Friday, January 25, 2008

Secrets beneath Yellowstone

Millions of tourists travel to Yellowstone each year. Many of the travelers leisurly take photos and hike, but they are unaware of the danger that resides thousands of miles beneath their shoes.

The source that makes yellowstone geysers and hot springs alive is a massive pool of magma residing in earth's mantle. This huge amount of magma is enough to drive a Super Volcano.

A super volcano is the largest and most deadly type of volcano. This type of eruption is a mangnitude 8 on the VEI scale which means that 1,000,000,000,000 cubic kilometers of magma will be errupted.

Just how bad would things get if one occurred?

First, anyone at ground zero would instantly become incinerated. Pyroclastic flows, which are gigantic flows of ash (that will turn into cement in your lungs), will cause any town within hundreds of miles to become decimated. [An example is shown in the bottom video on the video bar on the right.] Ash will fall almost everywhere across the nation. Indiana will have about 2 inches of ash on the ground.



But things get worse... All of the ash in the air will emcompass the entire globe, and the thick soot in the stratosphere will block out the sun for several months, even years. Twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide gas will be given off from the volcano, and when it combines with water in the atmosphere, sulfuric rain will occur. The planet will also have a global cooling of 1 degree Celcius for a year, and most of Earth's plants will die out and the water supply will be contaminated with massive amounts of soot.

Sure. You can guess what will happen, but how do we know that for sure?


The answer is simple... It's already happened before! If you look at Yellowstone, you will see gigantic ridges and rifts, almost like a huge wall that goes up a few hundred feet. A person might not think anything about it until he or she sees an aerial shot. There is an entire rim that goes around Yellowstone, and there is only one thing that couldv'e caused it... a previous super eruption.



You see, the magma pool underneath the ground takes up a lot of space. Actually, it's almost the entire size of Yellowstone. Once an eruption has occurred, and the magma empties, there is nothing left to support the land above the pool, and it all just collapses. It leaves the high ridges and rifts from where the elevation of the land used to be. Scientist refer to these areas as "calderas".

Are we in danger?

Scientists have estimated that a super eruption occurs every 600,000 years, but that's not a good thing. The last eruption hasn't occurred since 640,000 years ago! We are over due for a super eruption, but that doesn't mean that we should fret over it today. It could occur tomorrow, or it can occur another 100,000 years from now. One things for sure. We will know ahead of time if an eruption is about to occur. The ground will rise, small earthquakes will occur, and trees will die from the massive amounts of gas given off. So you shouldn't worry about it until then!

2 comments:

Krystal said...

I've heard about this volcano before. There are two volcanos just like this (though I believe it is quite smaller) in Japan. These two supervolcanoes have the most recent eruptions (dating 22,000 years ago). While they were extremely disastrous and caused a nation distress, it did not cause the global damage which you mention. Unfortunately, there is not much that we can do to prevent the eruption that will eventually occur in Yellowstone and we have to allow nature to run its course.

Unknown said...

You say that 1,000,000,000,000 cubic kilometers of magma will be errupted.
Thats just a little bit less than whole Earth :). Scientists say it will only be like 2500 kubic kilometres. But that's still enought to devastate whole Earth.