Threat Of Devastating 'Supervolcano' Eruption At Yellowstone Is Greater Than Previously Thought

Scientists from the US Geological Survey who breezily informed the public that there’s “nothing to worry about” with regards to the Yellowstone caldera, a supervolcano that should it erupt could cause potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, should be eating their words.

Since about mid-July, the earth beneath the volcano has been shifting in a sign that magma could be rushing into the caldera’s main chamber. Since then, there have been roughly 2,500 small-scale earthquakes recorded near the volcano, the largest stretch on record. Previous estimates had assumed that the process that led to the eruption took millenniums to occur.

The same estimates that USGS based their warning on.

As the New York Times explains, the Yellowstone caldera is a behemoth far more powerful than your average volcano. It has the ability to expel more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock and ash at once, 2,500 times more material than erupted from Mount St. Helens in 1980, which killed 57 people. That could blanket most of the United States in a thick layer of ash and even plunge the Earth into a volcanic winter.

As the Times points out, scientists expect a supervolcano eruption to scar the planet once every 100,000 years.

To reach their conclusion, the team of scientists spent weeks at Yellowstone’s Lava Creek Tuff – a fossilized ash deposit from the volcano’s last supereruption, where they gathered samples and analyzed the volcanic leftovers. The analysis allowed the scientists to pin down changes in the lava flow before the last eruption. The crystalline structures of the rocks recorded changes in temperature, pressure and water content beneath the volcano just like tree rings do.

“We expected that there might be processes happening over thousands of years preceding the eruption,” said Christy Till, a geologist at Arizona State, and Ms. Shamloo’s dissertation adviser. Instead, the outer rims of the crystals revealed a clear uptick in temperature and a change in composition that occurred on a rapid time scale. That could mean the super eruption transpired only decades after an injection of fresh magma beneath the volcano.”

Thanks to this research, scientists are beginning to realize that the conditions that would lead to a supervolcano eruption could emerge during a human lifetime. As the research continues, scientists hope they will be able to spot more signs of a coming eruption.

“It’s one thing to think about this slow gradual buildup – it’s another thing to think about how you mobile 1000 cubic kilometers of magma in a decade,” she said.

While scientists at the USGS have brushed off the threat of a supervolcano eruption, scientists at NASA have at least acknowledged the threat to the US population. The agency has devised a potential strategy to try and defuse an eruption should one appear imminent, though according to several the techniques involved – specifically, pumping water directly into the volcano’s magma chamber – involve significant risks.

But who knows? If the research is accurate, an eruption could emerge as a serious threat to the US – and possibly the global population – population as the fallout kills crops and livestock, causing widespread famine, while clouds of choking ash and debris spread for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.

Ominous Earthquake Swarm At Yellowstone Supervolcano Now One Of Longest Ever Recorded

The rumblings beneath the formerly dormant supervolcano known as the Yellowstone caldera just won"t quit. And The ongoing earthquake swarm at the Yellowstone National Park supervolcano is now one of the longest ever recorded, having started on June 12. The ongoing earthquake swarm at the Yellowstone National Park supervolcano is now one of the longest ever recorded, having started on June 12.

Over the past three and a half months, almost 2,500 earthquakes have been recorded in the western part of the national park. This is on par with the biggest swarm ever recorded, where more than 3,000 earthquakes took place over three months, Newsweek reports.

In its latest monthly update about activity at Yellowstone, the US Geological Survey said 115 earthquakes had been reported in the park during September. Of these, 78 were part of the ongoing swarm 6 miles north of West Yellowstone. The biggest event in the swarm last month was magnitude 2.3.

“This is the sort of work that will happen in the months to come, as we gather up all of the available data and start crunching numbers,” Poland says. “What we can say now is that through the of September, the University of Utah has located 2,475 earthquakes in the swarm. This puts the 2017 swarm on par with that of 1985, which lasted three months and had over 3,000 located events.  end

“[This is] certainly a fascinating event and one that we hope to learn more about through some post-swarm analysis,” he adds. “There"s a lot to work on this winter, for sure.”

