Yellowstone Rated High for Eruption Threat

Yellowstone Rated High for Eruption Threat

Associated Press
May 8, 2005

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) - The Yellowstone caldera has been classified a high threat for volcanic eruption, according to a report from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Yellowstone ranks 21st most dangerous of the 169 volcano centers in the United States, according to the Geological Survey's first-ever comprehensive review of the nation's volcanoes.

Kilauea in Hawaii received the highest overall threat score followed by Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainer in Washington, Mount Hood in Oregon and Mount Shasta in California.

...

Recurring earthquake swarms, swelling and falling ground, and changes in hydrothermal features are cited in the report as evidence of unrest at Yellowstone.
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/13539.html

...for the rest of the country. Is there time and do we have the technology to exploit that potential?

Yellowstone may be 21st in danger based on likelihood, but apparently is rated as a supervolcano with devastating consequences. See the various Discovery/Nova programs on this. I'm no volcanologist, but this is what I understand to be the case.

...valve, let off the pressure, use the excess heat (hyper-steam) as generators. How soon could the Yellowstone volcano blow, probabilities, that is? I know that these things are very unpredictable, but perhaps something like the equivalent of the Manhattan Project could be launched, or even the building of the Hover Dam, on that scale, to tap the potential for all of North America's electrical energy needs.

Dubya does not have the imagination for it, but the democrats could propose it and take control of the situation as a way of saving social security, providing jobs and ending the war in the middle east. We wouldn't need their oil! I like the idea.

Too bad my job is 15 miles west of here.....

:evilgrin:

Mississippi River.

:D

Please explain where we should start drilling and laying roads, drill platforms, infrastructures and power distribution grids. Perhaps we should also finish the job of diverting the water over Niagara Falls so it all runs down a tube.


NICE :sarcasm:

to directly harvest the force of the supervocanic eruption, when it happens. It might be a while before it happens, if we get impatient, maybe an h-bomb or two will hasten things.

tourist with h-bombs from coming here. Suggest you WY and ID DUers do the same! The West is NOT some empty space to disregard. There are people and rare animals here.

Sheesh... set off some h-bombs in Indiana first to make sure they work OK? :nuke: In fact, setting off several big bombs along the east coast and in major midwestern cities would ease this nation's reliance on imported oil and polluting coal fed power plants. That'd be a big help. Why, if we wiped humans out all together, it would solve most problems and it wouldn't be a big deal when the super volcano blows either! :eyes:

...points of the pressures that are building in Yellowstone? The scientists in Iceland have been designing, constructing and using geothermal energy for decades. I like what another DUer posted here in this thread about the prayer wheel focus of attention. It is worth a shot, continuing on with what the country is doing now, is a disaster with complete certainty.

Geothermal energy offers the potential for thousands of years as a constant, cheap and safe energy source with little or no ecological consequences. Bush wants to spend trillions of dollars in tax breaks for more oil refineries and drilling over the next two decades at the end of which these investments will be abandoned to rust.

:sarcasm:

'Exploit' is an interesting term, don't ya' think?

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
--Cree Indian Proverb

would kill all the food sources following the jet stream, poison the water supply and darken the skies bringing down the temperatures around the world which would necessitate more energy consumption. There is a special on this from the Discovery Chanel that spells it out in all its horror.

Bill Bryson discusses this in his latest book. This would be a huge catastrophe. Thing is, the things that would indicate an event like this happening occur all the time without any predictable sequences in Yellowstone all the time (erratic gysers, etc) so they'd have no way of foretelling the explosion.

Just *boom* good-bye midwest.

so they have a lot of geothermal potential for their small population.

According to the USGS, geothermal exploration in a national park would be more political headache than the energy would be worth. You'd spark a liberal battle royale over preservation of the Nation's resources versus clean electricity.

national park. what a political nightmare THAT would be!

:rofl:

This is long -- but if you scroll through it you will find a lot to enrich your understanding of what is going down at Yellowstone.

Again this year, out of recognition of what is happening and their responsibility to help, many traditional elders will be in ceremony on this theme (earth changes) from sunup till sundown on May 14, 2005. I will be back at Tzodzil again this year, with tobacco and drum...

http://www.chiron-communications.com/communique%209-2.html

with all of the locations is very interesting. The Native American medicine wheel, mandalas and the Tibetan sand circles fascinate me. The buffalo issues at Yellowstone are deeply troubling as well. sp

return herself to her natural balance. We humans must respect that.

