Yellowstone Supervolcano May Lead to Nuclear Disaster

heh, have been following this story for a few days and even blogged it, but if you have an hour to spare check out the ongoing enormous thread at ATS:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread422630/pg1

There’s a lot to read but, for once, it’s an ATS thread that isn’t just conspiracy theory or new-age spiritual nonsense. The folks have been researching and working hard to put data together.

Although it amuses me how many of these folks are honest-to-God certain that they can tell a harmonic tremor with no experience 🙂

Incidentally, Patrick, if you’re in Cali you are probably safe from ashfall, as the prevaling wind is West-East. However, you would get some horrendous seismic activity, and would still most likely be killed by starvation, cold, disease or civil unrest. Make no mistake, if she blows full-on, the human race is in a very bad place. When Toba blew, the human race was bottlenecked to, some think, about 10,000 survivors. And that was a VEI of 7-ish, it is believed.

Think about it this way: keep your fingers crossed for nothing happening, but if we get an eruption with a VEI of 7 or 8, then basically we are pretty much ALL dead. If not straight away, eventually. So, as there is nothing that can be done, assume nothing will happen and get on with your life. That’s the way I see it 🙂

Current USGS and vulcanologist thinking *seems* to point to the idea that if *anything* happens, it may be just a hydrothermal event – which is still devastating to the local area but would not wipe North America off the map, nor affect the world as a whole.

I get your point Tom – and believe me, there are folks out there with much more “doomsday” ways of thinking than me! But I think there is one factor you have to consider should there be a VEI 8 event (and, in all honesty, I don’t think there will be): our dependency of technology and soceital structures, alongside our territorial and agressive nature.

Undoubtedly, should such an event occur, the loss of life within North America would be unimagineable, short term. Ashfall would probably claim more lives than enything else, initially, most likely in the milions. And I really don’t think that, with the best will in the world, there is much that beaurocrats could do to prevent or ease that. Timely warnings are not really an options – no one knows what supervolcanoes do, so how do you predict something that you don’t understand?

Secondly, aside from the short term, we should think of the long-term geo-political conequences. The US financial markets would collapse instantly – because they would no longer exist – and I suspect world markets would collapse thereafter. Assuming that predictions of the long-term effects ae correct, glacial icing would force the majority of the Northern Hemisphere to migrate south – at least those who could. You have to consider how that would pan out.

I am in the UK. If I was forced to migrate south to, say, the equator and away from the ice, how exactly would I do that? Who would fly a plane, or drive a bus, or pilot a boat? Bearing in mind that everyone else in the UK would be doing the same and the countries I am migrating to are busy coping with an influx of potentially hundreds of millions of refugees, have no stable financial markets, and right now have limited resources? With the predicted drop in global temperature, there would be very little resource – i.e the onslaught of acidic rains and low temperatures, and the lack of sunlight caused by intense dispersion of CO2 and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere would cause mankind to struggle to raise any kind of crop – if there were any left. All but the most hardy plant life would be quickly killed off once the sunlight was reduced. Interestingly, although this sounds counter-intuitive, the two effects that the gas dispersion would cause are intense super-cooling (because of the sulfur dioxide reflecting radiation from the sun) and also intense heating (caused by the CO2 released). The super-cooling may last at the most a few years, but intense greenhouse effect from such massive releases is theorized to last thousands, if not millions of years.

I would recommend you read about the Siberian Traps: although they are a whole diffrent kettle of fish – a mantle uplift causing lave flows over a 7-million kilometre area over 500,000 to 1 million years – they released enough sulfur dioxide to wrap the planet in a thick layer of ice between the Permian and Triassic eras for several thousand years, and when the CO2 increase eventually allowed the temperatures to rise again this super-hot greenhouse period lasted for millons of years. It is estimated that 99% of life on Earth was wiperd out. Interestingly, the amount of CO2 released over the course of those lava flows is estimated to be about the same as our CO2 emissions since we started using petrochemicals. A poignant thought, but it shows what a lasting effect CO2 can have.

So, aside from the volcanic Winter in the north, and colder times in the south, for a few years, you could be looking at many, many years of severe desertification worldiwde.

Now, on the human side, think of any country at or below the equator. Think of all the petty, seemingly pointless political, religious, economic and resource-based fights and squabbles we get into. Now take away that country’s food supply, remove its abilty to sustain itself, remove any source of aid from other countries (as they will be in the same position) and then lastly add millions of refugees from the Nothern Hemisphere. I think you can see where that is heading.

