Yellowstone Evidence of What Will Happen if it Erupts?

Well if it happens while I am there, later this year, you will know why
I am no longer posting on ATS..... As I posted in another thread, it could happen
tomorrow, a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, and mostly
likely all life within 100 miles in all directions will be terminated. I can not however
think of a better place to be if it's my turn to go. Time will tell......

reply to post by Klassified

How is it that it "MAY be overdue" faulty, if there isn't enough data to say either way? Sounds more like what he's saying is we simply don't know. It may, or may not be.

What he's saying is, there have been only 2 dormant periods in the whole history of the volcano. Statistically speaking this is an anomaly. If there had been, lets say, 10 dormant periods you could extrapolate the data to find out when it would be likely to blow. Using 2 points to extrapolate would likely bring out the wrong answer

reply to post by Arbitrageur
There are loads of life threatening things out there in our everyday life. But at least getting run over, there is a good chance you wouldn't know? Thinking of Yellowstone blowing will create a slow, agonising end as you watch people all around you croak it, because they don't have water, food, heat.
Oxygen will probably be the thing that kills as the ash cloud would fill our skies with ash? The Iceland volcano eruption woke me up to the fact that ash can be a killer not just the lava flowing from the volcano. I witnessed our cars, roofs, grass, in your lungs (I used my asthma inhaler every couple of hours when the ash was around) and we are 800 miles from Icleand here in Scotland. So, if Yellowstone blew I can only imagine what it would look like, considering the plume up into the atmosphere of lava will reach over 20 miles.
I do hope it is well into the future but from the evidence put forward it looks like it is not a happy bunny right now?
Has anyone came up with the last time it bulged so much as it is now? If this is a common occurence then it is not a worry.

Originally posted by Griffo
reply to post by Klassified

 

How is it that it "MAY be overdue" faulty, if there isn't enough data to say either way? Sounds more like what he's saying is we simply don't know. It may, or may not be.

What he's saying is, there have been only 2 dormant periods in the whole history of the volcano. Statistically speaking this is an anomaly. If there had been, lets say, 10 dormant periods you could extrapolate the data to find out when it would be likely to blow. Using 2 points to extrapolate would likely bring out the wrong answer

I understood that. My question was a little sarcastic to illustrate my point. There just isn't enough data to satisfy scientific standard right now. And if he would have said what you just stated very well, I wouldn't have given it another thought.

reply to post by Klassified

My view may be slightly different, though I said I agreed with your earlier comment. I think we can state that the statistical "best guess" made from two previous intervals would be the average of those intervals.

What 10 intervals would do instead of 2 is to narrow the size of the 95% confidence interval surrounding that average.

For example I used the numbers 800,000 and 660,000 for the last two intervals (from wikipedia) and came up with an average of 730,000 years with a standard deviation of 98,995 years.

Plus or minus 2 standard deviations is about a 95% confidence interval, which means that if those two sample intervals are from a normal distribution, the 95% confidence interval for the next eruption will be between 532,000 and 928,000 years. It's already been 640,000 years since the last supervolcano eruption so we're well over the 532,000 years but we still have a long way to go just to get to the average of 730,000 let alone the 928,000 years.

Note I qualified that IF the intervals are normally distributed. It's impossible to do any tests for normality on 2 data points, but it would be possible with 10. However if the distribution is normal then they would use the same method as this to calculate the probability from 10 data points, the 95% confidence interval might be much narrower however.

I think the scientific flaw with that analysis is that there is simply no reason to assume the eruption intervals are normally distributed. If they were, then we could say there's a 95% confidence the next supervolcano eruption will happen within the next 288,000 years with the statistically most likely time for it to to happen being about 90,000 years from now (though 2 weeks from now would also be inside this confidence interval).

So while I admit that's somewhat unscientific and it's just a SWAG (sophisticated wild-assed guess), if nobody is offering a better guess, that's sort of how I look at it until someone else offers me a better guess.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Two things I noticed about that map.

One, the ash fall area is shaped like a pyramid!

And two, my state is out of the area.

But actually, I read about this several years ago. Funny how a bunch of information is coming out now, about all kinds of possible cyclical disasters that have happened in the past.

Things that are overdue........all converging at this point in time.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

I like your math on this. And your swag is as good as I think we're gonna get right now. Which is why I say we just flat don't know. However, having said that, I'd be curious to know if we have any outside interference at work here that has influenced our timetable? I'm not talking manmade, I'm talking natural for the moment. It might behoove us to see what's going on around Yellowstone, and see if there's anything that looks like at least, a theoretical connection. Maybe nothing, maybe something. Just a thought.

In fact, I'm going to put that in my notes, and do a little looking into that tonight. Thanks for getting my curiousity up. I'll let you know what I find.

reply to post by Klassified

Well, I've been too busy to do a lot of hunting, but usgs doesn't show anything really out of the ordinary in the three state area so far. Just common tremors and such. But if I find anything, I'll post it here.

reply to post by Klassified
I haven't done any hunting exactly, though I stumbled across something I didn't know. I thought the last supervolcano eruption at Yellowstone 640000 years ago was it, but I didn't know about the smaller magma flow from yellowstone 70,000 years ago, which also happens to be about the same time another supervolcano erupted, maybe 71000 years ago, Mount Toba!

When was the last time there was volcanism at Yellowstone?

The most recent volcanic activity consisted of rhyolitic lava flows that erupted approximately 70,000 years ago. The largest of these flows formed the Pitchstone Plateau in southwestern Yellowstone National Park.

It says when they ended but not when they started.

www.bradshawfoundation.com...

The Mount Toba eruption is dated to approximately 71000 years ago.

And almost wiped out mankind according to that.

Maybe the time interval for those two is just a coincidence but I wouldn't want to have lived my life at that time, it sounds pretty unpleasant.

The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa. Populations living in Europe and northern China would have been completely eliminated by the reduction of the summer temperatures by as much as 12 degrees centigrade.

Our technology will help more than 10,000 people survive the next supervolcano eruption, but still, billions will die. I only have one year of food stockpiled, so I can't survive a 6 year long volcanic winter.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

I don't even have a full year. Might be time to reprioritize that. Never hurts to have a little more stockpile and resources.