While scientists at the USGS have brushed off the threat of a supervolcano eruption, scientists at NASA have said it represents a potentially devastating threat to the US population. These same scientists have suggested several risky strategies to prevent an eruption if one appears imminent.

Brian Wilcox, a former member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense, and several other NASA researchers over the summer shared a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat Yellowstone poses, and what can be done to prevent an eruption.

According to NASA, an eruption at Yellowstone could plunge the earth into a volcanic winter and destroy crops and livestock, precipitating widespread famines.  Food reserves would only last about 74 days, according to the UN, after an eruption of a super volcano, like that under Yellowstone.

With an eruption long overdue, NASA has devised a plan to drill into the caldera and try to artificially cool it – a strategy that researchers say comes with its own risks.

Scientists at the USGS say the monthslong earthquake storm at the caldera has ended; however, they played down the risks posed by the swarm shortly after it started over the summer, only for the rumbling to continue. Others maintain that an eruption is long overdue.

Scientists Say Italian Supervolcano Is "Becoming More Dangerous" As Magma Builds Beneath It

After the long-dormant supervolcano Campi Flegrei awakened late last year, a team of scientists that has pinpointed the now-active volcano"s magma source says a potentially devastating eruption could be just around the corner.

Campi Flegrei is a volcanic caldera to the west of Naples that last erupted in the sixteenth century. It has been mostly quiet since then, with the exception of a few small tremors in the 1980s. Seismographic data from those rumbles allowed scientists to pinpoint the source of the magma that flooded into Campi Flegrei"s chamber and caldera, according to United Press International. The results are unequivocal: An analysis of the supervolcano"s hot zone suggests Campi Flegrei could be nearing an eruption.

"What this means in terms of the scale of any future eruption we cannot say, but there is no doubt that the volcano is becoming more dangerous," De Siena said.

"The big question we have to answer now is if it is a big layer of magma that is rising to the surface, or something less worrying which could find its way to the surface out at sea."

Researchers liken the volcano"s hot zone to a boiling pot of soup. Over the last several years, the volcano has gotten considerably hotter.

The Campi Flegrei "hot zone"

Four years ago, scientists warned any eruption could kill millions living near or on top of the volcano.

"These areas can give rise to the only eruptions that can have global catastrophic effects comparable to major meteorite impacts," said Giuseppe De Natale, head of a project to monitor the volcano"s activity.

Now, based on an assessment of the current flows, scientists are worried that a potentially deadly eruption could happen close to a population center like the city of Naples.

"During the last 30 years the behaviour of the volcano has changed, with everything becoming hotter due to fluids permeating the entire caldera," Dr De Siena explained.

"Whatever produced the activity under Pozzuoli in the 1980s has migrated somewhere else, so the danger doesn"t just lie in the same spot, it could now be much nearer to Naples which is more densely populated.

"This means that the risk from the caldera is no longer just in the centre, but has migrated. Indeed, you can now characterise Campi Flegrei as being like a boiling pot of soup beneath the surface.

"What this means in terms of the scale of any future eruption we cannot say, but there is no doubt that the volcano is becoming more dangerous.

The study, which Phys.org reports provides a benchmark that could help determine the timing of future eruptions, was led by Dr. Luca De Siena at the University of Aberdeen in conjunction with the INGV Osservatorio Vesuviano, the RISSC lab of the University of Naples, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Still, scientists have some questions.

"One question that has puzzled scientists is where magma is located beneath the caldera, and our study provides the first evidence of a hot zone under the city of Pozzuoli that extends into the sea at a depth of 4 km," Dr De Siena said.

"While this is the most probable location of a small batch of magma, it could also be the heated fluid-filled top of a wider magma chamber, located even deeper."

Dr De Siena"s study suggests that magma was prevented from rising to the surface in the 1980s by the presence of a one-to-two-kilometer-deep rock formation that blocked its path, forcing it to release energy along a different route. While the implications of this are still not fully understood, the relatively low amount of seismic activity in the area since the 1980s suggests that pressure is building within the caldera, raising the risk of an eruption.

