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The massive supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago has been blamed for nearly killing off our species. The emerging truth is much more interesting.

THEY NEVER SAW IT COMING. For the small bands of hunter-gatherers across Africa and Eurasia, the day was like any other. Some tracked great herds of migrating animals across expansive grasslands; others moved through dense rainforests, or along the banks of turgid rivers and ephemeral streambeds. Survival—finding food and water, avoiding predators, strengthening the small group’s social bonds—was the order of the day.

Thousands of miles away, an extraordinary event was about to take place: a cataclysm that would make the entire planet shudder. It would also change the story of our species. The question is, how?

About 74,000 years ago on Sumatra, the Toba supervolcano erupted on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. It was the most powerful eruption of the last 2.5 million years; by volume, it was more than 215 times larger than the 20th century’s biggest boom, the Novarupta event in Alaska, and more than 11,000 times the size of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. It dwarfed even the three largest known eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

In the late 20th century, researchers began trying to reconstruct what happened after Toba blew. According to those early models, inches-thick blankets of ash smothered much of the Indian subcontinent and choked the seas from the Arabian to Chinese coasts. Global air currents swept a haze of sulfur and ash particles across oceans and continents, wreaking climate havoc…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yellowstone geyser erupts for fifth time in months, prompting fears of an eruption

May 15, 2018

Yellowstone geyser erupts for fifth time in months, prompting fears of an eruption

Does the USGS, NASA, and other government agencies know more than they are leading people to believe when it comes to the Yellowstone supervolcano?

(INTELLIHUB) — The largest active geyser in the world has erupted for the fifth time this year, prompting the general public to wonder if an eruption of the supervolcano is imminent.

Scientists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have been trying to quell peoples fears that the magma chamber may explode by producing a series of information and awareness videos explaining how everything should be okay for the time being.

@USGSVolcanos issued the following tweet on Sunday: “#Steamboat #Geyser in @YellowstoneNPS erupts for [the] 5th time in 2018, just before 4 AM on May 13. Steamboat also had frequent eruptions in the 1960s and early 1980s. No implications for volcanic activity, but good implications for viewing some spectacular geysering this summer!” (typos corrected)

Seismic record from Norris museum showing Steamboat eruption starting just before 4 AM local time on May 13.

Temperature record (UTC time) from Steamboat geyser. Spike at about 10:00 UTC (4:00 AM local time) records hot water from the eruption passing by the temperature sensor.

✔

#Steamboat #Geyser in @YellowstoneNPS erupts for 5th time in 2018, just before 4 AM on May 13. Steamboat also had frequent eruptions in the 1960s and early 1980s. No implications for volcanic activity, but good implications for viewing some spectauclar geysering this summer!

10:22 AM – May 13, 2018

Plus, University of Utah Seismograph Station sensor readings indicate an uptick in activity which may be acting as a red flag indicator to people in-the-know.

But at the same time, NASA has been working on a plan to drill into the molten magma chamber and pump water into it in an effort to stop such an eruption from occurring, one that could send the world into a nuclear winter scenario.

Withal, some scientists fear the current activity may go hand-in-hand with the recent activation of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano and volcanoes located in the Pacific Northwest.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Unusual Eruptions” At World’s Largest Active Geyser In Yellowstone Stoke “Supervolcano” Fears

April 29, 2018

“Unusual Eruptions” At World’s Largest Active Geyser In Yellowstone Stoke “Supervolcano” Fears

One month after we reported that fears of an eruption at the Yellowstone supervolcano continue to grow following the first eruption of the world’s largest active geyser for the first time since 2014, overnight Reuters reported of continued “unusual eruptions” at the same location after said giant geyser erupted no less three times in the past six weeks, including once this week.

The good news, according to geologists, is that while the pattern is “unusual” it is not indicative of a more destructive volcanic eruption brewing beneath Wyoming.

The bad news, is that with geological events in Yellowstone increasingly described by even the most “reputable” mainstream media and scholars as “unusual”, the broader public is having trouble believing that everything is just normal.

This is what happened: Steamboat Geyser, which can shoot water as high as 300 feet (91 meters) into the air, erupted on March 15, April 19 and on Friday.

As the Bozeman Daily Chronicle adds, the Steamboat Geyser eruption on Friday was reported by a park visitor and was estimated to have begun at 6:30 am; that person was likely the only one who witnessed it firsthand, since boardwalks leading to area are closed due to high snowfall notes Gizmodo.

