could yellowstone reverse global warming?

[Themightytom]

Australia is mostly Shield Craton, are there any active volcanic regions there?

Australia is the only continent on earth without active volcanism.

Australia seems like the safest place to live I'm surprised there aren't zounds of survivalists holed up down there.

[Akkleptos]

Australia is mostly Shield Craton, are there any active volcanic regions there?

Australia is the only continent on earth without active volcanism.

Australia seems like the safest place to live I'm surprised there aren't zounds of survivalists holed up down there.

Maybe because pretty much everything in Oz is poisonous.

Loooook, what a pretty spider!
Don't touch it! It can kill you within minutes!
Okay, I'll go take a swim in the sea...
Wait, there are sea wasps in there, they'll kill you in minutes!
Oh, okay, so I'll just wade the puddles seaside...
No! There are blue-ringed octopii there! They'll kill you in minutes!
Oh, well, fuck the sea. I'll just lie down and rest in this nice rainforest...
No! there are snakes in that forest! Seven of the ten deadliest snakes live in Australia! They'll kill you dead in a matter of minutes!
Oh, okay, I'll just take a nap under this nice tree then...
No! There are drop bears that'll...


And so on...

[Simon_Jester]

I wouldn't be surprised if the remnant American government simply sent around nuclear armed warships to extort food from other countries at gunpoint, truth be told.

By the time that occurs to someone the government might well have collapsed to the point it's impractical to do that. You are also assuming that someone else HAS food. A pretty foolhardy assumption once world-wide agriculture collapses. Not sure the Feds, even with nuclear ships, would have the capacity to plunder and transport significant amounts of food in comparison to the numbers of refugees that will need to be fed.

The military is one of the last organizations to fall apart in a government collapse, and the US military in particular has spent the last fifty years worrying about what to do in the event that an enemy nuclear attack bombed the US back into the Stone Age. As far as the US government would be concerned, Yellowstone letting go wouldn't necessarily be much worse than being on the receiving end of a nuclear strike.* So I could honestly see the US military remaining more or less functional, at least in terms of most of the hardware still existing and the troops still following orders, especially orders that would clearly be 'helpful' in the sense of being good for the US.

Logistic capacity is more of an issue; I'm not saying this plan would work, though it might well return more calories than it cost to execute.

*Talk about damning with faint praise...

[CaptainChewbacca]

Maybe because pretty much everything in Oz is poisonous.

Quite right. Australia has some of the most hostile ecologies on earth, not to mention the lowest density of usable fresh water sources of anywhere on earth.

[Junghalli]

Honestly, trying to rig up giant algae farms or something along those lines sounds more sane this this "let's start a simultaneous massive war and crash infrastructure-building program in Africa and hope we can actually see results before everyone dies of starvation!" plan.

There have been calculations made that you could support a man indefinitely on between 6-200 liters of algae culture, feeding the algae with processed human excrement. Atomic Rocket has an extensive section on it here, though it discusses it in terms of a closed ecology life support system for spacecraft, which would actually have significantly more stringent design requirements than would be necessary here (you could find plenty of useless organic stuff to feed them besides sewage, and mass isn't a big concern). The big downside is that it's poor in vitamin C and loaded with nucleic acids. Vitamin C we can synthesize artificially from glucose (and we can supplement with stores of vitamin C rich foods), but the nucleic acids will mean if you eat more than a small quantity you're at risk for gout. As unpleasant as gout may be it still beats dying of starvation though. We can reserve real food for the manual laborers. Also it's pond scum but with a situation this desperate how appetizing it is should be utterly irrelevant as long as it can keep you from dying. I wonder if there might not be some way of processing out the nucleic acids? It might also help to pre-emptively put everyone on probenecids, which are used to treat gout and increase the excretion rate of uric acid from the body.

Alternate approaches may also be worth investigating. I already mentioned the synthetic food possibility. Yeast might be another one. Basically anything that can quickly turn dead organic matter to edible food in an enclosed environment is a good candidate.

Rigging up algae vats to feed hundreds of millions of people will certainly be an ambitious project, but I'm not at all sure it'd be worse than trying to conquer Africa and equatorial South and Central America and turn them into giant slave plantations.

[Bluewolf]

Sending armed ships out to take food is hilariously stupid because, for a start, other countries may be protecting or trying the same thing. The US navy is powerful but is not invincible and could be destroyed after a few nations. On top of that, such situation is basically "Give it to us or die?". Whats to make you think that countries would do the former? I mean if you give away food, you'd starve anyway, in fact you'd have nothing to lose in refusing. The whole Africa one is unlikley as well given that It'd take years to get a good food supply to feed the US itself and in that time, your still starving and dying. On top of this you will have others possibly doing this out of desperation. Its a joke post of course but it'd be interesting to see on film.

[cosmicalstorm]

I wonder if anyone's ever written any fiction describing life after such an event. It would be such a huge catastrophe (and a somewhat realistic scenario, unlike many other such alt-scenarios), and the world power structure would be irrevocably changed afterwards.

The Road by Cormack McCarthy. It's a novel about a father and his son surviving in a post apocalypse world. There is a movie version coming up pretty soon with Viggo Mortensen. The book is horribly depressing but still a very good read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCar ... 0307265439

[Erik von Nein]

Yeah, except The Road sucks. There's also no indication at all of what happened with anything.

Small excerpt of the quality of writing (verbatim):

Are we going to be okay?
I don't know.
Okay.
I'll say when we're okay.
Okay.
Are they bad guys?
I don't know.
Okay.

Then he went and hid in a bush. He then saw a group of people coming and hid. He then rushed back to where he left him and found some bodies and cradled them. He then came out of his hiding place where he was happy he was okay.

Will the characters actually have names? Will the dialog still suck?

The book still makes me laugh uncontrollably at how terribly written it is and how bizarrely well-rated it is.

Er, sorry. This is a hijack, I know, but the book is just terrible.

[Broomstick]

It's also another one of those clearly science fiction books that the author hysterical states over and over is NOT science fiction because, I dunno, he fancies himself a "literature" author who doesn't want to be sullied by working in the ghetto.

[Darth Wong]

I wonder if anyone's ever written any fiction describing life after such an event. It would be such a huge catastrophe (and a somewhat realistic scenario, unlike many other such alt-scenarios), and the world power structure would be irrevocably changed afterwards.

The Road by Cormack McCarthy. It's a novel about a father and his son surviving in a post apocalypse world. There is a movie version coming up pretty soon with Viggo Mortensen. The book is horribly depressing but still a very good read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCar ... 0307265439

My wife Rebecca read "The Road", and she said that nowhere in the entire book did the author make the slightest suggestion as to what had caused the catastrophe. From what she decribed, I recalled thinking that its characteristics were not really compatible with any particular kind of catastrophe. It was just some generalized sort of Mystery Catastrophe Plot Device.

[Junghalli]

It's also another one of those clearly science fiction books that the author hysterical states over and over is NOT science fiction because, I dunno, he fancies himself a "literature" author who doesn't want to be sullied by working in the ghetto.

You mean like Margaret Atwood? God those "I can't call what I write science fiction because everyone knows it's not respectable literature" types annoy me.

[CaptainChewbacca]

My wife Rebecca read "The Road", and she said that nowhere in the entire book did the author make the slightest suggestion as to what had caused the catastrophe. From what she decribed, I recalled thinking that its characteristics were not really compatible with any particular kind of catastrophe. It was just some generalized sort of Mystery Catastrophe Plot Device.

Near as I can figure from the book, the earth was hit by a massive plot device travelling at 1/3 the speed of light.

[Broomstick]

It's also another one of those clearly science fiction books that the author hysterical states over and over is NOT science fiction because, I dunno, he fancies himself a "literature" author who doesn't want to be sullied by working in the ghetto.

You mean like Margaret Atwood? God those "I can't call what I write science fiction because everyone knows it's not respectable literature" types annoy me.

Good lord - she's probably the current worst offender. I know both The Handmaid's Tale and Orynx and Crake are CLEARLY science fiction, but oh, no! We CAN'T call it that! COOTIES! COOTIES!

[cosmicalstorm]

I wonder if anyone's ever written any fiction describing life after such an event. It would be such a huge catastrophe (and a somewhat realistic scenario, unlike many other such alt-scenarios), and the world power structure would be irrevocably changed afterwards.