Just days ago, scientists warned that Mount Paektu, a long dormant supervolcano in North Korea, could be roused to a potentially humanity-threatening eruption if the isolated nation continues to conduct nuclear tests at its Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

Meanwhile, US government officials are monitoring a similar situation unfolding at the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming, another “supervolcano.” An eruption at Yellowstone could plunge the Earth into a volcanic winter, according to scientists at NASA, who’ve devised an incredibly risky plan to save the US from the volcano.

Of course, some scientists say NASA’s plan risks triggering the eruption it"s trying to prevent.

NASA believes the most viable solution could be to drill up to 10km down into the super volcano and pump down water at high pressure. The circulating water would return at a temperature of around 350C (662F), thus slowly day by day extracting heat from the volcano. And while such a project would come at an estimated cost of around $3.46 billion, it comes with an enticing catch which could convince politicians (taxpayers) to make the investment.

Of course, drilling into a supervolcano comes with its own risks, like the eruption that scientists are desperate to prevent.
 

North Korea's Nuclear Tests Could Trigger "Supervolcano" Eruption

After North Korea’s latest nuclear test, scientists are worried that more underground explosions in the isolated country’s rocky north could set the stage for a deadly volcanic eruption not unlike the one that NASA fears could be brewing in the Yellowstone caldera.

Following the North’s sixth nuclear test, which produced a blast that, by some estimates, was as powerful as 300 kilo hertz, Chinese authorities have stepped up radiation monitoring and even closed part of their border with North Korea as fallout fears have intensified.

And now, as Newsweek reports, China has limited access to a nature reserve on its border with North Korea after a mysterious series of seismic shakes at the rogue nation"s nuclear test site were detected less than 10 minutes after it conducted its latest test, which also triggered a sizable tremor. The severity of the tremors prompted Beijing to close the site over fears that underground detonations by the North Koreans at a facility near Punggye-ri could lead to rockslides, or worse, trigger an eruption of the active "super volcano" Mount Paektu, according to Disclose.tv.

According to Disclose.tv, the magma and sulfur booms during a supervolcano eruption could kill millions of people in the surrounding area, and potentially endangering all of humanity.

The volcano, which is sacred to North Korea, is located right on its border with China. China’s closure is in effect for a 70-mile-radius around the detonation site. A blast from a super volcano could be catastrophic, with ash traveling thousands of miles, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of deaths

"For the safety and convenience of travelers, we have temporarily closed the southern tourist zone of Changbai Mountain," read the message from Chinese authorities, translated by UPI. "Officials are thoroughly investigating the safety of the tourist area." The area will remain closed to the public until "the potential risks disappear," it said.

But besides radioactive risks, scientists are worried that North Korea’s nuclear tests could disturb could disturb mountains in the Changbai range, along with the still-active Mt. Paektu, triggering the first eruption since 1903.

A new article in scientific journal Nature’s Scientific Reports states that “an underground nuclear explosion test near an active volcano constitutes a direct threat."

Scientists wrote that it could “disturb the magma chamber of a volcano, thus accelerating the volcanic activity,” scientists argue.

“This is an interesting mystery at this point,” Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University in New York City, told Nature.

The US Geological Survey estimated the second burst of seismic energy, only eight and a half minutes after the detonation, had a magnitude of 4.1; the detonation itself registered at 6.3. While satellite images do show signs of structural collapse, the movement of rock more closely resembles a landslide.

North Korea is hardly alone in facing a potentially deadly eruption. Recently, NASA scientists have spoken out about the threat of super volcanoes and the risky methods that could be used to prevent a devastating eruption.

Lying beneath the tranquil and beautiful settings of Yellowstone National Park in the US is an enormous magma chamber called a caldera. It’s responsible for the geysers and hot springs for which the area is known, but for scientists at NASA, it’s also one of the greatest natural threats to human civilization as we know it.

Following an article published by BBC about super volcanoes last month, a group of NASA researchers got in touch with the media to share a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat Yellowstone poses, and what they hypothesize could possibly be done about it. As one researcher described it, the threat from super volcanos is much higher than the risk from asteroids

“I was a member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for NASA to defend the planet from asteroids and comets,” explains Brian Wilcox of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology.  

“I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.”

So, the agency has devised a plan that could ameliorate the volcano threat. The plan, which has yet to be authorized or implemented, would drill up to 10km down into the super volcano and pump down water at high pressure. The circulating water would return at a temperature of around 350C (662F). Thus, slowly day by day, extracting heat from the volcano. And while such a project would come at an estimated cost of around $3.46 billion, it comes with an enticing catch which could convince politicians (taxpayers) to make the investment.

“Yellowstone currently leaks around 6GW in heat,” Wilcox says. “Through drilling in this way, it could be used to create a geothermal plant, which generates electric power at extremely competitive prices of around $0.10/kWh. You would have to give the geothermal companies incentives to drill somewhat deeper and use hotter water than they usually would, but you would pay back your initial investment, and get electricity which can power the surrounding area for a period of potentially tens of thousands of years. And the long-term benefit is that you prevent a future supervolcano eruption which would devastate humanity.”

Of course, drilling into a super volcano comes with its own risks – in fact, it could inadvertently cause the eruption scientists are trying to prevent.

Talk about a volcanic irony…

'Supervolcano' Alert - Not Just In Yellowstone

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Thar she blows!

Once every 600,000 years or so Yellowstone’s supervolcano erupts, making Mt. St. Helens, Pinatubo, and Krakatoa look like firecrackers. It blankets thousands of miles around it in lava and ash, casting a pall over the earth that lowers temperatures and hinders plant life for decades. Compared to Mother Nature we anthropogenic climate changers (if we are that) are pikers. Interestingly enough, that supervolcano is due for another eruption.

Interestingly enough, so too is another supervolcano, one constructed entirely by humans. As to which erupts first, bet on the latter.

Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Coercion and violence generate a reaction, a countervailing pressure. They are historical constants, so like Yellowstone’s volcano, the pressure has been building for centuries, although not 6,000 of them. Like Yellowstone’s geysers, pressure-reducing steam has occasionally been released; coercion has abated and freedom briefly flowered. We know those periods as the times when progress mostly happened: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. However, the twentieth century marked a resurgence of pressure.

Their intellectual degradation complete, the coercive class meets any manifestation of countervailing pressure with still more coercion. The most pathetic case is the US government. Left at a zenith of power at the end of World War II, it has squandered its moral, military, and financial capital trying to squelch the forces that will inevitably topple its empire. After each disaster, it has sought new disasters. President Trump’s tripling down on Bush’s and Obama’s Afghanistan bets is yet another instance of the belief that force which fails can be “fixed” with more force.

The reactive opposites are decentralization and individual autonomy. Individuals now have unprecedented capacities to wage violence, communicate, and compute. Since World War II governments are batting virtually zero trying to suppress insurgencies waged by guerrillas fighting on their home turf.

Try as they might to suppress the Internet, they can’t go too far without severing their economies from the backbone of the information economy. Individuals perform computing feats on their smart phones that were beyond the capabilities of room-size computers fifty years ago. These are the forces pushing back against governmental centralization and coercion.

Lately, not a day has gone by where an article hasn’t appeared arguing that the US government or the media or the globalists or some other nefarious entity is pulling the strings of some nefarious “divide and conquer” strategy. “Divide” needs no help from anyone. Unless humans develop the ability to split themselves, division has proceeded as far as it can go. A solitary soul can work, shop, eat, drink, find amusement and information, and do everything else necessary to sustain life without ever leaving his dwelling or coming into contact with another human being. Undoubtedly some do.

Dividing is a done deal. Conquering is more problematic and in fact won’t happen. A government that’s sixteen years on in Afghanistan and hasn’t won a significant military engagement since World War II is going to have a bit of a problem either maintaining its faltering empire or subjugating its own well-armed population, half of which doesn’t like it very much, the other half expecting a perpetual payday. What if its creditors pull the charge card from the Empire of Debt?