Why is this unusual? Because the last time it erupted three times in a year was in 2003, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yellowstone Volcano Observatory said. Also notable: the last time it erupted prior to March was more than three years ago in September 2014.

While this year’s eruptions have (so far) been smaller than a usual Steamboat eruption, the two in April were about 10 times larger than an eruption at the park’s famed Old Faithful Geyser in terms on the amount of water discharged, geologists quoted by Reuters said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Public Fears An Eruption At Yellowstone: ‘Spate Of Tremors’ Reported

March 14, 2018

The Public Fears An Eruption At Yellowstone: ‘Spate Of Tremors’ Reported

Laying underneath the tranquil and beautiful geysers, waterfalls, and mountains of Wyoming lies the Yellowstone caldera. The supervolcano has been worrying some for decades, but now experts fear an eruption could happen soon after reporting a “spate of tremors.”

According to WMD, a spate of four mini-tremors in the area following a period of “rest” has raised fears among some that the supervolcano is about to blow. Although the Yellowstone supervolcano hasn’t erupted for 631,000 years, scientists have been diligently working to understand the last eruption so they can more accurately predict when a big one will happen again.

The most recent quake came on March 11 when a small 1.5 tremor took place beneath the surface. The strongest one, a 1.8 magnitude earthquake, came just hours before this, and people are concerned that Yellowstone could be about to blow.

The growing concern among the public is evident, but many scientists still say the activity at the supervolcano is perfectly normal. Tom Skilling, a meteorologist for WGN News, a local news site in Chicago, explains that is it normal for the volcano to have less active weeks. “Minor earthquakes occur in the Yellowstone area 50 or more times per week, but a major eruption is not expected in the foreseeable future.”

Yellowstone is one of the most seismically active areas in the world and there are regular earthquakes detected in and around the supervolcano. This latest spate of tremors follows a period in February where more than 200 small tremors detected were detected over a period of 10 days. According to experts with the US Geological Survey, that swarm began on February 8 in a region roughly eight miles northeast of West Yellowstone, Montana and increased dramatically in the days following.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Would Happen To The World If The Yellowstone Super Volcano Erupted Right Now?

November 15, 2017

What Would Happen To The World If The Yellowstone Super Volcano Erupted Right Now?

yellowstone-1400-0

With the looming threat of a possible eruption at the Yellowstone super volcano, some preppers have wondered exactly how to prepare for such a cataclysmic event. Here is what would happen should the super volcano erupt right now.

Yellowstone’s supervolcano is essentially a giant, lid-topped cauldron, and it’s so vast that it can only truly be seen from low-Earth orbit. Its crater is 45 miles (72 kilometers) across, and its underlying plumbing contains several tens of thousands of cubic kilometers of magmatic material. But if it were to erupt right now, we would have very little time to even know that it is happening.

IFL Science spoke to one of the country’s most respected volcanologists to get the most up-to-date low-down on the future of the world’s most famous supervolcano. Hopefully, it will give preppers and idea of what to expect in the unprecedented event that it actually explodes.

According to Yellowstone Volcano Observatory’s Scientist-In-Charge, Dr. Michael Poland, the super volcano may not have enough energy at present to produce a supereruption. “Right now, much of Yellowstone’s magma body is partially solidified, and you need a lot of magma to feed a large eruption.” The chances of a supervolcanic paroxysm are currently around one-in-730,000, which makes it less likely than a catastrophic asteroid impact.

A sudden injection of new magma from beneath the caldera, or a sudden weakening of the geological layers encasing it, as unlikely as this is, may be enough to trigger a sudden depressurization event, and the entire system would violently expunge onto the surface and up into the atmosphere. What would happen next is speculative, but it may be important to understand just how dire that could be.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yellowstone Super Volcano: We May Have Far Less Advance Warning Time Than We Thought

October 16, 2017

Yellowstone Super Volcano: We May Have Far Less Advance Warning Time Than We Thought

A new study done on ancient volcanic ash revealed that we may experience an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano even sooner than previously warned. Scientists are also concerned that we will probably have much less advance warning time than we had thought before.

