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A Surprise from the Supervolcano Under Yellowstone
- Romanulus 9y agoAt first I thought, "Oh lord, this is going to be a terrifying surprise and/or new and horrific way to die, melt, and explode (not in that order)." Colour me surprised!
- figgis 9y agoSay if the massive amounts of magma actually required to trigger these explosions were injected tonight what would the response be? Would we at least know this is happening?
- mikeytown2 9y agoLots of smaller earthquakes is what to look for.
- jschwartzi 9y agoWhat about local changes in elevation? If there's a ton of new material in the crust would we observe deformation in the caldera?
- compiler-guy 9y agoYes. In fact, scientists track the Yellowstone caldera's altitude and watch it "breathe", so to speak. https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/caldera-rises https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/caldera-rises
- FooHentai 9y ago>Would we at least know this is happening? Lots of earthquake activity in the area, as I understand it.
- DoubleCribble 9y agoWe'd probably have some idea the race is on. Telltale signs like earthquakes, changes in caldera elevation, volcanic gas emissions and temperature changes would offer advance warning. Here's the weekly report for the world's largest active volcano: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mauna_loa/elevated.html https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mauna_loa/elevated.html
- mikeytown2 9y agoSummary: super volcanoes can go from dormant to erupting in a human lifetime; previous estimates were it took much longer.
- rbanffy 9y agoSo, we need to be able to successfully establish a self-sufficient off-world colony in less than a human lifetime after we detect the events that precede a super-eruption. ;-) Outlook not so good.
- Maken 9y agoYou just need to figure how to survive the volcanic winter. It's not like the magma is going to cover the entire surface of the Earth.
- zdkl 9y agoI wonder which of these two options scales better
- protomyth 9y agoIsn’t the problem that you need a way to deal with the ash produced?
- Bartweiss 9y agoThat's a major part of it. Globally, the problem is volcanic winter - ash in the upper atmosphere blocking out light and causing major cooling. The estimates I've seen suggest ~2 years of nonstop winter, followed by a gradual recovery. But regionally, the problem is settling ash, which travels much further than larger debris. That blankets plants and kills them, as well as causing lung damage and suffocation sufficient to kill or sicken most animals in the area. It's one of the reasons Yellowstone is particularly threatening - we can expect that the volcanic winter would start with the death of crops and livestock in one of the highest-export farming regions on the planet.
- quotemstr 9y agoIs anyone else tired of this style of headline? I know HN prefers the original headline, but when the original headline is clickbait-y, wouldn't it be better to change the HN headline to something that encapsulates the main idea of the link? Now that my whining is out of the way: if we had a decade of warning, I'd hope that we'd be able to figure out some engineering technique for dissipating the magma chamber heat before a catastrophic eruption.
- dang 9y agoThe HN guidelines specifically ask submitters not to submit baity titles: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. In this case though I'd say we interpret 'linkbait' differently. The above title seems reasonable to me, though perhaps borderline.
- dredmorbius 9y agoHeadlines such as this make me want to build a wall. Not a practice I generally support in other contexts.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- BjoernKW 9y ago> figure out some engineering technique for dissipating the magma chamber heat. There have been several proposals, some of which even allow for using the heat for generating electricity. IIRC the problem with these approaches is that they take a few hundred years to be completed because you can’t simply drill the magma chamber but rather have to advance very slowly and carefully. A few hundred years unfortunately seems to be too large a timeframe for politics to pursue this huge undertaking in earnest.
- rbanffy 9y agoThere is an enormous amount of heat stored in there and the amount to be extracted to make any significant difference is probably more than the entire planetary demand. The good news is that we don't need to drill to the magma chamber unless we want to also dig a lava channel to the nearest ocean (2300km if you don't feel like digging through mountains, or about 1000km to Oregon's coast if you are into digging), but just somewhere near that's hot enough to boil water at some pressure. I don't see much support for doing it in a preservation area, however. In CA, the heat could be used to power sea-water desalination, if someone is willing to build the large 270km long pipe.
- njarboe 9y agoCaldera collapse volcanic eruptions the size of Yellowstone occurr at random intervals, not periodically every 100,000 years, as the article states. The last big one was the Toba eruption in Indonesia about 72,000 years ago. That one almost killed off the human race. The Long Valley Caldera in California became more active in the 1970's. If this study's conclusions hold up under investigation and it only takes a few decades of activity before a "supervolcano" can erupt, we should monitor these caldera a bit more closely.
