The Supervolcano Under Yellowstone Is Alive and Kicking | Hacker News Reader

The Supervolcano Under Yellowstone Is Alive and Kicking

nautil.us

58 pointsDarkContinent50 comments

Our family just visited Yellowstone a couple of weeks ago. What surprised me apart from the geysers and hot springs which I never grow tired of, is the variety of the landscape from stunning water falls, to mountain peaks, and lush valleys full of wildlife. We saw plenty of bison, and even a grizzly and her two cubs from a safe distance in Hayden Valley. But all is not well in Yellowstone. The park is being overrun by tourists. At the main sites, it feels more like Yellowstone City than Park. There are literally people jams on the boardwalks. There is a fair bit of trash at most of the hot springs sites, not out of neglect (we saw plenty of park volunteers cleaning up after the tourists, and we even chatted with one to talk about his techniques — he uses a fishing pole), but simply because of the sheer number of people visiting the park. There are tourists getting airlifted all day out of Old Faithful Village (we must have seen five helicopters land and take off) because, with that many people, there are bound to be medical emergencies. Morning Glory pool is not what it once was because tourists feel the need to throw coins and whatnot in the pool [1]. Last year someone crashed a quadcopter in Grand Prismatic which is still at the bottom of the pool [2]. There is now a ban on quadcopters in the park.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Glory_Pool [2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/tourist-crashes-dro...

We went there 2 years ago, and the best time we had was by taking hikes. If you want to experience Yellowstone, don't stay on the road. We've been lucky enough to even spot a wolf in the distance checking on a lone bison, and to be just on time for a geyser after an hour of walking. Most people only stay in the park for a couple of days so they rush to all the touristy spots in their cars. Big mistake... Lodging in Yellowstone is cheap by scarce, so you need to book very early.

This is pretty much the norm for any of the busy national parks. 90% of visitors never leave the roads and a few adjacent attractions and 90% of the rest don't get more than a 1/2 mile from the road. Even in places like Yosemite, you can pretty quickly get away from almost everyone surprisingly quickly.

This year has set records across the region for park visitation, so it's especially busy[1]. However, that does not excuse some of the behavior you describe (trash, drones, etc). I am glad people are visiting our parks ( they are ours!)

[1] http://m.jhnewsandguide.com/jackson_hole_daily/local/yellows...

I feel I need to balance this post somewhat: I live 1h north of The Park (as the folks here refer to Yellowstone) and we visit frequently, and have been visiting frequently for 15 years. We're first in line to be vaporized then the eruption comes.

Honestly I don't recognize your description above. Yes in the high summer the park will be busy, but we were there three weeks ago and I wouldn't say it was so busy that our visit was affected. I've been to The Louvre and The Vatican Museum and those are at least two orders of magnitude more busy!

Visitor numbers are up in recent years (supposedly a reaction to the recession since fewer people could afford airline-based vacations outside the US, in combination with increasing affluence in parts of Asia leading to more visitors from that part of the world), but since the various road improvements made after Tom Brokhaw's appeal, in my experience it feels less busy than 10 years ago.

Lastly, visit in Winter. You'll hardly see anyone!

For the HN crowd, remember there's almost no cell service in the park so bring your sat phone to keep up with Nagios alerts...

>For the HN crowd, remember there's almost no cell service in the park so bring your sat phone to keep up with Nagios alerts...

Heh. I've just spent 2 out of the past 3 weeks in Rainier and adjacent national forests. Yep. No cell phone reception for essentially the whole time. Probably will be going to Yellowstone this coming winter; I was there a decade+ ago.

> Morning Glory pool is not what it once was because tourists feel the need to throw coins and whatnot in the pool

I wonder if one day, when the pool erupts, it'll turn all those coins into shot and massacre everything around it.

I visited it several years ago and it was the most crowded place I'd ever been. The main sites had crowds of people. It was 20 people deep to see old faithful. The few bathrooms had lines nearing a hundred yards long. The few hiking trails we went down before giving up on the place had trash everyone, freshly carved graffiti on trees, and punk kids running around trying to spook the wild life.

I've had more fun mowing the yard.

My family spent 6 nights in the Tetons and 6 nights in Yellowstone in the second half of May this year and I think it's only fair to temper your opinion based on when you visited. Except in July & August, neither park is remotely full, and because the in-park lodging is limited, it never really gets too awful. It just seems bad because there are so many bus tours these days, so when 80 people descend on a site all at once, it makes a big impact. That's rough on all the roadside boardwalk areas, but these bus tours almost never do any real hiking, so the vast majority of the park is still clear. My personal opinion is that the mudpots/fumaroles/geysers you see from the boardwalks are just novelties -- the beauty of the park lies in the wilderness (we, in particular, love the Lamar Valley in the northwestern corner. Wolves are commonly viewed, the hiking is astoundingly good and varied, and you can go hours without seeing another soul.).

