Some worrying developments are taking place at the Super Volcano located beneath Yellowstone National Park; the kind of developments that were seen shortly before other volcanoes erupted. Not only was there a sudden rise in the elevation of the ground, and development of new cracks, but a gas called Helium-4, a very rare type of Helium, has begun coming out of the surface.
The claim that helium-4 is "a very rare type of Helium" pegged my pseudoscience meter, as -- to my knowledge -- helium-4 is something like 99.99% of the helium in the universe.
So it's pretty obviously bullshit, but I was wondering if others wanted to dogpile it for the "the more you know, the worse it gets" effect.
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"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
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Well he's not entirely wrong. It is imminent. It has been imminent for the last 100k years or so and could be imminent for the next 100k years. These things erupt once or twice every million years...good luck predicting it.
It's definitely imminent. Over geological timescales, anyway. The helium thing is, from a scientific viewpoint, quite interesting though. The moonbat site is somewhat correct in stating that He-4 is expected to be relatively rare ... in the context of measuring helium belched from a volcanic complex. It was expected that most of the helium coming up from Yellowstone to be the lighter He-3 variety, since the helium on Earth is produced through radioactive decay, and He-4 is produced through the decay of heavy radionuclides ... which the mantle is deficient in. Since Yellowstone sits on top of a giant hotspot, helium from deep within the mantle has a straight shot up.
However, Yellowstone has more He-4 than was expected. And that helium comes from pockets of really ancient rocks buried around Yellowstone. Rocks which didn't release their store of equally ancient helium until they were heated up by magma flowing up beneath Yellowstone. Magma flows that are really quite recent ... in geological timeframes. To the point where the extra He-4 has been coming out of the ground for ... oh about the last two million years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah - Yellowstone has been about to blow up for how many hundreds of thousands of years? Could happen tomorrow. Could happen after the human race is either extinct or evolved into something else.
My admittedly limited understanding is that even though we just recently discovered the He-4 it's actually been leaking out of the ground for a long, long time.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
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Ziggy Stardust wrote:If a supervolcano explodes in Wyoming, and there's nobody around, does it make a sound?
"The largest explosion, at 10:02 A.M, was so violent that it was heard 3,110 km (1,930 mi) away in Perth, Western Australia, and the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues near Mauritius (4,800 km (3,000 mi) away), where they were thought to be cannon fire from a nearby ship." Wikipedia article on the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.
So yes. People hundreds and possibly thousands of miles away would hear it go boom. Going across land would reduce how far the noise reaches, but it would be significantly larger than Krakatoa was, and that bastard holds the record for loudest sound in history. Krakatoa was definitely a big volcano, but it was no super volcano. Yellow Stone's eruption would make it look rather tiny.
Sig images are for people who aren't fucking lazy.
The Yellowstone supervolcano dwarfs any volcano in recorded history, by orders of magnitude. The tuff from the most recent Yellowstone eruption is the Lava Creek Tuff. It covers pretty much the westen half of the US, and is 180-200 meters deep. Supervolcano eruptions are, barring a better word, cataclysmic in scale.
Oh, I know that the magnitude of a potential Yellowstone super volcano explosion, I was just making a dumb throw-away joke about how nobody gives a shit about Wyoming.
The Vortex Empire wrote:I think the real question is obviously how a supervolcano eruption wiping out vast swathes of the country would affect the 2016 election.
The GOP would blame Obama and use the subsequent nuclear winter to debunk global warming.
Wait, there probably won't BE an Obama after this motherfucker decides to blow. Wouldn't that be a cause for great joy amongst the GOP?
Yeah, I've always taken the subtext of the Birther movement to be, "The rules don't count here! This is different! HE'S BLACK! BLACK, I SAY! ARE YOU ALL BLIND!?
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Destiny and fate are for those too weak to forge their own futures. Where we are 'supposed' to be is irrelevent.
Chimaera wrote:Wait, there probably won't BE an Obama after this motherfucker decides to blow. Wouldn't that be a cause for great joy amongst the GOP?