The Road by Cormack McCarthy. It's a novel about a father and his son surviving in a post apocalypse world. There is a movie version coming up pretty soon with Viggo Mortensen. The book is horribly depressing but still a very good read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCar ... 0307265439

My wife Rebecca read "The Road", and she said that nowhere in the entire book did the author make the slightest suggestion as to what had caused the catastrophe. From what she decribed, I recalled thinking that its characteristics were not really compatible with any particular kind of catastrophe. It was just some generalized sort of Mystery Catastrophe Plot Device.

Indeed, the disaster is never mentioned, the reason I brought it up is because whatever it was that happened had filled the air with ash, killed most of the vegetation and completely ruined society. To me that sounded like something that might happen, perhaps not globally, but at least in the area surrounding a super volcano after an eruption.

I'll add my name to the list of people who would be interested in a book that deals with the global consequences of a super volcano eruption.
I read Without Warning a few months ago, where America simply goes up in smoke one day, but I didn't really like that book.

[CaptainChewbacca]

It's also another one of those clearly science fiction books that the author hysterical states over and over is NOT science fiction because, I dunno, he fancies himself a "literature" author who doesn't want to be sullied by working in the ghetto.

You mean like Margaret Atwood? God those "I can't call what I write science fiction because everyone knows it's not respectable literature" types annoy me.

Good lord - she's probably the current worst offender. I know both The Handmaid's Tale and Orynx and Crake are CLEARLY science fiction, but oh, no! We CAN'T call it that! COOTIES! COOTIES!

They need to give that crazypants a Hugo award, that'll shut her up.

[Jeremy]

Australia is mostly Shield Craton, are there any active volcanic regions there?

Australia is the only continent on earth without active volcanism.

Australia seems like the safest place to live I'm surprised there aren't zounds of survivalists holed up down there.

Except all of Asia and the Pacific Rim points right towards the old land. If another Toba or even a Tambora happens, Australia suffers just as much.

[Mayabird]

The maximum duration of the Yellowstone 2Ma climate effects was recently estimated by atmospheric-ocean global climate model at about 50 years, IIRC. Volcanic aerosols triggering extreme global temperature drops of up to 10 degrees in the first couple of years, up to 2 degrees within 10, and with lingering -0.3 degree deviations from global average temperatures for up to 50 years after the event.

A question about the lingering effects. I remember reading an article a few years ago about how the sulfur emissions from a volcanic eruption have an extra longer-term effect than blocking sunlight - as it falls out of the atmosphere, the sulfur suppresses methanogens in wetlands worldwide, and since methane is a really strong greenhouse gas, that reduction in methane output contributes to the long-term cooling effect.

Now, it's been a while and I can't find the article again, so I was wondering if that hypothesis holds any water. Also, if you do know of it, how great is that effect, anyway?

[El Moose Monstero]

The maximum duration of the Yellowstone 2Ma climate effects was recently estimated by atmospheric-ocean global climate model at about 50 years, IIRC. Volcanic aerosols triggering extreme global temperature drops of up to 10 degrees in the first couple of years, up to 2 degrees within 10, and with lingering -0.3 degree deviations from global average temperatures for up to 50 years after the event.

A question about the lingering effects. I remember reading an article a few years ago about how the sulfur emissions from a volcanic eruption have an extra longer-term effect than blocking sunlight - as it falls out of the atmosphere, the sulfur suppresses methanogens in wetlands worldwide, and since methane is a really strong greenhouse gas, that reduction in methane output contributes to the long-term cooling effect.

Now, it's been a while and I can't find the article again, so I was wondering if that hypothesis holds any water. Also, if you do know of it, how great is that effect, anyway?

Short answer - I don't know . The study is by Vincent Gauci, they suggested that the sulfate aerosols of the 1783 Laki fissure eruptions could have halved the Northern Hemisphere wetlands methane flux. I've only skimmed it a few months back, but my office mate is working with him on a related project. They're a bit cautious about embracing it, mainly because of the sheer heterogeneity of wetland soils when doing sulfur deposition experiments, and they think that it might be difficult to really say whether there's a trend or not, because whilst the experiments were conducted to the relevant standards, there have only been about 6 studies to draw any trends from.