- Bartweiss 9y agoWait, surely it's not entirely random? I thought we were talking about a process like earthquakes, where the actual event is unpredictable but the underlying causes add 'pressure' and gradually raise the odds. Obviously that's predictability within a single supervolcano, not worldwide, but I'd love clarification if I've got that wrong.
- knownothing 9y agoThe key point is: > Caldera collapse volcanic eruptions the size of Yellowstone occurr at random intervals Which I take to mean that there isn't enough data about exceptional events like this to reliably predict their timing.
- njarboe 9y agoThe Yellowstone hotspot has produced dozens of super volcano eruptions over the last 16 million years or so. The time between them has been between 500,000 and a 1.5 million years or so. This hotspot is the most periodic on Earth and there is really no where else like it currently. Many caldera eruption locations have one or two eruptions and that's it. Like the Valle Grande in northern New Mexico. So, in the Yellowstone case, it is reasonable to assume another one will happen and that the magma is "building up". And that it is more likely to happen soon, if it has not happened in a long while. On the other hand, I don't think we yet understand the mechanisms behind caldera eruptions well enough to say what will happen with much certainty. It is possible Yellowstone won't erupt again. Earthquakes are much more predictable. There are hundreds of faults all over the Earth that each have a long history that can be determined by digging trenches across faults. Most are semi-periodic with repetition going back dozens of earthquakes.
- KGIII 9y ago> There, they hauled rocks under the heat of the sun to gather samples, occasionally suspending their work when a bison or a bear roamed nearby. NYT is a horrible source for science news. Why were they hauling rocks and what did they do with their hauled rocks? I like bears and bison, but that doesn't seem important. Another article, slightly more sensationalist but worth checking out, in my opinion: http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/651406/yellowstone-supervolcano-eruption-super-volcano-nasa-drilling-plan http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/651406/yellowston...
- cokernel 9y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but the NYT article says they were hauling rocks "to gather samples" (of "fossilized ash deposit" for analysis). The next paragraph explains that they were looking for crystals in the samples because that can help give a timeline for relevant changes in the crystal's environment: > Ms. Shamloo later analyzed trace crystals in the volcanic leftovers, allowing her to pin down changes before the supervolcano’s eruption. Each crystal once resided within the vast, seething ocean of magma deep underground. As the crystals grew outward, layer upon layer, they recorded changes in temperature, pressure and water content beneath the volcano, much like a set of tree rings. It's true that this is not sufficient information to allow readers to replicate the analysis at home, but it seems like a good level of introductory detail so people can decide whether they want to follow the link in the NYT article to the volcanology conference.
- KGIII 9y agoHauling rocks doesn't really impart a whole lot of information. If they are going to include a bit about hauling rocks, maybe tell us about it - instead of pretending it's a novel with bison and bears. You know, science journalism. NYT is a lousy source for science journalism. How about what kind of rock? How about why they were moving rock (heavy?) instead of just taking small samples? Bison, bears, and the hot sun are prose for op-eds and novels, not an article about geology. Heck, they could have skipped that whole sentence and it'd have been fine. I'm not outraged, it's just lousy science journalism that is an example of their continued low-quality reporting. It's just one more strike against them, so I figured I'd mention it and offer readers a second article - which wasn't much better but you can combine the two and almost have something worth reading.
- jackgavigan 9y agoAm I the only one irritated by the writer's use of "millenniums"?
- Tyrannosaur 9y agoOh come now. You can't expect writers and editors for a company like The New York Times to know and use proper spelling and grammar, can you? Seriously though. So annoying.
- ghaff 9y agoHow dare they use an accepted form from Merriam Webster. (Personally I use millennia but if millenniums is accepted use in MW, that puts it well into the range of standard US usage.)
- rojondo 9y agoWhy irritated? It's one of two correct plural forms of "millenium." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/millennium https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/millennium
- dkarl 9y agoThat's literally[1] the worst argument ever. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
- dkarl 9y agoAll right, to spell it out: Merriam-Webster is not a dictionary of "correct" forms. The usage of "literally" in my post is documented in Merriam-Webster as "used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible." It would be inappropriate to use "literally" in that way in a science article in the New York Times, because the standards for writing in the New York Times are different from the standards for inclusion in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
- fowkswe 9y agoHas anyone heard of a study of how fracking and horizontal oil drilling in the states surrounding Colorado are affecting the caldera? I would imagine all of the seismic activity they cause would have an impact.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI picked the worst time to have a child. Then again, I think you could reasonably say that at any point in the past hundred years or so, at least if you were living in America.