The irony would be if Obama is on vacation in Hawaii when it blows, leaving him safe and open to charges he knew it was coming and/or caused it. Meanwhile, such conservative bastions such as Texas and Utah would be gone for all intents and purposes.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Chimaera wrote:Wait, there probably won't BE an Obama after this motherfucker decides to blow. Wouldn't that be a cause for great joy amongst the GOP?
The irony would be if Obama is on vacation in Hawaii when it blows, leaving him safe and open to charges he knew it was coming and/or caused it. Meanwhile, such conservative bastions such as Texas and Utah would be gone for all intents and purposes.
Considering how much damage a Yellowstone event would cause, it would be likely that Hawaii and Alaska would be all that would be left. The midwest would be buried and the rest would be a unheard of mess. Maybe the state of California would be alright but I doubt it. It's an extinction level event regardless so I see no reason to worry about it.
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I see no reason to worry about it because there isn't a goddamned thing we can do about it. Likewise, I don't worry about giant rocks falling out of the sky, or my body spontaneously com busting.
Well, OK, IF I hear Yellowstone blows (and it's conceivable I might actually hear the damn thing with my own ears once the shockwave reaches my area) I will probably pile the spouse, the birds, and a few things into the car and head east because of that silly survival instinct I seem to have and hope to reach the rest of the family before things get too horrible, maybe the east coast and hope to be a refugee somewhere else, but other than that half-assed plan there really isn't anything I could conceivably do.
Most of the "preppers" in North America, if they are foolish enough to flee to their underground bunkers, will shortly find the door buried under too much ash to dig through. They will either suffocate when the air vents are covered over, or starve underground, unable to escape their bunkers when the food runs out.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Chimaera wrote:Wait, there probably won't BE an Obama after this motherfucker decides to blow. Wouldn't that be a cause for great joy amongst the GOP?
The irony would be if Obama is on vacation in Hawaii when it blows, leaving him safe and open to charges he knew it was coming and/or caused it. Meanwhile, such conservative bastions such as Texas and Utah would be gone for all intents and purposes.
Considering how much damage a Yellowstone event would cause, it would be likely that Hawaii and Alaska would be all that would be left. The midwest would be buried and the rest would be a unheard of mess. Maybe the state of California would be alright but I doubt it. It's an extinction level event regardless so I see no reason to worry about it.
No it is not. *slap*
Primitive tool-using hominids survived one eruption. Hell, North American fauna survived three. It wont be fun by any stretch of the imagination. We will have a few years without summers as sulfates in the upper atmosphere reflect away sunlight, but those leave atmo relatively quickly and the yellowstone volcano's magma contains relatively small amounts of sulfur. Points east of yellowstone will see ashfall that wrecks civic infrastructure by way of shorting out ALL the transformers and power generation grid, smothering crops, and making surface water non-potable.
IE. we would lose most our breadbasket regions for about ten years barring massive international cleanup efforts and any area that relies on surface water for drinking supplies... it will be bad. But the west coast, most of Canada, and the eastern US from Arkansas to Maine would not be directly affected. There would be a few years of mass starvation from global crop failure, but it would be survivable. In fact, civilization would survive.
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BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/ Entomology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences
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Would it necessarily be a Massive Explosion type of supervolcano eruption? If it was more gradual, then the disruption would be much more dragged out and less lethal. You'd still end up with large parts of the western US under ash and lava, but you'd have more time to adjust.
The places that would really be screwed (beyond the western US) would be those that are dependent on outside food imports, since the first thing that would happen once you start getting crop failures due to the weather is export restrictions on agricultural products.
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Guardsman Bass wrote:Would it necessarily be a Massive Explosion type of supervolcano eruption? If it was more gradual, then the disruption would be much more dragged out and less lethal. You'd still end up with large parts of the western US under ash and lava, but you'd have more time to adjust.
The places that would really be screwed (beyond the western US) would be those that are dependent on outside food imports, since the first thing that would happen once you start getting crop failures due to the weather is export restrictions on agricultural products.
Given past history and geology, yes, as far as I know. You get different types of magma in different places. This is, AFAIK rather vicious magma with lots of dissolved gases. That means plinian eruption, and once that ball gets rolling... unless it is a small outpocket of molten rock....yeah.... Big Eruption.
GALE Force Biological Agent/
BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/ Entomology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences
There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.
