Yellowstone...Time to spread some fear.

[Knowze Gungk]

Anyone know anything about the Yellowstone Super volcano?

I've been fascinated by this dooms-day volcano since I read about it in Bill Brysons A Short History Of Nearly Everything, about 6 months ago. Are there any experts on the subject that could shed some light for us simple folk?

As far as I know, the entire park is just one massive caldera, 85km long and 45km wide. It erupts like clockwork, every 600,000 years and the last eruption was about 640,000 years ago. Last time it blew, it relesed a thousand, or so, cubic Kms of rock-ash into the atmosphere (Ever heard of black lung? Nasty stuff.), removed a chunk of mountain range and plunged the earth into a nuclear winter. And, above all, it is showing signs of awakening, such as the ground bulging and a once-every-Fifty-year geyser erupting Four times int the past 18 months.

If anyone knows anything more or can provide a link to an official source, please feel free.

Anway here's an unofficial site Which has loads of stuff & is hosted by a bloke who has dreams about it, I just wish he didn't try to make out that they might mean something, other than that he has a passion fo yellowstone.

This one's just an online journal

 

[cgannon64]

I'll wait for the major summer blockbuster about it.

 

[anarchywrksbest]

I've known about that for about 3 years.

I also know about 10 other things that will destroy life on Earth as we know it.

 

[Amenhotep7]

Earth is overdue for so many things its not even funny! It makes you wonder why it hasn't happened to us? Maybe somebody like us.

 

[andrewgprv]

Scary, I am too close for comfort!

 

[andrewgprv]

.

 

[Archer 007]

Spooky!

 

[Ohwell]

Ooh, exciting.

 

[CivCube]

640,000 years? That is one streaky RNG!

 

[Archer 007]

Originally posted by Ohwell
Ooh, exciting.

Death never wet my whistle.

 

[Dark Ascendant]

Yeah, I know about it. I hope it doesn't blow in my lifetime. If it does, I'll be dead before I knew it, very comforting.

 

[Shadylookin]

i find it funny that he urges people to be prepared 600 miles away because it will kill them, they should be so lucky as to die quickly the rest of us will have to die in the nuclear winter. Yes i've heard of the super volcano, but i don't pay any attention too it since it doesn't look like worrying about it will make any difference

 

[h4ppy]

Originally posted by Shadylookin
i find it funny that he urges people to be prepared 600 miles away because it will kill them, they should be so lucky as to die quickly the rest of us will have to die in the nuclear winter. Yes i've heard of the super volcano, but i don't pay any attention too it since it doesn't look like worrying about it will make any difference

I agree with you. We can't do anything about the volcano so we shouldn't care about it. Odds are it won't happen in our life times anyways. It erupts on average every 600000 years We don't know what numbers were put in to find out the average, for all we know the numbers could represent the rare event of two or three unusually close eruptions.

 

[Riesstiu IV]

I heard about this on a PBS special a couple of years ago. It creeped me out then... thanks for bringing back the memories.

 

[General Porkins]

it had better not go off...there are too many good fishing spots out there that it would ruin

 

[The Iron Fist]

Well, I'll just file this one in my "Things that will probably kill me before I'm 50" folder. It'll sit nice next to Iranian nuke holocaust and ladder accident.

 

[Siegmund]

I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Quite a lot of statements have been twisted around and taken out of context in that first post. Here is a sampler:

It doesn't "erupt every 600,000 years." The last three big eruptions happen to be at 0.6, 1.3, and 2.0 million years ago - the others before that are irregularly spaced. There were many smaller eruptions, the nice quite lava-flow variety, up to about 100,000 years ago. (This isn't so scary, really - plenty of other places in the West have much more frequent eruptions, some of them quite sizable. Any super-big eruption is going to have years if not more of warning.)

The "once every 50 years geyser," Steamboat Geyser, did once go that long (1911 to 1969) between eruptions, but normally alternates between a few years of no eruptions and a few years of eruptions every few month. Nothing abnormal about that.

The ground has bulged before and will again .... in places it has risen hundreds of feet over thousands of years. It just happens that in recent years, this is news, because for the first time we have instruments sensitive to detect movement of only a few centimeters, instead of waiting until you can see the change from the old-fashioned surveying crew on a mountaintop method.

A beautiful place. Loved it there, spent weeks there every summer when I lived in Idaho. Rick Hutchinson, former park service geologist, had a dream of living to see a volcanic eruption in his park - he was guessing the most likely outbreak point was near Le Hardy Rapids (in the 1980s that was the area where the ground was bulging up fastests) and rated his odds at something like 1 in 100 of living to see it.

He didnt - he was buried by an avalanche in the Yellowstone backcountry in the spring of 1997. Too bad. But at least it was at the hand of nature in the park he loved. That much, at least, was as he wanted it.


If there are any particular Yellowstone geology topics y'all want a reference to a good book or article for, drop me an IM.

 

[Desmond Hawkins]

Of course I have heard about it, being the ultra-informed CFCer I am, but I am not that concerned, as it could just as easily be another 100 000 years.

 

[Enemy Ace]

I've known of this for a long time. Fear not, our species survived the last eruption of a super volcano, although just barely. It was said the population was reduced from millions to a mere one hundred thousand members. What is most disturbing is that my wonderful empire will be destroyed.

Now for additional information, scientists have discovered a lake is slowly being moved, because the volcano is expanding and pushing the lake bed upward on one side and the water is running off at the other end and flooding the ground, permanently.

 

[Tassadar]

I think its an official site:http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/


Read current activity, past activity, post doctoral position and FAQ.