An injection of magma under Norris Geyser Basin | Hacker News Reader

An injection of magma under Norris Geyser Basin

nationalgeographic.com

131 pointsBender130 comments

"For more than two decades, an area larger than Chicago centered near the basin has been inflating and deflating by several inches in erratic bursts. In a hyperactive volcanic region like Yellowstone, the exact causes of any specific movement are difficult to pin down."

[...]

"To be clear, the new research does not indicate that the supervolcano that created Yellowstone’s caldera—which last erupted 640,000 years ago—is any more likely to erupt now."

Thank you for this. The headline of the article certainly seems to be taking advantage of the recent hysteria around everything else happening in our lives right now (covid-19)

Headlines of previously respectful media have always been inching towards more drama, shock and FUD in general, so I don't think it's specific to the current mass hysteria. I'd bet COVID-19 has been a boon to all media though.

Thankfully the post was updated to be less misleading.

2020 is already shit, of course it's going to erupt, block out the sun and cause a nuclear winter. Why the hell not?

Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?

Even brief nuclear winter would cause billion of deaths from starvation (and chaos caused by collapsing economy).

I just wonder if we have a plan B to rebuild stuff (relatively) quickly or humans will be thrown into preindustrial world condemned to reinvent everything again?

Whatever hope we had of surviving a nuclear winter now was gone the moment the virus shot the global supply chains to hell.

The supply chains are back. China has made big progress and are back to work.

They're not back yet. The back end is pumping goods again, but the receiving side is crashing, sending demand shock waves upstream.

Plans A-Z call for us avoiding all nuclear winters and impacts from large asteroids. We don’t and won’t ever have a way to quickly rebuild after extinction level events. It will affect multiple generations in the best case.

There are not plans for such an event.

Such plans are inherently unpalletable.

The right answer would be murder 90% of the population to sustain the resources for the 10% during the recovery.

How many people are game for that?

Well you probably don’t need a whole 10% to murder the other 90%.

My point is... If you have enough foodstore for X% of the population to make it through the 5-10 year period of crop failure, but can't do that if you try to feed 100% of the people what do you do?

I choose the 10% and continuity of civilization over 100% and complete destruction of society. And if I'm in the 90% .... I'll be pissed, but what needs to be done must be done.

In WW2 sailors sealed themselves up below the waterline to save the ship at certain doom to themselves.

The universe is an ugly place... But to see the light of humanity possibly extinguished is a worse prospect for me personally.

The world just got caught completely flat footed by a virus that's closely related to the seasonal flu. I shudder to think what will happen when something 1000 times more novel and deadly inevitably comes along.

Depends on your definition of "deadly".

The MERS virus was much more deadly than this thing, and that wasn't very long ago. The problem with it was that it was too deadly: it killed people off pretty quickly. Pathogens that are highly deadly usually aren't very good at starting plagues, because they kill off their hosts too quickly and for that reason don't spread that much. This one is worse because it has a really long incubation period with few or no symptoms and then does its thing, but still with a relatively low mortality rate.

I guess what would really cause civilization to collapse would be a virus that has a very long incubation time with no symptoms, and then sudden very high mortality.

I mean, that's kind of what HIV was up until the mid-late 90s anyway. No symptoms for years and then nearly 100% mortality.

It's killed millions but still hasn't wiped out civilization.

HIV didn't spread very quickly because it required fluid transfer (and usually sexual, even kissing generally didn't spread it). It's hard to have an "outbreak" when a virus is so difficult to spread between people.

If society was actually thrown back into preindustrial levels, odds are good we would never get back, because all of the easy to acquire oil/coal is already gone.

"Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?"

There's a ton of them. You can google "prepper community".

IMHO all of them tend to underestimate the cleverness of the remaining humans; i.e., holing up in a cabin in the mountains with a metric ton of freezedried food won't help when you've got people with a metric ton of freezedried motivation to find you.

