10 replies to this topic

[Wisdom]

Tonight on discovery at 8pm est their will be a specail on what many happen if the supervolcano under yellowstone national park erupied.

I think that you all that as cable and have discover channel should see it because it will effect the world we live in and not just the United states.

It's not if it will errupied, it's when. Weither it happens 50, 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000 years from now it will happen and getting an idea of how and what it will look like may help you to life through it.

If you would like to read more about it and updates of earthquake activey goto this website. http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/

Edited by Wisdom, 10 April 2005 - 04:54 PM.

[Sean]

This was on in the UK the other week, its probably not exactly the same show but it was talking about the same thing.

EDIT: Just found out it is the same show:

03/11/2005
BBC and the Discovery Channel produced a new docudrama and documentary about Yellowstone. The BBC version will be shown this month and the Discovery Channel version will be shown in April. For more information on the docudrama and documentary see our docudrama question and answer page.

Edited by Sean, 10 April 2005 - 04:54 PM.

[Lady_Maha]

The movie End Day took a few possibilities of natural disasters that will eventually occur, an eruption of the supervolcano underneath yellowstone included. Very interesting really.

Event supervolcano: yellowstone would blow up, the masses of ashes, lava and rubble erupting would pretty much cause something similar to a nuclear winter, so pack some warm clothes, guys.

Event volcano eruption on La Palma: A major eruption will split the island in half, causing one half to fall into the Atlantic Ocean, which in return will cause a gigantic tsunami racing for the North American East coast, which would pretty much take out all major cities lined up along that coast. Moving a few miles inland sounds like a good idea.

There were many more scenarios played out, such as a huge meteor crashing into our cute little planet, a deadly virus, a fusion experiment gone wrong...

Makes you wanna live life now and not worry about tomorrow so much, because who knows if there will really be a tomorrow...

[Darklin]

Thats uh... kind of depressing to think about =/ Wot happened to just watching those little shark dudes on the discovery channel and laughing when some stupid jackass got his leg bitten off?

[Tadpole]

theres a movie coming out in june about this called supervolcano....jus seen the previews at the movies tonight....looks good

[Darklin]

Ok i watched teh movie. The movie was based on worst cause scenario. After the movie they had a bunch of scientists come on an explain the entire thing in an aspect outside of the movie. They actually said that there is a possibility there could be an eruption, but its a low one because of how perfect the conditions would need to be. So there no nuclear winter. Now lets watch those sharks aye?

[two]

a much more realistic scenario was already made into a movie about 15 years earlier, in which one man actually fought an erupting volcano. i think it was Joe Versus the Volcano.

quite a feat in volcanic documentation.

[Malavon]

It's not if it will errupied, it's when. Weither it happens 50, 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000 years from now it will happen and getting an idea of how and what it will look like may help you to life through it.

The supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park erupts, on average, every 600,000 years and the last eruption was 640,000 years ago, so it is overdue to erupt again. I believe (I may be remembering this slightly wrong) that the last time it erupted, the human population was reduced to just a few million (scientists did tests on mitochondria, which contain their own genes. The genes are transmitted from one generation to the next. This meant the scientists could measure the variety of genes - as the population decreased, so did the variety... something along those lines, anyway.)

but its a low one because of how perfect the conditions would need to be.

Pardon? it may be a "supervolcano" but I expect the eruption is still caused in a similar way: the main causes, I think, are pressure and the magma chamber underneath: the heat and pressure causes magma to rise, breaking through any weak points (e.g. cracks) of the surrounding rocks and it forces upwards. The type of eruption depends on two main things: lithostatic pressure, which decreases as the magma rises causing the gases to form bubbles, increasing in size and pressure as the magma gets closer to the surface, until the pressure becomes large enough to burst the lava apart and hurl out fragments, causing an explosion. The other cause is the viscosity of the lava (proportion of silica). More viscious means gases stay trapped and the bubbles that form cannot rise to the surface: only a big increase in their internal pressure can enable these gases to escape. Low viscosity is the opposite. The magma chamber of the yellowstone national park supervolcano is roughly 70km wide (that figure may be slightly off, my memory isn't so good ), so I would imagine that the pressure and amount of magma in there would be rather large

Edited by Malavon, 12 April 2005 - 10:27 AM.

[Darklin]

Meh... you really cannot say its "overdue" for an eruption seeing as how we only know of 3 major eruptions, and you cant make an average out of 3

[Wolfgang]

I thought it was interesting, and all I can say is:

"I'd rather it not erupt."

[Wisdom]

Yes, the human population was reduces long ago and it wasn't reduced to 1mil. It was reduce to 10,000 people on earth. I don't think that yellowstone was the cause of that, but another supervalcano.