“Good science is nothing more than a progress report. It’s what we know at a certain time with the data that we have.”

That is the best definition of scientific knowledge I have read.

And Farrell isn’t convinced another super-eruption will happen at all. “The system might be dying,” he said. “The Yellowstone hot spot is moving into thicker, colder continental crust. And it takes a lot more energy to burn through that crust than it did the thinner crust that it’s been burning through for the last 17 million years.”

I wonder what imaging we will be able to see in the years ahead.

I always think we are going to have some hard times in the future when one of the big volcanos (ok maybe not supervolcano, but a big one) explodes and we get a ash cloud for a few years. Apart from the natrual issues caused, what happens to our electrical grid if we accomplish moving most of our infrastructure to renewable energies...

It's far more dangerous than that. If we had an ash cloud significant enough to dim the sun then plants would receive less sunlight, which means a poorer growing season, which means worldwide famine. If that thing erupts, renewable electrical supply will be the least of our worries. I would say we'll spend most of our time trying to grow enough food.

But given enough electricity, we could easily grow enough food to feed the entire planet in a relatively small amount of space. Plants don't care if they're growing under the sun or under a UV bulb, if they're growing in earth or hydroponic, if they're growing on land or vertical. At that point it's merely a distribution issue. Existing distribution channels wouldn't necessarily be interrupted, with the possible exception of air travel (and of course, all of the area that is now a crater from the super volcano). The problem really starts if all of our electricity is generated by the sun, and then the sun goes away for a bit.

It's not actually an "alternative power" problem, it's just a solar problem. Wind, nuclear, and hydro power wouldn't be affected.

I'm not convinced wind farms wouldn't be affected as well.

With an ash cloud large and dense enough to restrict that much sunlight, wouldn't we also get a different distribution of warmed land and therefore different wind patterns?

Don't forget the abrasive qualities of volcanic ash. The blade surfaces would be eroded, and the internal bearings supporting the blade, the multiplier gears, and generator inside would quickly become trashed.

Wind and hydro power are solar power in a sense. The energy to move the air and evaporate the oceans comes in large measure from the sun. So a global solar disruption could also change wind and precipitation patterns

With less sun, you get less evaporation; not sure that wouldn't affect hydropower, not to mention other uses of water.

> But given enough electricity, we could easily grow enough food to feed the entire planet in a relatively small amount of space.

Sure, in a hypothetical world. But in the real world, what percentage of our crops are currently being grown under UV bulbs? It's a vanishingly tiny percentage. The problem is not that it's impossible to grow without sunlight. The problem is that it's impossible to transition to a low-sunlight world without a few years of global famine and a massive human die-off.

This was my thought exactly regarding growing crops. The other alternative powers are unpredictable, so we would have to go back to nuclear or similar. My thought is that today we could actually accomplish quite a lot in a short time if we where organized. If we where successful in removing the majority of the current power infrastructure, I'm unsure how much time it would take to get the system running.

Just to replace the wheat crop would require 11x our current total electrical production. We would need All Teh Powerz!

I'm sure in such an emergency we could find a way to switch to a crop that is more calorie dense for the amount of energy it takes to grow it. Wheat is in a lot of products we eat, but not as the main ingredient with just a few exceptions. Just like corn, it's not a terribly efficient crop to grow so we probably wouldn't grow it anymore.

Another good reason to have nuclear power (fusion would be perfect, but at least fission) - it works anywhere, anytime...

Everyone wins with fission. Even if we somehow built crappy new reactors and mishandled them so that we got a Three Mile Island incident every once in a while, that's still better than the Three Mile Island equivalent we get here in Oklahoma every few years from the thorium and uranium released by our coal plants (not counting the mercury and VOC's).

And it's moving, eastward. Old Faithful is getting a bit less faithful, and shorter, as the years pass, while new hotpots and geysers appear east of it's location.

On the plus side, it appears that we will have a fair bit of warning before Yellowstone goes off, for all the good it will do humanity.

Actually, the Yellowstone hot spot is stationary. It's the North American continental plate that is moving westward over the hot spot. If you look at a geological map, you can trace the path. It's similar to the Hawaiian island chain in the pacific and it's hot spot. Older islands trend to the northwest as the pacific plate has moved eastward.

The Pacific plate is moving northwest, which is why the older islands are there... the hotspot stays in the same place, which is why the newer Big Island Hawai'i emerged southeast of the older islands. I think you had it right but just miswrote.

D'oh! Absolutely correct, kissickas. My fingers engaged before my brain.

Stationary relative to what? And remember the earth is rotating...

I remember having a "relativity" revelation as a kid riding in the back of our car.