Is the medicine wheel to be held on May 14th going to be at the same locations as last year's ceremony? Specifically the one in Colorado?

will occur as well as the potential damage it would cause. My impression is that a supervolcano eruption at Yellowstone is a very low probability event: these happen on a multiple-hundred-thousand-year time frame; the odds of an eruption happening in our lifetimes is 1 in a 1000 (and there is no particular geological evidence that really indicates it might be sooner rather than later). But if it happened, it would be horrific.

Big blows are hundreds of thousands of years apart, it is true. In the past, about 600,000 years between major events. So we are at what, year 630,000?

I won't worry too much, but I will live today to the fullest, just in case.

:hi: :beer:

Even given the fact that a supervolcano blast is overdue by 30,000 years (and I remember hearing the same when I lived in Beautiful Big Sky Country), the plus/minus on ANY geological event has got to be several dozen human generations at minimum.

Sure, it's still possible. but we have bigger, more immediate fish to fry, like restoring the Old Republic of America and making sure the Age of Enlightenment doesn't flicker out.

And I know that it doesn't necessarily follow that if Imperial Amerika opts for the Dark Ages that the rest of the Free World will fall like dominos to BushPutinism, but I still want to do our part and I still yearn for America to be on the correct side of this fight.

Hope you and your family are doing great! :hi:

Was just sitting here, moping last night that I hadn't crossed paths w'ya in a long time.

Yeah, too busy frying other fish to fret about the big blow job from west of me. ;) Like I said, live every day to the fullest! For me, that means making the Reich sweat and fret. America won't be restored in what's left of my lifetime, but I intend to go down swinging for that eventual victory!

Doin OK. Just slowing down more and more, but that gives me more time to surf and write.

Coming for a visit this summer? Should thumb your nose at that volcano on a regular basis, makes ya strong!

I do wanna get some pictures taken of some big ol ash piles and fallen sequoias to post for the amusement of geology buffs and the few scaredy cats around here. We got some strange formations resulting from old blows around here. I like thinking what it will be like again without people makin a mess of things :7

I saw something on the discovery channel--there have only been three recorded yellowstone blasts EVER, so there aren't enough data points to say that it explodes every 600,000 years. Just because it exploded after ~600,000 years of dormancy twice does not mean that it will happen that way again. scientists don't even know that it will ever see another super-blast again, though it is certainly possible.

anyway, I'm not heading back to the east coast anytime soon. ;)

"Smith does not paint the devastating picture portrayed in a recent TV docudrama but said smaller threats exist. For example, a lower-scale hydrothermal blast could scald tourists strolling along boardwalks."


A year ago, the Art BELL replacement (NOORY?) scared the bee-Zeus-us out of me for a few nights, saying that this erruption is going to blow us all away, "all" meaning "the earth". He made it sound like it was happening within days/weeks. Later info was that it could be in months or a thousand years. A DU-er back then said that his father is a (geology prof?), and that the first sign of significant changes would be a stream of graduate students INTO the park, and that the sure sign of an impending erruption would be the grad students streaming OUT.

<link> http://armageddononline.tripod.com/volcano.htm

This site says we have three such sites in the U.S.

<link> http://www.solcomhouse.com/yellowstone.htm

...and spews its lava 50 kilometers up into the atmosphere, those accumulated 60 years of radio active nuclear waste will totally encircle the earth and contaminate every molecule of breathe-able air.

TEOTWAWKI

(If it isn't one thing, it's another...)

We are an experiment. We don't seem to be doing real well. Time to clear out the lab rats? ;)

...but, we've long lost our natural advantages and have placed all our eggs in the 'technology' basket.

When the power goes out for good...we are toast...

will keep us living. I keep telling people to learn to grow as much as they can. Won't help when teh skies stay dark for months, bt will help in the bad economic times ahead.

Canning is a good thing to learn. A bit of nderstanding of nature and basic engineering would help too. My daughter is taking up some trade training cuz it dawned on her that being a whiz on a keyboard will not be of much use someday soon and a backp plan is good.

The Mayan's figure this world (present reality) iw abot to end. The material age is about over according to them. From the things I see, am prone to believe they may be onto something. The next age, I believe, is the world of ether. Hmmm, lots of interesting things to ponder there.

Meantime, live for today and learn for a different reality. It can't hurt.

as of Dec. 21, 2012. If you talk with the Mayan Daykeepers, you will learn that they are upset about the misinterpretation of their calendars. The calendars say the age ends, not the world. According to their reckoning, we will soon enter the World (or age) of the Fifth Sun.

http://www.chiron-communications.com/communique%207-10.html

THE WORLD is gonna go on evolving on its own, with or without us.