The same problems—imperial inefficiency and debt far in excess of the underlying economy’s ability to support it—will unexpectedly walk in on the globalists’ masturbatory fantasies. Governments at all levels have collectively plighted their troth to a spurious order maintained by force and fraud, resting on a supervolcano. The seismic portents have registered for decades. The Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years, the Soviet Union sixty-nine. The Chinese government extended its life by rearranging its battery of forces, but the potential—so far successfully suppressed—counter-reaction leaves the rulers in a perpetual state of repressive anxiety.

The western welfare states are beset by bankruptcy, unsustainable expectations, faltering economies, Brexit, Trump, separatist and secessionist movements, and pitched battles over campus speakers, statues, and whatever else triggers the triggered. These are akin to Yellowstone’s recent seismic swarms, and they’ll only get more numerous and intense.

The list of irritations and grievances that can morph into confrontation and chaos is endless. It dawns on the debt-slave young that they are supporting their elders in a style to which they will never become accustomed. The productive tire of funding the unproductive and their government-sponsored rackets. Natives wonder why they should open their arms to migrants, especially those who hate them. Americans rebel against their government’s costly military interventions (okay, that one’s remote). Europe finds the Islamic chokehold increasingly choking and European manhood rediscovers its testicles (even more remote). It would be fitting if the first big morph came at some place like Davos or Jackson Hole.

The think-tank terms for today’s tremors are “devolution” and “decentralization,” always characterized as threats. Supervolcanos take no prisoners. When this one erupts, it will obliterate the rickety superstructures of global governance, finance, and economic. The proper phraseology will be, “blown to smithereens”: the just and unjust, prepared and unprepared, wise and foolish buried under lava flows and choked by ashes, reality beyond a hand in front of one’s face impossible to make out amidst the smoke and haze. The beloved order of the ruling class giving way to entropic atomization.

Atoms are life’s building blocks. Most everything worthwhile—family, community, trade, inquiry, innovation, production, progress—starts with individuals and builds. Most everything deleterious—repression, state-sponsored rapacity, tyranny, war—is imposed from the top by sociopaths masquerading as leaders. Bad as the supervolcano will be, it will blow this “top” to bits, giving the green shoots of decentralized freedom a chance to poke here and there through the ash. It’s about time.

NASA Unveils Plan To Stop World-Ending Supervolcano Eruption...There's Just One Catch

A NASA plan to stop the Yellowstone supervolcano from erupting, could actually cause it to blow... triggering a nuclear winter that would wipe out humanity.

As we have detailed recently, government officials have been closely monitoring the activity in the Yellowstone caldera.

However, as SHTFplan.com"s Mac Slavo details, scientists at NASA have now come up with an incredibly risky plan to save the United States from the super volcano.

A NASA scientist has spoken out about the true threat of super volcanoes and the risky methods that could be used to prevent a devastating eruption. Lying beneath the tranquil and beautiful settings of Yellowstone National Park in the US lies an enormous magma chamber, called a caldera. It’s responsible for the geysers and hot springs that define the area, but for scientists at NASA, it’s also one of the greatest natural threats to human civilization as we know it.

Brian Wilcox, a former member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense, shared a report on the natural hazard that hadn’t been seen outside of the agency until now. Following an article published by BBC about super volcanoes last month, a group of NASA researchers got in touch with the media to share a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat Yellowstone poses, and what they hypothesize could possibly be done about it.

“I was a member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for NASA to defend the planet from asteroids and comets,” explains Brian Wilcox of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology.  

 

“I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.”

Yellowstone currently leaks about 60 to 70 percent of its heat into the atmosphere through stream water which seeps into the magma chamber through cracks, while the rest of the heat builds up as magma and dissolves into volatile gasses. The heat and pressure will reach the threshold, meaning an explosion is inevitable. When NASA scientists considered the fact that a super volcano’s eruption would plunge the earth into a volcanic winter, destroying most sources of food, starvation would then become a real possibility.  Food reserves would only last about 74 days, according to the UN, after an eruption of a super volcano, like that under Yellowstone.  And they have devised a risky plan that could end up blowing up in their faces.  Literally.

