Supervolcano - Yellowstone National Park
Latest activity reports - http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/activity.html
Yellowstone's caldera rising December 2006
March
2006 update
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg18925414.000.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00071CA3-1130-1406-913083414B7F0000
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060301/sc_space/yellowstonevolcanogrowsasgeysersreawaken
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060302/ap_on_sc/yellowstone_volcano
Yellowstone Volcano Observatory
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg18925345.100.html
- How a supervolcano covers a continent
WHEN supervolcanoes blow they can cover entire continents with ash.
But how this happens has been a puzzle because wind and the initial
force of the eruption are not enough to carry the ash over such long
distances. Now an examination of prehistoric eruptions has come up with
an answer.
Supervolcanoes are classified as volcanoes that spew out more than a trillion tonnes of material when they erupt - equivalent to 30 Krakatoas. Such volcanoes cannot be studied directly as the most recent was Toba in Sumatra around 71,000 years ago.
So Peter Baines from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Stephen Sparks from the University of Bristol, UK, used geological records of ash volume and magma chamber size to estimate the energy of past blasts and model the plumes they would have generated. From this they deduced that the Earth's rotation fans ash out into a giant spinning cloud up to 6000 kilometres wide within one day. "It is a bit like a hurricane, but on a much larger scale," Sparks says.
Unfortunately the findings don't offer a solution for surviving a future eruption, such as if the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park in the US were to blow. "I'm not sure what we could do, except stay underground," says Sparks.
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Super3
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Super4
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=PR58
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Super1
Steamboat erupts for the 4th time in 18 months. - More links further down the page.
Full report on the volcanic history of the area from USGS (a very large pdf file)
3-D Images Reveal Yellowstone Plume
Is The Forecasting Of The Eruption Of The Yellowstone Supervolcano Possible? - science report - "The magma chamber that was found extends basically beneath the entire caldera. It is approximately 40-50 kilometres long, approximately 20 kilometres wide and it has a thickness of about 10 kilometres. So it's a giant in volume and essentially encompasses a half or a third of the area beneath Yellowstone National Park."
The Park Visitors map.
This may be very significant to the End Days with "fire and brimstone" in large quantities. In recent years it has been discovered that Yellowstone is one of a few known examples of a supervolcano. These volcanoes erupt only rarely; but with a force at least 1000 times that of ordinary volcanoes.
Imagine 1,000 volcanoes all erupting in the same place at the same time.
A large part of the national park area is a giant crater formed by the last explosion 640,000 years ago. It is so large that it can only be seen from space. It fills most of the area covered by this map.
This has only been discovered in the past few years - I only came across it in a BBC TV Horizon program (I now have a copy of this on video). Check the links at the bottom of this page for the BBC transcript of the film.
It explodes regularly every 600,000 years - in between it is quiet, now it is overdue.
Modern humans did not exist last time this exploded but its effects are known - a herd of fossilized rhinos were found choked to death under the ash layer a thousand miles away. This was the first evidence of the size of the eruptions.
Most of America was buried under several feet of volcanic ash - and there were vast amounts of choking sulfurous gases. This has been going on for at least 10,000,000 years. The craters (calderas) from the last 3 eruptions have been identified and date from 600,000 years, 1,200,000 years and 1,800,000 years.
There is a giant blob of red hot magma 8,000 metres below Yellowstone, it has been building up since the last eruption and is fed from below. It is now 50 Km long, 30 Km wide and 10 Km deep and is full of dissolved gasses at enormous pressure.
The gases are the cause of the explosion that occurs once the eruption is underway - the magma pools below the surface under great pressure. When the steady build up of pressure finally forces a way through to the surface the effect is similar to removing the cork from champagne - the gases suddenly leave the liquid they were dissolved in and blow the liquid out of its container. Once an eruption starts it will accelerate until the whole pool of magma explodes, throwing at least 1000 cubic kilometers of hot material high into the atmosphere.
This is likely to happen soon, the area north of the lake has bulged upwards by almost a metre in 50 years. One side of the lake is creeping into the forest as the land rises. This type of rapid change cannot continue for long without something giving way, every year there are hundreds of small earthquakes.
This map shows earthquakes under the park, which occur daily - and the cumulative pattern reveals the likely size of the next crater.
The last time one of these things exploded is believed to have been 74,000 years ago at Toba in Sumatra, there is a large lake filling the caldera at present. The TV program also revealed that other researchers, studying human genetics had found evidence that humans came close to extinction between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago; the global population suddenly fell to around 5,000 people. This is now thought to be due to the effect on the world's weather of the dust from the Toba eruption.
The predicted effects of a Yellowstone eruption are the immediate devastation of North America followed by several years of freezing weather for the whole world.
The year 2010 might be indicated in the Bible Codes where it says "days of horror, darkness and gloom" and also the newly found Eruption in 2010 Bible code.
BBC TV Horizon program - Supervolcanoes: Transcript of the TV program also available as text file.
Geology Maps (from Bob Smith's page - see below)
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