I realize the difference between 'age' and 'world' as the Mayan refer to the terms, but also have to communicate with those who don't. Most humans in the US would think it was the end of the world because we are such an egocentric tribe. Much like the ancients in the 'old world' talking about the end of the world or ruling the world, the Americas were doing just fine when European and Middleeastern 'worlds' came to ends or under somebody's rule

I figure the planet is gonna be here a lot longer than our reality.

Minor eruptions of lava are much more likely to occur. Check out the Yellowstone Volcano Obesrvatory for more info http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/

:eyes:

Krakatoa, which blew in 1883, threw four cubic miles of 'stuff' into the atmosphere. You know all those colorful sunsets you see in pictures painted in the late 1880s? That's crap from the Krakatoa eruption that was still in the air.

The Irish Potato Famine? That was most likely caused by the Tambora eruption of 1815. Tambora tossed up about six cubic miles of 'stuff.'

Now for a little perspective from http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/faqssupervolc.html#supervolcano

Q: What is a supervolcano?
A: The term "supervolcano" implies an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index, meaning that more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of magma (partially molten rock) are erupted. The most recent such event on Earth occurred 74,000 years ago at the Toba Caldera in Sumatra, Indonesia

Yellowstone is a potential extinction event.

was by and large caused by the English, not volcanoes.

Like someone said above, a supervolcano eruption is the most dangerous, but the least likely.

was the coolness of the weather.

coming up out of the ocean right next to the old blast cone.
I saw this on "Supervolcanoes" and they say it's due for an eruption soon as well. :scared: Yikes!

4 are right in my back yard. Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood and Mt. Shasta. All these troublemakers are part of the Cascade Range, which is connected to the Pacific 'Ring of Fire'.

(think I'd better start packing)

of the Yellowstone here in my area! A keen eye and a little understanding of natural forces makes for some interesting times just looking around here abouts.

I do want to take and post some pictures of some of the interesting formations and residue around here. We are in the shadow of Yellowstone's plume. They dig up dinosaur remains around here. I figure someday they will dig up ours.

the nice thing about the Cascades volcanos is that eruptions are usually somewhat predictable, allowing you to get out of Dodge.

The USGS has been keeping watch over that part of the Pacific Plate.

The increased activity of the Indonesian Plate is also a matter of concern. There are at least two supervolcanoes (Toba is one of them) and a whole system of volcanoes, faults, and smaller fracture zones there. The 12/26/04 earthquake and tsunami did not even come close to relieving the pressure.

It's not all gloom-and-doom. Cumbre Vieja in the Canaries is sill stable, and a Rockslide of Doom is not likely for at least 300 years. But we do need a serious international Plan B for disaster planning. We also have an ongoing climate change and occasional cometary/asteroid impacts to monitor. "Stuff" can come out of nowhere and lay any area low, or even the whole globe. Whether these events are serious challenges or crippling blows to the planet and Humanity is ours to decide. A little scientific paranoia and a few bucks spent on research today will go a long way toward saving lives in even the worst of our tomorrows.

--p!

loss of human life: drought/famine, war, and pandemic disease (especially the latter). All three of these are of grave concern now.

Mother Nature is an awesome force. Between earthquakes in the west, volcanoes in the north, hurricanes in the south, tornadoes in the midwest- no place is safe. Maybe it is time to colonize the moon...

:sarcasm:

I saw that movie on the Discovery Channel in which all of North America ends up covered in volcanic ash. In the movie, the USGS downplays the danger of a super eruption in order to not frighten tourists. How much of this is art, and how much is really true is something to ponder about.

The Good News: We'd almost certainly have a week, probably have a month, and possibly have a year -- or more -- to prepare for this. The caldera will not become active all-at-once unless something very dramatic happens first -- even most normal-size volcanoes give several weeks of lead time. Having a chance to "batten down the hatches" would save tens of millions of lives.

The Bad News: It's still a supervolcano. It will still eject 500-5000 cubic km of material. The recent Discovery Channel fiction/fact movie will still be an understatement.

Some of the plans fielded here to exploit the energy and/or relieve some pressure in the magma chamber(s) are imaginative, but the energy of even a regular sized volcano is astounding. The only analogy I can come up with the comes close is trying to relieve the water pressure behind the Hoover or Grand Coulee Dam with a soda straw. Yes, there is that much power involved.

The Bad News (Part 2): The Right Wingers will still find a way to blame it on Clinton, who will spend most of Eruption Day helping Poppy Bush dig out Junior from an ash-covered "Compound W".

--p!
"Honest ... I was jus' clearin' some brush, when this big ol' black cloud appears outta nowhere ... I thought Saddama McLaden was comin' for me an' Pickles an' the Twins. And, heck, he can have the Twins! An' I'll even throw in ol' Fart Blossom!"