And there is one last thing to bear in mind. I mentioned about our dependency as a weakness.

When the Toba supervolcano erupted, mankind lived more of a nomadic existence. They had a greater freedom to migrate, and also had the ability to “live off the land and natural resources” which we do not. Studies of Mitochondrial DNA in the world’s populations have revealed that each “geographical culture” (to use as an abstract term) has a diffrent amount of variability. Highly varied MDNA shows a great ancestral diversity in that culture, whereas a low variabilty shows a very limited ancestral history.

Research has shown that of all human types, India has the lowest MDNA variation. And across all types, it became evident that something happened about the time of Toba that caused a grat “bottleneck” in human diversity, as if numbers were reduced massively and the gene pool left was horribly restricted overnight. It is interesting to note that the Asian continent is where most of the ashfall from Toba occurred.

it is surmised that in the Asian continent, based on MDNA, that the population was reduced to around six hunded (because the land was deep in ash, there was no plant life and no way for the people to sustain themselves). And globally, the total human population was probably in the tens of thousands as a result of catastrophic climatic changes.

These were hardy folk who could survive off the land. But they had little to hunt and little to grow. If their population could be reduced so drastically by a volcano with a VEI of 7, what would a VEI of 8 do to us, who, for the most part, would not have a clue how to fend for ourselves, hate one another, and have grown soft and dependent? How would we survive when there are no livestock, no crops to plant, and the ground is either under kilometres of ice or baked rock hard?

With all our technology? With all our technological might and our rich plant and animal resources, we can’t stop just one country suffering a famine right now, so how would we prevent a worldwide famine where there are no resources?

So I would say that I am not doomsaying. I am simply listing a worst-case scenario, to give Patrick a sense of what could happen. Which I why I said that there is almost no point worrying about it, there’s nothing you could do anyway. Certainly nothing that useless Governments or authorities could do, for most likely by that point, they would cease to either exist or be any use.

Do I think this will actually be the case? In all honesty, after poring through all the USGS data for the last few days, No. Of course, NO-ONE really knows what is going on, or what will happen. Not even the geologists. We have never experienced one before where there have been records. We may get a supervolcanic eruption. We may get a hydrothermal explosion, or maybe a smaller hydrothermal eruption. We may get nothing. No-one has a clue. But I find that, at least for me, even though I do not assume the worst, simply knowing the worst gives me a whole diffrent focus. I find that suddenly the petty annoyances of day to day life are no longer that important, and I find myself being just a little more thoughtful and caring to others. After all, if we are about to be wiped out, I think I would like to be in a peaceful state of mind when I go, if you know what I mean 🙂

But *should* the worst happen, given the effect that Toba had, I can’t say I am confident that billions would survive. We’d probably end up killing each other and helping nature reduce our ranks even more.

Remember, Chamberlain thought he had secured peace. And Stalin thought the treaty meant Germany would never attack 🙂

Ah, yes, I totally missed that point 😉

Reacting to the threat of nuclear meltdown would be important, yes I agree. I wonder how much water would need to be stockpiled to guarantee that the rods cold be cooled sufficiently once the plants stop functioning? Scary amounts, I would suspect.

I agree that the supervolcanoes are not in the same ballpark as thre Traps, that much is true. I doubt that we would see that kind of emission.But Toba is very similar to Yellowstone (I keep having to resist typing “Jellysyone”), as it is a supervolcano. It is not known for sure how long Toba erupted for, but it is beleived it may only have been a matter of weeks. And it’s similar size (as far as we know) to Yellowstone means that it would be a good comparable to judge the effects on eruption.

I’m sure, if the worst happened, mankind would come out the other side. I just hope I’m not around to have to experience it. Although I can’t help feeling…that mankind as it is now is such a loathsome collection, maybe a “reset” might do us some good. Kind of a “revert to last checkpoint” for when it has all gone horribly awry 🙂

But again, it’s a “who knows” scenario. For all we know, Jellystone could erupt into a lovely plume of kittens and sparkles. I guess we just wait.

Most nuclear power plants will automatically shut down if the water flow is reduced. Meaning that if the cooling water supplies are clogged due to ash, then the plants will shut down. So no power in that immediate region. But I guess they could go back to burning coal, who would notice.

measures for ash fall: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/ash/