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Summary: super volcanoes can go from dormant to erupting in a human lifetime; previous estimates were it took much longer.

rbanffy 9y ago
So, 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 ago
  You 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 ago
    I wonder which of these two options scales better
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Isn’t the problem that you need a way to deal with the ash produced?
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      That'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.
      - drharby 9y ago
        I'm curious - could a swarm of uavs with giant receptacles be able to reduce ash presence in the atmosphere.
        stcredzero 9y ago
        No. The size of swarm you'd need would entail a rather large environmental impact on its own.
        Bartweiss 9y ago
        The one bright spot I see is that you wouldn't actually need to fly around; something akin to flying windmill designs might suffice. I think there are at least three major problems here, though, each bad enough to sink the idea. First: the last major Yellowstone eruption involved 240 cubic miles of debris. Even if that's only 1% ash, that's a basically prohibitive amount of volume to remove from the upper atmosphere. Second: ash distribution is rapid and extensive. There's not enough ash in any one place to make cleanup runs effective overall, and distribution is too fast to clean a region persistently. Third: volcanic ash is some of the nastiest, most machinery-hostile stuff nature produces. I would expect it to jam and corrode basically any moving πarts we can build, while also blocking out enough light to prohibit any kind of sustained solar flight. Frankly, I don't think there is a good answer at the moment; the sheer volume of the stuff is beyond any sort of geoengineering we've seriously considered.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    It'll provoke a mass extinction and make the maximum human population the Earth can support a fraction of what it is now. If the US government finds out Yellowstone is going to erupt in, say, 10 years, it'll have a strong pressure to invade territories considered safe in order to preserve its existence past the eruption. Also, wars to secure supplies for the designated survivor populations should be expected.
    - Retric 9y ago
      These things are frequent and don't cause 'mass' extinctions. ~1/100,000 years seems slow, but that's ~650 of them post dinosaurs.
      - _jal 9y ago
        Sure, NBD. Just throw the chains on your truck-tires and wear a coat. Can I ask, what is the intended communicative payload of the scare-quotes around 'mass'?
        Retric 9y ago
        They do cause extinctions, possibly 10's of thousands, however extinctions are also common events as the background rate is ~1-5 per year. Right now we are around 1,000 - 10,000x that rate (as in several dozen per day) which very much qualifies as a Mass extinction when you add up the last 10,000 years. Put another way, when 99.9% of species survive it's not a mass extinction. Remember, even if 99% of individual organisms die that's not necessarily fatal at the species level. PS: The big 5 killed of ~70-98% of all species and even large ~17-57% of all families of species. That's hard to picture, but think not just all domestic cats, but also all tigers, lions, Jaguar, Leopard, Ocelot, lynx, Bobcat, Cheetah, Leopard, etc aka anything cat like as just one family.
      - chiph 9y ago
        It's not a concern if you're one of the species that will likely survive it.
- deadghost 9y ago
  Just construct a giant bowl on top of the volcano to collect the ash and lava.
  - WillReplyfFood 9y ago
    I know, its supossed to be fun and games.. but drones with a binding agent.. Nanorobots reproducing on the ashes.. Triggering some atmospheric cleaning process.. There is a lot we dont know yet, we might be able to do..
    - drharby 9y ago
      >username I've got this bazooka bubblegum
  - Jemmeh 9y ago
    Leave a shop vac turned on up there, we'll be fine.
- baldfat 9y ago
  I see a new movie is about to be made. There are already engineering plans to relieve the eruption. NASA has commented that a Super Volcano are a bigger threat than asteroids. > But if more of the heat could be extracted, then the supervolcano would never erupt. Nasa estimates that if a 35% increase in heat transfer could be achieved from its magma chamber, Yellowstone would no longer pose a threat. The only question is how? http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-plan-to-save-earth-from-a-supervolcano http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-pla...
  - nine_k 9y ago
    So, some drilling and pumping water through the drilled area would help? Putting a power plant on top would be an almost-free bonus.
    - Harvey-Specter 9y ago
      Yeah, that's NASA's suggestion in the article.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      The issue is next to nothing or no one lives within hundreds of miles of Yellowstone. Almost 90% of Wyoming and Montana has less than 1 person per mile density. Its beautiful but how do you deliver that energy? http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/geog1000/maplinks/namerica/gallery.html http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/geog1000/maplinks/namerica/...
  - SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
    That would be awesome. Even if we could somehow prevent loss of life and manage the fallout of a Yellowstone eruption, there would still be one really tragic casualty - Yellowstone itself. Maybe it would be replaced by something even better... eventually. But if it can be saved from super volcanic death, that seems like a really awesome thing. Of course, then one has to wonder if that sort of interference in major geological processes will have some other bad side-effects in the future.
rsync 9y ago
"Summary: super volcanoes can go from dormant to erupting in a human lifetime; previous estimates were it took much longer." This sounds very much like the beginning pages of seveneves[1] by Neal Stephenson. It's a novel about what happens to people when an unexpected deadline is imposed upon them. Highly recommended. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves

rbanffy 9y ago

So, 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 ago
You 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 ago
  I wonder which of these two options scales better
- protomyth 9y ago
  Isn’t the problem that you need a way to deal with the ash produced?
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    That'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.
    - drharby 9y ago
      I'm curious - could a swarm of uavs with giant receptacles be able to reduce ash presence in the atmosphere.
      - stcredzero 9y ago
        No. The size of swarm you'd need would entail a rather large environmental impact on its own.
      - Bartweiss 9y ago
        The one bright spot I see is that you wouldn't actually need to fly around; something akin to flying windmill designs might suffice. I think there are at least three major problems here, though, each bad enough to sink the idea. First: the last major Yellowstone eruption involved 240 cubic miles of debris. Even if that's only 1% ash, that's a basically prohibitive amount of volume to remove from the upper atmosphere. Second: ash distribution is rapid and extensive. There's not enough ash in any one place to make cleanup runs effective overall, and distribution is too fast to clean a region persistently. Third: volcanic ash is some of the nastiest, most machinery-hostile stuff nature produces. I would expect it to jam and corrode basically any moving πarts we can build, while also blocking out enough light to prohibit any kind of sustained solar flight. Frankly, I don't think there is a good answer at the moment; the sheer volume of the stuff is beyond any sort of geoengineering we've seriously considered.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  It'll provoke a mass extinction and make the maximum human population the Earth can support a fraction of what it is now. If the US government finds out Yellowstone is going to erupt in, say, 10 years, it'll have a strong pressure to invade territories considered safe in order to preserve its existence past the eruption. Also, wars to secure supplies for the designated survivor populations should be expected.
  - Retric 9y ago
    These things are frequent and don't cause 'mass' extinctions. ~1/100,000 years seems slow, but that's ~650 of them post dinosaurs.
    - _jal 9y ago
      Sure, NBD. Just throw the chains on your truck-tires and wear a coat. Can I ask, what is the intended communicative payload of the scare-quotes around 'mass'?
      - Retric 9y ago
        They do cause extinctions, possibly 10's of thousands, however extinctions are also common events as the background rate is ~1-5 per year. Right now we are around 1,000 - 10,000x that rate (as in several dozen per day) which very much qualifies as a Mass extinction when you add up the last 10,000 years. Put another way, when 99.9% of species survive it's not a mass extinction. Remember, even if 99% of individual organisms die that's not necessarily fatal at the species level. PS: The big 5 killed of ~70-98% of all species and even large ~17-57% of all families of species. That's hard to picture, but think not just all domestic cats, but also all tigers, lions, Jaguar, Leopard, Ocelot, lynx, Bobcat, Cheetah, Leopard, etc aka anything cat like as just one family.
    - chiph 9y ago
      It's not a concern if you're one of the species that will likely survive it.
deadghost 9y ago
Just construct a giant bowl on top of the volcano to collect the ash and lava.
- WillReplyfFood 9y ago
  I know, its supossed to be fun and games.. but drones with a binding agent.. Nanorobots reproducing on the ashes.. Triggering some atmospheric cleaning process.. There is a lot we dont know yet, we might be able to do..
  - drharby 9y ago
    >username I've got this bazooka bubblegum
- Jemmeh 9y ago
  Leave a shop vac turned on up there, we'll be fine.
baldfat 9y ago
I see a new movie is about to be made. There are already engineering plans to relieve the eruption. NASA has commented that a Super Volcano are a bigger threat than asteroids. > But if more of the heat could be extracted, then the supervolcano would never erupt. Nasa estimates that if a 35% increase in heat transfer could be achieved from its magma chamber, Yellowstone would no longer pose a threat. The only question is how? http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-plan-to-save-earth-from-a-supervolcano http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-pla...
- nine_k 9y ago
  So, some drilling and pumping water through the drilled area would help? Putting a power plant on top would be an almost-free bonus.
  - Harvey-Specter 9y ago
    Yeah, that's NASA's suggestion in the article.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    The issue is next to nothing or no one lives within hundreds of miles of Yellowstone. Almost 90% of Wyoming and Montana has less than 1 person per mile density. Its beautiful but how do you deliver that energy? http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/geog1000/maplinks/namerica/gallery.html http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/geog1000/maplinks/namerica/...
- SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
  That would be awesome. Even if we could somehow prevent loss of life and manage the fallout of a Yellowstone eruption, there would still be one really tragic casualty - Yellowstone itself. Maybe it would be replaced by something even better... eventually. But if it can be saved from super volcanic death, that seems like a really awesome thing. Of course, then one has to wonder if that sort of interference in major geological processes will have some other bad side-effects in the future.

rsync 9y ago

"Summary: super volcanoes can go from dormant to erupting in a human lifetime; previous estimates were it took much longer." This sounds very much like the beginning pages of seveneves[1] by Neal Stephenson. It's a novel about what happens to people when an unexpected deadline is imposed upon them. Highly recommended. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves