6 ms·

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.