Maybe it's just me but super volcanoes seem pretty destructive. I've been hearing rumors for a couple years now about Yellowstone National Park basicallt being a huge caldera for one that has blown several times in the past, and is getting ready to again.
If I remember correctly after seeing a special on them, there are only supposed to be 6 or so in the world. Every time one goes off it always turns into a global situation. Anyone else know about these things?
Yep, it'll have a ridiculously huge blast radius followed by an even wider zone where poisonous gas and volcanic dust will kill every living thing, then the resulting amount of dust left in the atmosphere will cover the planet and lower global temperatures.
Yellowstone is moving. About 12 million years agoa disaster occured in Nebraska. A huge fossil bed was found with animals buried in ash. When the ash was analysed it was found to match ash from Idaho. The volcanic explosion was big enough to make an ash layer 3m deep in eastern Nebraska about 1,600 miles away. The US sits atop a "hot spot" which erupted every 600,000 years (last time it erupted was just over 600,000 years ago) and is currently situated in Wyoming. Yellowstone park. Mt. St Helens lost about 400m of its peak produced a column of ash that rose to 18,000m, destroyed 600 square KM of forest. 48km from the volcano an airplane reported being hit with rocks. Yakima, washington ground to a hault though it recieved just 1.5cm of ash. It had a caldera of about 2 square km. When it exploded a crater 1.6 km wide was made.
Yellowstone has a caldera almost 9,000 square km and a crater 65km across. Yellowstone national park sits atop a superplume that goes down about 200km into the earths core. Its magma chamber is about 72km across and 13km thick. (it is about the same size as the park) If you imagine sitting on a TNT pile 13km high and the size of a beautiful English county that is what yellowstone is. The park is about o.5km higher than it should be because of the force of the magma.
There are 30 active plumes on the earth. Iceland, Pitcairn, Galapogos, Hawaii etc. are all caused by them. Yellowstone is the only continental one though. Genreally these, when thery erupt, less explode more flow. However since Yellowstone is on continental crust it behaves very differently. Its most recent explosion was 1000 times more powerful than mt st helens. before that it was 280 times as big and the one before that could be as much as 8,000 the size. Krakatau was big it made water slosh in the English channel and reverberated round the globe for 9 days. If mount st helens was a pea and krakatau was, comparatively, a golf ball. The biggest yellowston eruption would be a sphere capable of hiding a grown man behind. 2 million years ago when it erupted New York was buried in ash to a depth of 20m and California 6m.
19 western states were covered in ash from the last eruption (plus parts of canada and mexico). After 9/11 it took 8 months to clear 1.8 billion tonnes of debris. Imagine clearing almost all of the US west of the Missisipi. In Toba Sumatra the blast made 6 years of volcanic winter. It is thought it reduced the human population was reduced to a few thousand for the nexy 20 thousand years. In 1973 the water in yellowstone lake began to run out and flood ssurrounding fields. A survey showed that a bulge was created that had lifted up one end of the lake. By 1984 100 square km of the park had risen over 1m. It seems yellowstone is active and restless. Though most of the "warning signs" of eruption happen in one form or another at yellowstone already.
There isn't a volcano IN Yellowstone, Yellowstone ITSELF is a supervolcano. Yellowstone is supposed too blow in about a thousand years.
As to whether or not how many people will die BECAUSE of the volcano, relatively few people, compared to the population of the world in about 1000 years, will actually die because of the explosion itself. However, the about of poisonous ash and gases will travel around the globe fairly quickly, and because of that many others will die.
Also, because of the huge amounts of ash in the sky, it will literally block out the sun. Therefore, the Earth is predicted to go into another Ice Age. How that will affect humankind in general, nobody knows, but many say that we as a species are "better prepared" for such a disaster.
are we talking rainbows and ponies thuper? or just thpecial thuper? or all hell will break loose super?
I think I'll go with th last one.
Anyway, I don't think there are volcanoes in Wyoming, because it is not on a tectonic plate. But there are calderas, (which are hot water type volcanoes) and geysers.
When you say super volcanoes it reminds me of Pompeii, that was truly a devastating blast.
I am pretty sure that volcano in Yellowstone will never ever be a Super Volcano. Most of those happened like millions of years ago.
It was, is and wil be one. I watched a documentary about it in geography class, read a few books on it. It's pretty scary, considering some scientists claim the Big One is overdue already.
Anyway, I don't think there are volcanoes in Wyoming, because it is not on a tectonic plate. But there are calderas, (which are hot water type volcanoes) and geysers.
As far as I know the caldera is the super-volcano. They spent a while looking for the caldera when NASA sent over some pics they had taken to try out some new satelite or something. Then they realised the park was the caldera.
as I said before it isn;t the "Oh my God I'm gonna blw up" Pompeii style volcano its the bubbling spurting one but since it is on hard continental plate rather than thinner oceanic plate more pressure builds up so it blows with more force.