According to National Geographic, we may have mere decades before Yellowstone erupts. If the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone national park erupts again, we could also have far less time to prepare than originally thought. After analyzing minerals in fossilized ash from the most recent mega-eruption, researchers at Arizona State University think the supervolcano last woke up after two influxes of fresh magma flowed into the reservoir below the caldera. The new paper adds to the lengthening list of surprises scientists have uncovered over the last few years as they have continued to study and closely monitor the supervolcano.

A 2013 study, for instance, showed that the magma reservoir that feeds the supervolcano is about two and a half times larger than previous estimates. Scientists also think the reservoir is drained after every monster blast, so they thought it should take a long time to refill. Based on the new study, it seems the magma can rapidly refresh—making the volcano potentially explosive in the geologic blink of an eye. –National Geographic

“It’s shocking how little time is required to take a volcanic system from being quiet and sitting there to the edge of an eruption,” study co-author Hannah Shamloo told the New York Times. But scientists insist that this may seem scary, however, it may still be awhile before the eruption occurs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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

October 11, 2017

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 earthquakesrecorded 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.

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.

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

September 19, 2017

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”

“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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NASA Unveils Plan To Stop Yellowstone “Supervolcano” Eruption, There’s Just One Catch

August 20, 2017

NASA Unveils Plan To Stop Yellowstone “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.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

National Geographic’s Guide To The Yellowstone Supervolcano

July 10, 2017

National Geographic’s Guide To The Yellowstone Supervolcano

Amid a growing ‘swarm’ of over earthquakes (now over 1000), and Montana’s largest quake ever, scientists are growing increasingly concerned that the so-called ‘super-volcano’ at the heart of Yellowstone National Park could be building towards a Category 7 eruption.So what is a ‘super-volcano’ and what does its explosion mean for life on earth? NatGeo explains…

As National Geographic details…

Think of Yellowstone as a gigantic pressure cooker, fueled by a massive supervolcano. Water from rain and snowmelt, much of it centuries-old, percolates through cracks in the Earth’s crust until heated by molten rock reservoirs deep below. The water then filters upward, eventually finding release in the thousands of geysers, hot springs, and other hydrothermal wonders.

The plume of hot rock has been calculated at more than 600 miles deep. But scientists suspect it actually descends as far as 1,800 miles, all the way to what’s known as the Earth’s outer core-mantle boundary.

The reservoirs and plume are superheated, spongelike rock holding pockets of molten material called magma. The reservoirs’ heat, which originates in the plume, is what keeps the area’s geysers boiling.

Ancient rain and snowmelt seep down to just above the volcano’s magma reservoirs, until they are superheated and rise again through the fractures. Volcanic heat and gases help propel steam and water toward the surface, where they escape through hot springs or geysers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Scientists Fear “Supervolcano” Eruption As Earthquake Swarm Near Yellowstone Soars To 800

June 29, 2017

Scientists Fear “Supervolcano” Eruption As Earthquake Swarm Near Yellowstone Soars To 800

More than 800 earthquakes have now been recorded at the Yellowstone Caldera, a long-dormant supervolcano located in Yellowstone National Park, over the last two weeks – an ominous sign that a potentially catastrophic eruption could be brewing. However, despite earthquakes occurring at a frequency unseen during any period in the past five years, the US Geological Survey says the risk level remains in the “green,” unchanged from its normal levels, according to Newsweek.

The biggest earthquake in this “swarm” – which registered a magnitude of 4.4 – took place on June 15, three days after the rumblings started. That quake was the biggest in the region since a magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck close to Norris Geyser Basin in March 2014. This magnitude 4.4 earthquake was so powerful that people felt it in Bozman Montana, about eight miles away.

A scientist from the University of Utah said the quakes have also included five in the magnitude three range, and 68 in the magnitude two range.

“The swarm consists of one earthquake in the magnitude 4 range, five earthquakes in the magnitude 3 range, 68 earthquakes in the magnitude 2 range, 277 earthquakes in the magnitude 1 range, 508 earthquakes in the magnitude 0 range, and 19 earthquakes with magnitudes of less than zero,” the latest report said.

An earthquake with a magnitude less than zero is a very small event that can only be detected with the extremely sensitive instruments used in earthquake monitoring.”

There is normally a rise in seismic activity before a volcano erupts. And scientists currently believe there’s a 10% chance that a “supervolcanic Category 7 eruption” could take place this century, as pointed out by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.

An eruption, Kaku said, is long overdue: The last one occurred 640,000 years ago..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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