Wilcox hypothesized that if enough heat was removed, and the temperature of the super volcano dropped, it would never erupt. But he wants to see a 35% decrease in temperature, and how to achieve that, is incredibly risky. One possibility is to simply increase the amount of water in the supervolcano. As it turns to steam. the water would release the heat into the atmosphere, making global warming alarmists tremble.

“Building a big aqueduct uphill into a mountainous region would be both costly and difficult, and people don’t want their water spent that way,” Wilcox says. “People are desperate for water all over the world and so a major infrastructure project, where the only way the water is used is to cool down a supervolcano, would be very controversial.”

So, NASA came up with an alternative plan. They believe the most viable solution could be to drill up to 10km down into the super volcano and pump down water at high pressure. The circulating water would return at a temperature of around 350C (662F), thus slowly day by day extracting heat from the volcano. And while such a project would come at an estimated cost of around $3.46 billion, it comes with an enticing catch which could convince politicians (taxpayers) to make the investment.

“Yellowstone currently leaks around 6GW in heat,” Wilcox says. “Through drilling in this way, it could be used to create a geothermal plant, which generates electric power at extremely competitive prices of around $0.10/kWh. You would have to give the geothermal companies incentives to drill somewhat deeper and use hotter water than they usually would, but you would pay back your initial investment, and get electricity which can power the surrounding area for a period of potentially tens of thousands of years. And the long-term benefit is that you prevent a future supervolcano eruption which would devastate humanity.”

Of course, drilling into a super volcano comes with its own risks, like the eruption that scientists are desperate to prevent. Triggering an eruption by drilling would be disastrous.

“The most important thing with this is to do no harm,” Wilcox says.

 

“If you drill into the top of the magma chamber and try and cool it from there, this would be very risky. This could make the cap over the magma chamber more brittle and prone to fracture. And you might trigger the release of harmful volatile gases in the magma at the top of the chamber which would otherwise not be released.”

The cooling of Yellowstone in this manner would also take tens of thousands of years, but it is a plan that scientists at NASA are considering for every super volcano on earth.

“When people first considered the idea of defending the Earth from an asteroid impact, they reacted in a similar way to the supervolcano threat,” Wilcox says.

“People thought, ‘As puny as we are, how can humans possibly prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth.’ Well, it turns out if you engineer something which pushes very slightly for a very long time, you can make the asteroid miss the Earth. So the problem turns out to be easier than people think. In both cases it requires the scientific community to invest brain power and you have to start early. But Yellowstone explodes roughly every 600,000 years, and it is about 600,000 years since it last exploded, which should cause us to sit up and take notice.”

So what would happen?

1400-Quake Swarm Prompts Question "If Yellowstone Erupted, What Would Be Left?"

Yellowstone volcano has been struck by 1,400 earthquakes in recent weeks, leading to fears that the supervolcano is ready to blow and wipe out life on Earth.

Seismic activity around the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, US, is not uncommon, but the heaviest swarm in half a decade has people very concerned.

Since June 12, The Express reports there has been over 1,400 tremors in the region, and experts state that the swarm could go on for another month.

However, seismologists state that there is nothing to be concerned about yet. Jamie Farrell at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City told New Scientist:

“This is a large swarm but it is not the largest swarm we’ve recorded in Yellowstone.

“Earthquake swarms are fairly common in Yellowstone.

“There is no indication that this swarm is related to magma moving through the shallow crust.”

Neverthelesss, following Montana’s biggest earthquake in 34 years, a 5.4 tremor in early June, which is on the same fault line as Yellowstone, and coupled with the swarm of quakes in the National Park, many are convinced that the supervolcano is now ready to blow.

One local wrote on Twitter: “Earthquake in Bozeman = truly terrified Yellowstone volcano gonna go off.”

So what would happen?