“…(W)e may well be on the brink of the biggest catastrophe the modern world has ever witnessed“, according to this (alarmist?) report. Increased geothermal activity beneath Yallowstone National Park, which at first blush appears to be of concern only to potential visitors to the park, may herald the impending eruption of “one of the most destructive natural phenomena in the world: a massive supervolcano“, one of only a handful known to exist in the world. Listen to this scenario:
…(W)hen one erupts the explosion will be heard around the globe. The sky will darken, black acid rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. It could push humanity to the brink of extinction….
Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College London, says that America’s Yellowstone Park is one of the largest and most dangerous supervolcanoes in the world. “The Yellowstone volcano can be likened to a sleeping dragon,” says Professor McGuire, “whose slow breathing brings repeated swelling and sinking of the Earth’s crust in northern Wyoming and southern Montana.”
Professor McGuire went on to explain that: “Many supervolcanoes are not typical hill-shaped structures but huge, collapsed craters called “calderas” that are filled with hot magma and are harder to detect. The Yellowstone supervolcano was detected in the Sixties when infra-red satellite photographs revealed a magma-filled caldera 85km long and 45km wide. It has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago, so the next is long overdue.”
Volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres, almost two and a half feet, since 1923, indicating a massive swelling underneath the park.
“The impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend.” says Professor McGuire. “Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years.”
The long-term effects would be even more devastating. The thousands of cubic kilometres of ash that would shoot into the atmosphere would block out light from the sun, making global temperatures collapse. This is called a nuclear winter. A large percentage of the world’s plant life would be killed by the ash and the drop in temperature. The resulting change in the world’s climate would devastate the planet, and scientists know that another eruption is due – they just don’t know when.
Michael Rampino, a geologist at New York University, quoted in a BBC Horizon documentary on Supervolcanoes three years ago explained: “It’s difficult to conceive of an eruption this big. It’s really not a question of if it’ll go off, it’s a question of when, because sooner or later one of these large super eruptions will happen.” —Online Journal [via Medley]