- amha 9y agoWould you rather have had a child in the 19th century, when job options for your potential child would have been limited to a) difficult farm labor, with long days, low pay, and poor working conditions, or b) difficult factory labor, with long days, low pay, and poor working conditions?
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI wouldn't. But the problems of those times seemed to be on a much more human scale. Cholera might get her, or she might die in a mine, or be murdered by a nobleman in a drunken rage. Some of those things I can work to protect her against. But a supervolcano is an inhuman threat. So is war, regular, nuclear or civil. So is climate change, if we're too late to stop its progress.
- lostapathy 9y agoIn this way, lucky for all of us that large wars are getting less frequent, and the amount of non-combatant casualties continues to drop. The amount of people who died in the american civil war and world war 1 & 2 is staggering compared to the loss of life in most modern conflicts.
- bzbarsky 9y agoRight now is probably the safest time in human history wrt to dying in a war, on average. At least if you look at actual deaths, not potential ones from a nuclear war. Putting numbers to that last is difficult. If we assume the war is not between major powers with large numbers of nuclear weapons (i.e. assume North Korea, not Russia), then the potential death toll is in the millions to tens of millions and the probability is likely in the single digits at most, I would guess... But I welcome sources on good estimates for this. On the other hand, in the 19th century diseases _would_ get about 1/4 to 1/2 (depending on what country you were in) of your kids before they turned 5. Check out http://www.gapminder.org/tools/#_state_time_value=1800;&marker_axis/_x_which=time&domainMin:null&domainMax:null&zoomedMin:null&zoomedMax:null&scaleType=time;&axis/_y_which=child/_mortality/_0/_5/_year/_olds/_dying/_per/_1000/_born&domainMin:null&domainMax:null&zoomedMin:null&zoomedMax:null&scaleType=log;;;&chart-type=bubbles http://www.gapminder.org/tools/#_state_time_value=1800;&mark... for example. And diseases were, at the time, very much an inhuman threat that you couldn't protect against; people didn't even have a very clear understanding of why they happened, much less what to do about it until the _end_ of the 19th century. Dying in a mine or being murdered by noblemen isn't even a blip compared to dying of good old cholera, measles, typhus, etc, etc.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoEven a "small" eruption of a super volcano will change the climate significantly for decades. This helps motivates Elon Musk's desire to be a multi-planetary species. It is also why I advocate additional investment in engineering solutions to surviving climate change rather than focusing entirely on CO2 mitigation. We cannot prevent a super volcano from erupting. One of the more interesting conjectures I've heard about climate change was the relationship of sea level to magma mobility. A paper looking at the effect of the Mediterranean ocean drying out and its impact on volcanic activity[1] describes a fairly local connection. Such a mechanism could be used to explain a systemic recovery response of the planet from periods of high average temperature. Specifically the planet has gone through periods where it has been really warm and then really cold (ice ages) and back again to warm. [1] http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v10/n10/full/ngeo3032.html http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v10/n10/full/ngeo3032.htm...
- microtherion 9y ago> Even a "small" eruption of a super volcano will change the climate significantly for decades. This helps motivates Elon Musk's desire to be a multi-planetary species. But even the biggest conceivable eruption will leave Earth infinitely more habitable than any other known celestial body.
- Houshalter 9y agoExactly. It would be far far easier to build self sufficient colonies in Antarctica, or under the ocean, or even remote deserts. We don't even have the technology to do that yet. They couldn't even get the biosphere to work.
- gebeeson 9y agoAbsolutely. We are already here.
- ballenf 9y agoWould life on earth exist if none of these super volcanoes had ever erupted? That is, are the massive cooling effects and resulting changes to the environment required to balance natural warming? Has anyone studied or attempted to model an earth without super volcanic events?
- antisthenes 9y agoIf the greenhouse effect did not exist, the average temperature of Earth would be -18C So it's more correct to say that without the greenhouse effect, life would never exist on Earth, because plant life most certainly wouldn't develop in -18C and saturate the planet with oxygen.
- ballenf 9y agoCan there not be more than one parallel requisite for life to exist? Like the presence of the moon, distance from the sun, etc.