It doesn't matter how much planning you do; such plans would not survive contact with the enemy anyhow.

I stick to the regular amounts of prep I've been advising anyhow. It helps even if such a worst-case occurs and gives you time to plan your next move, which is all you can really ask for anyhow.

To close out on a happier note, it isn't even all bad news, and it may be getting better over time. Even a catastrophic collapse of civilization could still leave you with a lot more resources than you'd expect, as society gets wealthier over time. For instance, every house that has solar panels on it is just a few components away from being able to provide small, but potentially vital, amounts of power, power that will have all sorts of uses. It may not be fun but people may surprise you with what even the "shattered remnants" of civilization can do. After all, we bootstrapped once already with none of that stuff.

In norwegian we have an expression: En ulykke kommer sjelden alene. A misfortune/accident seldom comes alone.

I’ve heard it said in California as “When it rains, it pours”

Think it's a common saying in English the language, in general. Heard it lots from people around the world.

It has fallen into disuse in Seattle.

Just remove the "when" bit.

Definitely say that here (Alberta, Canada).

Also, “bad things come in threes”

Is this number three?

The virus seems to have triggered the pending recession, so if it does blow - yep, seems like it.

German version is basically the same even without translating: Ein Unglück kommt selten allein.

In Dutch it's "een ongeluk komt zelden alleen"

From Shakespeare's Hamlet: "When sorrows come, they come not single spies But in battalions"

yeah we're pattern seeking machines... its no surprise that we lump events together like that.

Yeah, my first though: so this is how Q2 2020 is going to start. Will we even get to Q3, or will the gods cancel humanity mid-season because of low ratings?

Good news.

A civilization ending asteroid is going to miss us! https://www.space.com/asteroid-1998-or2-earth-flyby-april-20...

To me, this is the scariest aspect of a fast&hot pandemic. If hospitals are already overloaded, supplies already exhausted, what happens in the event of a significant natural disaster? Typically, nations around the world rally to assist with hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami, etc. What would that look like today?

Black swan events extreme enough to push our normal operating infrastructure to the limit are very hard to prepare for efficiently and effectively. Preparing for them to double up is likely a fool's errand. This is obviously cold comfort if we have an extinction level event on the heels of a pandemic, but at some point you have to just accept your fate.

  Till shade is gone,
  Till water is gone,
  Into the shadow with teeth bared,
  Screaming defiance with the last breath,
  To spit in Sightblinder's eye on the last day.

I suppose the Mark Watney "Keep solving problems" is more in keeping with the HN zeitgeist. Ah well.

I'm not worried about extinction-level events -- more like the 100-year earthquakes and hurricanes that are improbable in any one place but somewhat frequent on a global scale... things like hurricane Katrina

Finally an end to the climate crisis!

All it takes is wiping out humanity! Who knew?

Will we be able to get toilet paper in this nuclear winter?

There's a bit of a gap between "shit" and literal apocalypse.

I wonder how much of the US's energy needs could be extracted from geothermal sources around the caldera.

It's possibly unwise to go poking holes in a supervolcano.

If one could remove a lot of the heat and convert it to electricity, it wouldn't be so super.

Isn't that how Iceland gets all it's power?

"In May 1980, a strong earthquake swarm that included four Richter magnitude 6 earthquakes struck the southern margin of the Long Valley Caldera. It was associated with a 10-inch (250 mm) dome-shaped uplift of the caldera floor"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Valley_Caldera

https://archive.md/fm9ep

I wonder what the pulses might indicate elsewhere (like water temperatures in the gulf or s/t)

If this theoretically erupted, what would the impact be? Extinction level?

Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything does a good job of describing it, I'd butcher a paraphrasing. Essentially, feet of ash covering hundreds to thousands of miles.

It also highlights that this is been going on and areas bulge constantly.

Even better: https://www.amazon.com/Supervolcano-Catastrophic-Changed-Cou...

