Fwd: Thar she blows again...

[Jim McCulloch]

Frances,

Interesting article.

Worry about the Yellowstone supervolcano is kind of like worrying 
about an asteroid or comet impact--such a disaster will probably end 
human civilization, if not human life, when it happens, but there is 
not much anyone can do about it. Actually, we could protect most of 
the human population against supervolcano and asteroid nuclear winter 
scenarios by storing maybe a decade's worth of food for 6 billion 
people, and keeping such a store on hand at all times. Obviously, the 
likelihood of our doing this is small.

According to USGS web sites, the geologically recent blasts of the 
yellowstone hotspot have occurred at intervals of 800 thousand and 
660 thousand years. The most recent one was 640 thousand years ago. 
All you can say, statistically, from this is that another blast could 
occur in a few days, a few thousand years, or never. The sample size 
is too small for to make predictions from.

The USGS thinks the most likely type of volcanic eruption in 
Yellowstone will not be one of the huge supervolcano explosions, but 
a hydrothermal eruption that might blow out a hole big enough to make 
a small lake. Several of these occur during any given 10,000 year 
interval.

Oddly enough, most of the survivalists who expect to live through the 
end of human civilization have built their bunkers in Idaho, Wyoming, 
or Montana, such that if the supervolcano does blow for real, they 
will all be buried under the ash.

Best regards,

--Jim McCulloch