Assuming that the methane flux is inhibited, Gauci's paper put the duration of the effects from Laki at a couple of years. The output of yellowstone SO2 I think has been estimated to be at least 10 times that, but I suppose the limiting factor would actually be the time taken to leach sulphate through the soil and away from wherever the methanogens hang out. That might be on the order of a few years, it only took a few months for elemental sulphur released from ash particles at Ruapehu (very high sulphur loading, 10000 ppm) to be leached from the top 30 odd cm or so, if I recall correctly. Caveat here is I'm not a soil scientist and I actually don't know where an excess loading of sulphur into a wetland soil would end up.

An additional factor to think about is the fact that Laki, the eruption which inspired Gauci's study, was a fissure based eruption, which might not extend a plume to such a great height as the more massive Yellowstone eruption. After Laki, the sulphur aerosols hung over Europe like a haze, hence the deposition, whereas a colossal explosion such as that at Yellowstone would blast it into the high stratosphere where it would take a lot longer to spread out, settle down, and might be a lot more diffuse as a result. If you asked me to take a guess, I'd say that any methane inhibition would occur in the first ten years or so, which is when the main cooling from dust injection and sulphate aerosol would be taking place (i.e. the 10C decrease in global temperatures), which I think will be more significant.

However, I will point out that I'm not a soil scientist and I'm certainly not a microbiologist, so I could be talking out of my ass, and I could be misremembering the paper.

[Broomstick]

Part of the problem about asking "What happens if Yellowstone blows?" is that prior eruptions are so far removed in time from the present day. There data, but it is open to interpretation and differing theories because we simply don't know. We can extrapolate only so much from the smaller eruptions we are familiar with.

[El Moose Monstero]

Part of the problem about asking "What happens if Yellowstone blows?" is that prior eruptions are so far removed in time from the present day. There data, but it is open to interpretation and differing theories because we simply don't know. We can extrapolate only so much from the smaller eruptions we are familiar with.

Welcome to my world - I've got a review paper on the environmental effects of volcanic ash sitting almost finished waiting for my supervisor to pull his finger out and do his share of the work, and the main problems really are that there have only been about 20 easily accessible volcanic eruptions over the past 100 years. Then you have to consider how many of them happened when there was sufficient supporting science in other fields or access to modern analysis techniques, and then add on to that a healthy portion of 'people are generally only interested in the big, obvious effects, and don't ask the right questions when it comes to the small'. It's a nightmare trying to pull everything together for a consistent story.

As a prime example, Mt. St. Helens, possibly the most accessible eruption of the 20th century - there were a colossal amount of studies on the lakes around Mt. St. Helens and the impact on the water - BUT - only one of about thirty studies actually had any baseline chemical and biological information for the lake, and all others were judged by comparison to Spirit Lake at the foot of Mt. St. Helens, which I'm sure you can see is dubious due to the vast differences between individual lakes.

[JBG]

I wonder if anyone's ever written any fiction describing life after such an event. It would be such a huge catastrophe (and a somewhat realistic scenario, unlike many other such alt-scenarios), and the world power structure would be irrevocably changed afterwards.

The Road by Cormack McCarthy. It's a novel about a father and his son surviving in a post apocalypse world. There is a movie version coming up pretty soon with Viggo Mortensen. The book is horribly depressing but still a very good read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCar ... 0307265439

My wife Rebecca read "The Road", and she said that nowhere in the entire book did the author make the slightest suggestion as to what had caused the catastrophe. From what she decribed, I recalled thinking that its characteristics were not really compatible with any particular kind of catastrophe. It was just some generalized sort of Mystery Catastrophe Plot Device.

An interesting film came out of NZ a few years ago - "The Quiet Earth". Due to an utterly unexplained catastrophe affecting only humans, all died save those who were actually dying at the time!

Chewie, we can tick most of the poisonous creatures boxes, including a monotreme but we don't have a poisonous bird. You have to pop over the Torres Straight to New guinea and there's one.

Australia is incredibly non volcanic. What you see here is very old indeed.