If this blows, a billion people could die. And I suspect it’s more likely than an asteroid hit.

2020 no joke yo

I am calling on everyone reading this, to turn in the direction of Yellowstone (rhumb and great-circle bearings both acceptable), and channel your chi into the mantra "NOT NOW"

ed: although, yes, the danger of eruption is not heightened now.

The season finale of 2020 sounds terrifying.

There's a close pass of a 4km asteroid happening in April. It should miss us.

https://www.space.com/asteroid-1998-or2-earth-flyby-april-20...

I'm just not counting on should at this rate...

What if the asteroid strikes Yellowstone?

That can't happen twice.

Well that would likely eliminate SARS-CVD-2 so there'd be a silver lining...

Why, is this asteroid high in silver? Can we mine it? /s

Perhaps I should have written "silver plating"

"Should" is putting it a bit lightly. It has essentially zero chance of hitting us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(52768)_1998_OR2#2020_approach

What if it turns?

Then we have a much bigger problem than getting hit by an asteroid.

"That's no moon..."

You also have a few close ones coming up this weekend.

https://www.news18.com/news/tech/four-new-asteroids-are-appr...

Please stop spreading FUD. That's not even close to a close pass. From the linked article:

> At its closest approach, which will happen at about 5:56 a.m. EDT (0956 GMT), asteroid 1998 OR2 will be 3.9 million miles (6.3 million km) from Earth. That's more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.

To be fair, various media outlets are also calling it a "close pass".

You're right, of course, that it's much larger than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, but that doesn't stop mainstream media from calling it a close pass.

At a space scale it's a close pass.

A "close pass" here means "it may even be visible from Earth in a normal observatory sized telescope!"

Close pass isn't some FUD. It's a scientific definition. It's even defined in the article I linked.

I like https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks which gets its data from https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ the NASA JPL center for near Earth object studies. There aren't many that come closer than the moon...

There was a nice big (5.7) earthquake in Utah recently. It closed an Amazon warehouse.

Has anyone checked the expiry date on Earth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...

Haha well... Apparently Jean Dixon gave this year as the year a “wave of Armageddon would wipe out the planet”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Dixon

I mean, with as many psychics, and mediums, and holy people as have predicted the end of the world, eventually one will get it write.

A million monkeys with a million typewriters and all that.

Also, there's a literal Dixon Effect that's about ignoring all the bad and focusing on just the one or two correct things.

I've been thinking for a while that this whole millennium has gotten off to a bad start.

Maybe we should regroup and try again.

It's a slight improvement over 1900-1920.

You might be onto something. We've hit the trifecta of health crisis, faltering economies and bars closing their doors except now we've got smartphones and air conditioning.

Turn it off and on again to see if 2020 is a runtime error...

dont worry - in DBZ, channeling an energy attack usually lasts 10 episodes before its ready... so we got until 2030 to prepare

Plot Twist: only Sean Bean survives

He /is/ legend.

Forgive me for making a reddit comment, but this has been me in 2020

https://youtu.be/VmW-ScmGRMA

I'm happy Jeff is capable of filling his dad's comedic shoes.

2020: The Year the Earth Stood Still

I can't even figure out the genre anymore - political drama shifted into a medical procedural, now we're going to end in a full on disaster movie? Pick a lane people.

This just goes to show, "truth is stranger than fiction".

If someone had tried to make a movie that showed the true events of 2020, people would think it's ridiculously unrealistic.

12 Monkeys?

So... Ridiculously unrealistic checks up.

Maybe, but with all the people stuck at home, it really should be on everyone's Netflix to-watch list. Fantastic movie.

Some other good picks relevant for these times: The Andromeda Strain (1971) Outbreak (1995) Contagion (2011) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 versions) 28 Days Later (2002)

Don't forget that the San Andreas fault is supposed to be "overdue".

