Time Bomb Under Yellowstone = 90,000 Immediate Deaths and Nuclear Winter in US

Supervolcano May Erupt Faster Than They Thought

Photos, video and more here.


If the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone erupts again, we may have far less advance warning time than we thought.

After analyzing minerals in fossilized ash from the most recent mega-eruption, researchers at Arizona State University think the supervolcano last woke up after two influxes of fresh magma flowed into the reservoir below the caldera.

And in an unsettling twist, the minerals revealed that the critical changes in temperature and composition built up in a matter of decades. Until now, geologists had thought it would take centuries for the supervolcano to make that transition.

Today, Yellowstone National Park owes much of its rich geologic beauty to its violent past. Wonders like the Old Faithful geyser and the Grand Prismatic Spring are products of the geothermal activity still seething below the park, which is driven in turn by the vast magma plume that feeds the supervolcano.

About 630,000 years ago, a powerful eruption shook the region, spewing forth 240 cubic miles’ worth of rock and ash and creating the Yellowstone caldera, a volcanic depression 40 miles wide that now cradles most of the national park.

That eruption left behind the Lava Creek Tuff, the ash deposit that Shamloo and her ASU colleague Christy Till used for their work, which they presented in August at a volcanology meeting in Oregon. The pair also presented an earlier version of their study at a 2016 meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Based on fossil deposits like this one, scientists think the supervolcano has seen at least two other eruptions on this scale in the past two million years or so. Lucky for us, the supervolcano has been largely dormant since before the first people arrived in the Americas. While a handful of smaller belches and quakes have periodically filled the caldera with lava and ash, the last one happened about 70,000 years ago.

In 2011, scientists revealed that the ground above the magma chamber bulged by up to 10 inches in a span of about seven years.

"It's an extraordinary uplift, because it covers such a large area and the rates are so high," the University of Utah's Bob Smith, an expert in Yellowstone volcanism, told National Geographic at the time.

The swelling magma reservoir responsible for the uplift was too deep to create fears of imminent doom, Smith said, and instead the caldera’s gentle “breathing” offered valuable insights into the supervolcano’s behavior.

In 2012, another team reported that at least one of the past super-eruptions may have really been two events, hinting that such large-scale events may be more common than thought.

But almost everyone who studies Yellowstone’s slumbering supervolcano says that right now, we have no way of knowing when the next big blast will happen. For its part, the U.S. Geological Survey puts the rough yearly odds of another massive Yellowstone blast at 1 in 730,000—about the same chance as a catastrophic asteroid collision.
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I've read and seen documentaries about the Yellowstone super volcano. I sure pray it doesn't erupt during our lifetime, nor that of any of my grandchildren or their children when they have them.
 
Three extremely large explosive eruptions have occurred at Yellowstone in the past 2.1 million years with a recurrence interval of about 600,000 to 800,000 years.
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USGS

Well, on average maybe it can be said that there's about a 200,000 year variance in interval.

Maybe we can miss the eruption by 100,000 years, I'll buy those odds.
 
If/When Yellowstone erupts again, the fortunate ones will be those living in fairly close proximity to it....they will meet a sudden death. Those in the rest of the country...and perhaps even most of the globe...will face a longer and miserable fate as the climate plummets, food production virtually ceases, respiratory failure sets in, and everything we take for granted comes to a halt. The Northern Hemisphere, especially, will become little more than a wasteland.
 
I live in prime earthquake country, we also have nuclear reactors nearby. Although our quakes are seldom, it only takes one. I prefer to laugh and dance, live and love, rather than worry over things beyond my control. Since time immemorial, humans have lived under dire threats of one kind or another. C'est la vie.​
 
The Photographers Who Braved Mount St. Helens

More here.

When Mount St. Helens erupted in the morning of May 18, 1980, a freelance photographer named Robert Landsberg was within four miles of the summit documenting the event. Robert had been visiting the grumbling mountain since April, and had made dozens of successful trips hiking and climbing to various vantage points to capture the changing volcano that had been erupting for the past several weeks.

On Saturday evening, May 17, Robert camped near the volcano and wrote in his journal, “Feel right on the verge of something.” Aside from his gut feeling, there was nothing on scientific instruments that volcanologists had placed in the vicinity of the volcano to measure everything from the rate of bulge movement, to sulfur dioxide emission, and ground temperature, to indicate the catastrophe that was about to follow.

mount-st-helens2


Two photographers died that day. The other was photojournalist Reid Blackburn who was working for a local newspaper as well as National Geographic magazine and the United States Geological Survey. Blackburn was assigned to stay on the mountain until May 17, the day before it erupted, but as fate would have it, he decided to spend a few more days. Blackburn was camped near Coldwater Creek, 8 miles away from the mountain’s north flank. This region was totally obliterated by landslide and pyroclastic flow.

Blackburn’s body was discovered the following day, inside his car that was buried in ash up to the windows. Blackburn was still seated at the wheels and the car was facing away from the mountain as if he had been trying to flee before he was overcome by the superheated cloud of ash and burning pumice. Every window of the car except the windshield was blown out. The fabric lining the roof of the car had come undone and was hanging weighted down by ash.


Blackburn’s camera was too damaged to salvage any images he had shot, but decades later an undeveloped role of film he shot of the mountain before the eruption was recovered by a photo assistant for The Columbian, the newspaper where he worked.
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I was there 20 yrs after the eruption. Went to visitors center, watched the video, listened to the narrator, the whole bit. Still have a book I bought about it. The experience was awe inspiring , and indeed scary.

BuT!

As stated, if the big one ever does happen? ......Not one damn thing we can do about it !
 
Most probably Yellowstone will erupt someday in the future. I believe it will hopefully give off enough hints of the coming eruption that lives maybe saved. There's really no way to mitigate the enormous scope of the devastation. We'll have to cope with it. We have no choice.
 
It was not jut the fires that killled off the dinosauers it was more the smoke. Depending on the wind currents it could kill Canadians, Asians and Russians as well.
 
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When I was a child my parents took me to Yellowstone. I remember "Old Faithful", the bubbling hot mud pots and beautiful hot springs. We stayed in a little log cabin and encountered many brown bears who would root through the garbage cans and invade picnic areas. One day we were having lunch at a picnic table and along came a mother bear and her two cubs. We quickly ran to the car and the bears literally ate out lunch! Another family also cooking/eating lunch nearby just sat there laughing at us. So when the bears were finished eating our lunch, they moved over to that other family's picnic table and ate their lunch! One of their kids yelled out that one of the the bears had eaten a whole can of Crisco!!


As for Yellowstone's potential of producing a massive fiery/explosive end of the world event... I am reminded of this Bible passage from 2 Peter 3

... the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.

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tnthomas said:
Yes, kind of a scary proposition, a Yellowstone eruption would surely 'ruin' (vast understatement) a large section of the North American continent.
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Makes one wonder if that was the reason why North America was so sparsely populated before European settlement. Maybe something similar had happened previously in the distant past.

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