Scientists have revealed the supervolcano lurking beneath Yellowstone National Park is twice as big

reply to post by snowspirit


or our children's, or our children's children ...


reply to post by pandersway


well, more like fragile humans; earth itself will survive just about anything outside a planetoid crashing into it; humans, however are quite fragile and would have a hard time surviving even a minor scratch to the planet.

I take a George Carlin overview to the Earth. Humans are worried about keeping things nice for themselves, 'save the planet' means more like save the things we like about the planet. The planet has been around for billions of years ... some suppose the moon was formed by a major, large impact. That it has survived several large meteors ... and related to supervolcanos; it has survived many, many of their explosions over the years to still come out as quite lush, vibrant, and life supporting; as I can assume it would again after anything devastating to our existence were to happen.

I think the chance of humanity surviving is extremely high to some extent in all but the most extreme extinction level events. Maybe slightly less so now that many of the billions of people have lost most of the skills required to live off the land, without even considering a land in a state of emergency. Tribal nations will fare the best, especially any that their location gives them the advantage of being the least affected.


Now, stop and think for a second. What would be known about our superior society if something brought it to an end? What stories would be told by the tribes and leftover survivors? We wouldn't have the people to support the infrastructure. The 'advanced' sections of society would fall to decay. If only a billion were left spread across the planet, there is no guarantee they'd have the knowledge to run any technology; so communication might be gone, as well as usage of anything once it broke down. Humanity would return to the stone age; carving crude drawing on caves. There is no guarantee artists survive, so things might look rough. In a few thousands years from then, everything would have crumbled or rusted away. A future society would see these crazy drawings and wonder what superstitious myths we had about magical beings visiting from space and large cities on the coast that were the centers of technology and socialization. If water levels also rose in that time, as it can rise up to 250 ft from today; NYC, Tokyo, Miami, LA, San Fran ... pretty much all our coastal cities will be GONE, no evidence at all. Pure myth. Between decay and ash, nearly everything that proves we were here would be gone, especially the coastal mega structures of our society. No one of that age would remotely believe the stories passed down about our technological and intellectual advances. We would be the gods and/or Atlantis myths of the future. If the damage was severe enough, that is.


But no sense anyone worrying about it. They could try to vent it, nothing wrong with taking actions to protect humanity where you can ... but worry and stress? Nope. No reason to. You can't change it by worry. It may not even happen for thousands of years. You can't stress about every possibility or you will not be able to move because nearly anything is possible at any moment.

This is just another of those interesting tidbits of information that media sensationalizes for shock value for ratings/to get noticed. A mega-eruption would strain humanity, no doubt. But wiping out North America? well, it has not done that before, safe to assume there is a high chance that wouldn't happen the next time either. If it did? Well, that size of destruction would affect the entire world, not just North America, not just the northern hemisphere ... the entire world would feel the effects for a very long time. Even after the 'dust' settles, missing a large chunk of a continent would affect everything that deals with the normal (as we know it) planet operation. Weather and water patterns. Temperature distributions. It would be a 'new earth' basically.


Don't worry, be happy. Life is short, enjoy it

I wonder if there's a way (Or if they already do) they can use the heat for geothermal electricity while cooling the magma some. Maybe have a channeling system of some sort?

reply to post by Bmason13


good read and a way to go from nuclear plants
en.wikipedia.org...

but it can't cool anything significantly. Even if it could I think the pressure factor would be intact.

pandersway
It is an underground cavern measuring some 90km by 30km and containing between 200 and 300 billion cubic kilometres of molten rock.

So it's at least 74,000,000 km deep?

reply to post by rigel434


You make it sound like a fat person couldn't starve to death. Apparently, you have no idea how metabolism problems can affect a person. If a person's systems weren't able to use or break down the stored fat, the person very well could starve to death as easily as a thin person with normal metabolism.

If I were you, I wouldn't automatically lump everyone who is overweight into the same category.

If I had a choice of dying from nuclear war or a huge catastrophe like Yellowstone blowing I would choose the latter.

Somehow it would be better to die from a natural disaster than human stupidity!

It's hard for me to see any eruption scenario that doesn't involve a truly large (6.0 or higher) earthquake. These swarms of small earthquakes show that the caldera is active, but a 3.0 quake isn't going to burst through several miles of rock that has kept the caldera locked up since the last (smaller) eruption 70,000 years ago.

So that's really my own personal "time to worry" sign- a large earthquake. If we got one of those I'd probably start stocking up on foods I like to eat anyway, just in case.

reply to post by jhn7537


Let's put it this way...low to non-existent security, plenty of opportunity, no hassle or rush...yep, just as i thought - Yellowstone appears to be THE ideal target for a small suitcase nuke if you wanted to wipe the US of the world map.

Not kidding either.

Thinking about it, at any time the Soviets could have probably taken out the entire North America with one well placed nuke.

Make me wonder why some nut hasn't tried it already.

This could be where we begin our trip to the center of the earth.

reply to post by MountainEnigma


Hate me or not.

An overweight person starving to death is natural selection. If their body cannot metabolize the fats stored for that specific purpose, well...
Another equation is maybe the overweight people need to burn the calories through working of the body and its processes. Like helping the community recover. Which would be more likely because there would be less idle time I would suspect. Pretty much to sum up my thought; is that the incapable would go and the determined will survive. I mean how well would a community survive when what is left of the gene pool has serious medical problems?

Lots of media scare stories about Yellowstone lately- here's ABC getting in on the act:

abcnews.go.com...

Absolutely nothing new in this story, yet they apparently out of the blue decided to try to scare everyone with a banner headline saying an eruption is overdue.

I've been doing some more reading about this subject, and I'm not quite as pessimistic about the effects of Yellowstone as I was before. Previously, I feared that ash fall would make our entire midwest unfarmable for decades. However, after reading about the effects of Mt. St. Helens and Pinatubo eruptions, I'm not nearly as pessimistic. It turns out that, even in the areas right next to the volcanos, with dozens of feet of ashfall, vegetation would spring back to life soon after the eruption.

That being the case, I don't think it's accurate to think that, say, the entire states of Nebraska and Iowa would be unfarmable for years after a super-eruption. If vegetation returns even without the assistance of man, I think it's very likely that with our agriculture technology we'd be able to get some crops going again.