Drawing paralels to computer systems, It usually take 3 or more separate events to take a system down. No one thought that we would get both a pandemic, big volcano eruption, and a asteroid hit at the same time. When you roll a dice and get two sixes there is still 1/6 chance to roll a third six in a row.

My guess is, at this scale, it's at least one heist film (more likely a concurrent series of them), with the earmarks of a biblical tragedy providing a smoke screen; starring old white dudes who prefer not to appear on the marquee. I'd imagine the exchange "isn't that illegal?", "not yet!" appears in the script at least once.

Sounds like the Mayans may have been off by a few.

Season? We're looking at SERIES finale...

Plot twist:

It was a huge mistake to ask all of humanity to focus their chi on this as that was what caused the explosion that made Krakatoa look like a piker.

just got done with a decent earthquake here in Salt Lake City, we're just waiting for the third thing to drop.

This reminds me of when the .com bubble burst in 2000 PBS's Nova series ran a set of shows on every way humanity could suddenly end from Yellowstone exploding to an asteroid hitting as the solar system passes through the galactic disk to the ice caps melting and changing the salinity of the oceans. It was strangely comforting.

There was a really well done podcast on this topic a couple years ago, The End of the World with Josh Clark. Only 10 episodes https://open.spotify.com/show/7sh9DwBEdUngxq1BefmnZ0?si=WqWF...

Sending bad vibes that way to show my disapproval. Science!

If you're going to do this kind of thing, do it with positive language, not negative. (in a very literal sense) You want to focus on peace, not anti-war. You want to focus on health, not anti-virus. You want to focus on stability in Yellowstone, not "please don't erupt."

Well I enjoyed the title. The site asked for my email to continue reading so that's about as far as I got.

Same here lol

I usually go with @example.com or @contoso.com

Can confirm that "allyourbase@us.com" was accepted. Thanks!

I usually go with something like "popups@annoy.me.and.are.useless.for.you.xxx".

I feel bad for whoever owns that email. They're getting all the spam!

If someone lists an MX for 'annoy.me.and.are.useless.for.you.xxx', I'd personally be really curious as to why.

(I did just look, `dig any you.xxx` returns NOTIMP, probably a reserved name.)

The more offensive the better. This is bad and they should feel bad.

I totally get why people delivering great content want to maximize their readership this way, but I've never read an article on that site before, so how would I know if its worth giving my email?

They're probably counting on name recognition. I'm not sure about outside the US, but National Geographic is a big name here.

@Kye - After seeing the crap that comes on the History Channel, I don't know if I can trust anything anymore. National Geographic might just become National Geothermal Signatures of Alien Presence... But that's just my ignorance of NG speaking.

Nat Geo was purchased by 21st Century Fox a while back.

I used to use mm@disney.com (Mickey or Minnie Mouse)as a fake email.

I didn't see any. I guess something caught it (origin/pihole/bypass paywall)

Has Murphy's Law chosen 2020 to play itself out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law

Robert Heinlein had a story The Year Of the Jackpot, about exactly this.

Ends with the Sun going nova.

It was the first science fiction story I ever read, and I was 11. I still remember the opening line. "At first Potiphar Breen did not notice the girl who was undressing."

I wonder if that's where Gibson got the term "the Jackpot" for the slow-motion catastrophe that overtakes future Earth in The Peripheral.

At this rate I might need to change my stance on the biblical writings about the apocalypse & 4 horsemen.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Given there's no discernable HN requirement to remain on topic (ever) the origin of this quote makes interesting reading.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/

There was this hilarious cartoon:

https://i.redd.it/trycnbzmy0m41.jpg

Good, I was just saying Q1 2020 has been pretty boring so...

Yep Kobe, Covid and now this!

Only because you aren't used to being housebound.

I, on the other hand, have been having a better than usual time, now that the rest of humanity is finally as concerned with germ control as I have been for nearly two decades.

Covid, Caldera, Locust Invasion...What a time to be alive!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com