So we're cruising down the highway. But wonder, what if I could just stop. I would zip through the back of the car, being stationary on the road and watch the car zoom away. But wait...

I know the earth is rotating too, and we're driving east. So if I stopped, then the car would be zooming forward on the road, but the road itself would be zooming forward even faster than the car's (relative) speed! But wait...

The earth isn't just rotating, it orbits the sun. If I stopped, the road and the car on it, wouldn't just be going forward, they would be falling away at an even greater speed. Within seconds, I'd be floating in space at a snapshot point in the earths rotation and the earth would be cruising away from me. But wait...

The sun moves too! If I were sitting in my car, on the road, on earth, and just stopped, Things would be moving away even quicker than before.

Around this point, the wondering switched from bigger frames of reference to paradoxies if space were a thing we were moving through. In one second, our car would move a certain distance on the road. But the road was also moving so we really traveled an extra special distance forward. And the place we came from wasn't just one second back on the road, it couldn't be given all that extra motion. But it was literally just one second ago, how could it not be that same definite spot on the road. My young mind was blown.

Consequently, my current mind is also blown having typed that out. Spacetime is weird, I need to go clear my head. It's currently being smeared across the solar system at speeds in excess of 100,000km/h

It would be great to create an animation with the different movements you just described!

> Actually, the Yellowstone hot spot is stationary. It's the North American continental plate that is moving westward over the hot spot.

Actually, the north american plate is stationary. It's the stuff underneath that is rotating eastward. Now, show me how to tell the difference between those scenarios. :-P

Observe from above? Geosynchronous satellites?

If you want to do it from the surface, sunrise and sunset times? That will tell you whether or not your position has shifted relative to the Earth's rotation.

Ah, but that just raises more issues. Geosynchronous satellites are by definition pegged to a relative spot over the earth's surface. And the earth spins constantly, inside and out. The question is, is there any difference between the core spinning slightly slower, vs. the crust spinning slightly faster (assuming zero acceleration)?

To a godlike observer outside of the plane of the ecliptic, I'm not sure the idea of one being stationary and the other "slipping" in some direction even has meaning.

> for all the good it will do humanity.

More all the good it will do America, it'll be pretty grim in Europe but they've found that the fallout wouldn't be as bad as expected due to Yellowstone having a low sulfur content.

The rest of humanity would definitely feel it (dramatic weather shifts, much colder winters, crop failures) but it's not an extinction level event or even remotely close.

I was reading a report the other day saying that they have not been able to tie major eruptions to extinction events, flora and fauna seem to come through them ok.

The geyser systems aren't directly coupled to the hot stuff deep underneath, and you can't make inferences about the hotspot moving based on their changing behavior. Hydrothermal features appear and disappear on their own (much shorter) timescale. presses the geologist call button

If you are ever looking for geyser data, I helped build an ODbL database of observations -- http://geysertimes.org ; API: http://www.geysertimes.org/api/v3/docs/index.html. We use the data to predict geyser eruptions when enough data are available. For instance, here's the next prediction for Old Faithful (JSON / unix epoch): http://www.geysertimes.org/api/v3//predictions_latest/2 -or- (cleaned up): http://geysertimes.org/predictions.php

I wonder if eventually in the future it would be possible to tap into the hot spots, and use the heat as a source of geothermal energy. This would also have the advantage of gradually cooling down the volcano and preventing another eruption.

Ironically the plot of a season 2 episode of Stargate Atlantis.

That's coincidental, but how is it ironic?

The small civilization living on top of the caldera drew energy from the supervolcano to power a defensive shield around the clock.

The irony is that this caused pressure to build under the caldera and an eruption to wipe out life on the surface.

I should watch more scifi...

Isn't this used in Iceland?

Yep, and many other countries including the USA. Using geothermal energy to "tap into hot spots" is called "geothermal energy."

Very true. One example I know of is the Casa Diablo thermal power generating station built on the Long Valley caldera on the east side of the Sierra near Mammoth Lakes. Its been there since the mid 80s.

Actually they're already developing that region for geothermal. Just not inside the park: http://www.montanagreenpower.com/other/geothermal.php

There are actually much better spots in the US though. Some relatively close to Yellowstone: http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_educati...

There is a great section about the Yellowstone super volcano in Bill Bryson's book "A brief history of everything". Pretty much no spot on Earth would be safe if this one erupted - probably an extinction event.

Lots of places would be safe during the eruption - just probably not the United States or southern Canada. Humans have survived many super volcanic eruptions before.

The real problem if you survive the eruption would be the decade or so of crazy weather and food shortages, not to mention general unrest.

I do wonder if it's possible to cool Yellowstone artificially and reduce the risk? Could be possible to get geothermal energy out of it too.

So they imaged it - I would love to 1) see some images and 2) understand their technique/instruments/etc.

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