the inverse is not equal to the original statement. The equivalent is the contrapositive. We form the contrapositive by negating the first and last part and swapping them. So you get something like "it could think of a reason".
What the hell? Not only is this volcano some super-super volcano that can destroy the world, but it can think of a reason to do so?
Well that's it. Drones forming Skynet is one thing, but a friggin'
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That explains the human sacrifice to appease the Volcano Gods - so they can release all that pent-up frustration in virgin territory
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there's no reason to think it couldn't == there's reason to think it could
Dwarves (Score:1)
Interesting, but that is all (Score:2)
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.
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I'm not sure underground is such a great idea - underwater now, that might be a different story.
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Perhaps if people cared enough, we could do it quick enough before Yellowstone's time is up.
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Why can't we grow plants in domes in the Martian atmosphere?
We have the technology to go to Mars. What's lacking is the political will. We need a Kennedy to give us the vision, couched in political rhetoric, that we once had about space.
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Why can't we grow plants in domes in the Martian atmosphere?
With less effort you can grow plants in domes on Earth.
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Growing cattle is hardly required for survival. Veganists have been surviving without it for years.
Now I am not saying the first self sustaining Martian colonists should be veganists, but all meat and animal products should come from small livestock. Chickens for example, require only little space (even free range ones. The ones that have so much space that they don't even use half of it.).
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Underground cities are possible. Nuclear powered grow lamps lighting up hydroponic farms would get you all the vegetables you would need. Water might be a problem, but I think it is a NASA solved problem on a small scale, so likely it could be solved on a larger scale.
Mars is just as doable, it might require lenses to concentrate the sun's light, or going with grow lights, but we could do it just fine.
What we are missing with both of these is political will, not the ability.
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I read that if this supervolcano explodes it could cause an extinction event by spewing ash into the air and blocking out the sun.
Re:Interesting, but that is all (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it could cause what we'd think of as a "nuclear winter". Which is really how it would do most of it's global damage. The ashfall would also be off the charts, but likely confined to North America.
Basically take the entire Yellowstone park, dig out every cubic centimeter of dirt and rocks from the surface down to the lava reservoir and just throw all of that into the stratosphere. All at once. Of course you don't want to be in the radius where the heavy stuff starts coming down on you, and that will probably be a number of entire states under significant debris.
The rest of the world will merely need to deal with the sun being blotted out for a few years. This is what happened when Mount Tambora erupted which was only a "normal" VEI-7 eruption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1... [wikipedia.org]
Spoilers: The Year Without A Summer (1816) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y... [wikipedia.org]
A supervolcano is VEI-8+
Note that they are supposed to be 1/10,000ish year events. Thereabouts, that seems sort of high. While Yellowstone might not go off any time soon, there are other places that might much sooner.
The Toba eruption about 74,000 years ago is thought to have caused a genetic bottleneck in humans were we were cut down to the mere tens of thousands of people in the entire world.
Toba being principally responsible for this bottleneck is disputed, but it should also be pointed out that humans at that time were fairly mobile, so their strategy for survival would probably not be possible for most of us. Our ancestors at the time didn't rely on agriculture and with humans only in the millions in population, we could have probably foraged and moved.
Humans today... well let's just say that our urban populations would not have the ability to switch hunting grounds.
I'm not sure any of the known calderas are actually thought to be ready to blow in the near future, but Yellowstone was supposed to go off in 600,000ish year intervals and I believe we're overdue. It doesn't mean it will go off any time soon, just that it's starting to look like it is time again, assuming that the characteristics of the lava reservoir are similar to last time.
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There's bits of the volcano on the North Korea/China border that came down in Japan a few thousand years ago.
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Luckily I live on the other side of the planet so I can die slowly from starvation.
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The UK, Greenland, possibly some of North Africa , etc etc would probably have a few dozen Tsunami's to deal with too.....
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Where better to hunt? For some, having plentiful prey is the whole reason for urban living.
Drill now and extracting the thermal energy (Score:5, Interesting)
And maybe mitigate or eliminate a possible extinction event down the road.
Screw that, let's get FRACKING! (Score:2)
Capture some smoke, ash particles before they spre (Score:3)
Chile's Calbuco volcano erupted on April 22, "at around 1800 local time" [reuters.com]. The second picture in this article [qz.com] 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 [timeanddate.com], 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.)
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(Of course, this assumes that we'll have a few hours warning before the eruption
I think we'll probably have a few generations of warning. Ash is mostly silica, especially with Yellowstone eruptions. It won't be magnetic. And a bad eruption would be tens to hundreds of cubic kilometers of ash and stuff. You aren't going to push that around with wimpy balloons.
The ideal solution here is to build up a considerable global food supplies of several years and not be there when the volcano erupts.
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If Yellowstone goes boom it will almost certainly wipe out most complex life on the planet, and we'll be very fortunate not to count ourselves among the casualties. I'm afraid some balloons just aren't going to cut it.
Bonus (Score:3)
Living just northeast of Yellowstone means never having to worry about saying goodbye. It'll be over so fast you'll miss it.
Whats it burning? (Score:2)
Re:Whats it burning? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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The power source is the Earth's residual radioactivity, slowly breaking down and releasing heat since the formation if the planet.
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Exactly. Who needs volcanology when we already have Pat Robertson to warn us.
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I seriously doubt OP has a soul, let alone a combustible one.
Obvious solution (Score:2)
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Sounds good. The colorado river is drying up anyway, so they won't be needed that canyon for anything else.
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I'm so disappointed that you beat me to saying that.
Speak For Yourself (Score:1)
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Uh, Maine is still there.
well now (Score:2)
I see they've finally found the Earth's belly button.
Thank Goodness (Score:3)
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?
2005-2007 (Score:2)
which, thankfully, did not kill us all in 2004, or in 2008
2005-2007: no data
We have to learn how to (Score:2)
rill into them to release the pressure in the form of lava.
All volcanos are merely giant zits that will pop unless lanced.
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A couple thoughts on Yellowstone (Score:2)
Re:GeoThermal Energy anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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or, kill three birds with one stone.
use this geothermal energy to distill seawater to end coastal drought
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distill seawater to end coastal drought
Wyoming is not where you seem to think it is.
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Day after day, more people come to L... A...
Don't you tell anybody, the whole place's slipping away
Where can we go, when there's no San Francisco?
Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho
Where can we go, when there's no San Diego
Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho
Do you know the swim, you better learn quick Jim
Those who don't know the swim, better sing the hymn
The steam explosion to end all steam explosions (Score:2)
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All this talk about the super-volcano that doesn't have an obvious peak reminds me of a zit I had on my back once... it was SO BIG--the sloped edges were almost flat that you couldn't tell that it was a zit. But when it finally burst, it was like a half cup of puss and mucous.
I bet that felt awesome!