Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park
jhnewsandguide.com
jhnewsandguide.com
The interesting thing about geysers and pools is how relatively predictable they are... until they are not. A mathematical and statistical person would have a lot of fun building prediction models for all the different geysers.
It's so popular that one of the datasets immediately available in base R is the set of waiting times between eruptions for a Yellowstone geyser [1].
[1] https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/datasets/versions/3....
I’m not sure that it’s particularly more regular than most other geysers, but that’s what is known for.
Yellowstone tourists have a proud tradition of not running from things they should be.
As Sean Connery says in Hunt for Red October, "We must give this American a wide berth."
I think of it as the National Park discontinuity: few people these days have experience being in environments that can be rapidly lethal.
And there isn't a sign in National Parks saying "Past this line, there are apex predators, dangerous natural features, no cell phone service, and/or the nearest medical facility being a backcountry airlift away."
That's a big change from most people's everyday normal.
It has a pretty irregular major eruption pattern. What people often forget, is that geysers don't wait for the day time, so many events occur at night when nobody is around to witness the beauty. When a geyser like this only erupts a handful of times a year and for approximately 3 minutes, you have to get very very very lucky to witness it. Especially when you take into account how enormous YNP is.
[1] https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/steamboat-geyser.htm#:....
It might just save your life.
If when looking up, the object has an apparent motion (left/right/back), it won't hit you, and certainly don't move in the direction it appears to be moving. If it appears stationary in the sky, it WILL hit you or very close, so move fast. Best default strategy with limited time & options is to hug the rock face, especially under an overhang.
I hereby dub this the Ridley Scott's Prometheus Rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_bearing,_decreasing_r...
It's also a real problem for certain intersection angles where vehicles or bicycles with unfortunate timing will be obscured behind the A-Pillar until nearly too late. There was an article (iirc) on HN years ago about just such an intersection repeatedly injuring/killing bicyclists. I once had to seriously threshold brake at an off-angle intersection to avoid a fire truck running a red light, when the timing/speed/distance/angle all lined up to hide the entire truck behind the A-Pillar for a few seconds approaching the intersection.
So, if you don't have any clues, and have a half second to make your choice, I suppose it's better than no rule of thumb, but I wouldn't rely on it as a primary technique.
Interested because I was there a few weeks ago.
Local explosions like this are not very indicative of movements in the county-sized reservoir of magma ten times deeper down that underlies the entire caldera.
Local hydrothermal basin, upper magma chamber, lower magma chamber, mantle plume: https://www.yellowstonepark.com/news/supervolcano-magma-cham...
I really really want to underscore this point.
You're literally standing on top of ground and under that is boiling water.
If that breaks and you fall in you're going to be in boiling water with no way to get out and you will die screaming.
Also NEVER walk on ground that has no vegetation. If you look around a geyser you will see that the ground is white and has no vegetation. That's because the temperature is too high and it has water under it that's heating the ground.
Walk on that and there's a chance you will fall in.
In the back country there are no fences so you can fall right through the crust.
There are also places on this planet where toxicity issues preclude vegetation. If there are fumes coming through the soil so powerful that grass doesn't grow, take the hint.
My sidewalk has no vegetation, but that is because I weedwhacked on Tuesday not because a geyser 10 meters away is flash boiling water in a pressure vessel made of stone and glass shrapnel-to-be.
Those with uncovered skin suffered horribly, and it’s quite surprisingly how little covering was helpful.
There is a good documentary on it [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island...
My cousin is in hydrogeology as well! Fascinating subject!
What would be the point of running if the Yellowstone Caldera actually goes bang? I mean, where would you run to? The resulting destruction would be greater than that experienced by the asteroid collision that ended the dinosaurs.
You're better off staying put and vaporising than dying of asphyxiation a week later.
1. This issue is not some precursor to the caldera becoming active - it is a irregular but normal part of areas with geysers.
2. If a geyser, hot spring, etc starts looking different, acting different, or there is an unexpected explosion run away from it quickly. The negative effects will be localized so distance is helpful.
"At around 10:00 AM MST on July 23, 2024, a small hydrothermal explosion occurred in Yellowstone National Park in the Biscuit Basin thermal area, about 2.1 miles (3.5 km) northwest of Old Faithful. Numerous videos of the event were recorded by visitors. The boardwalk was damaged, but there were no reports of injury. The explosion appears to have originated near Black Diamond Pool.
Biscuit Basin, including the parking lot and boardwalks, are temporary closed for visitor safety. The Grand Loop road remains open. Yellowstone National Park geologists are investigating the event."
I feel like that’s pure luck. Things could’ve gone way worse
Briefly, near the beginning. But not for the rest of the video.
If you're watching a video on a phone, it's trivial to rotate the phone 90 degrees. On a TV or computer, not so much, so you end up with a ridiculous amount of wasted screen real estate and objectively inferior image resolution.
I found a discussion on the topic here[*]. The consensus seems to be that “wasted” sensor area outside the circle would not be marketable.
https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/109452/is-there-an...
Suppose you implement horizontal recording while the phone is vertical; this would mean the video preview is now scaled and takes only a fraction of the screen (the same way watching horizontal video on YouTube while in "portrait mode"), which people would find annoying.
Alternatively, you could not scale the video; now the video preview displays only a vertical slice of the frame. It looks OK, but people would soon discover the actual video a screen's worth of image on each side of the preview, leading to anxiety and worry - people would have pay extra attention to not capture things that weren't intended to be on the video; they'd soon look for a way to turn this off.
The unfortunate reality is, it's a social problem partially caused by a technological one. Vertical videos are driven by the phone form-factor and because portraits and selfies actually need to be vertical, and people being people, shooting photos of themselves and other is what they care about the most.
There's far better things to focus false internet collective outrage at.
Contrast with a monitor, where it will at least be viewable vertically, even if it too only fills a portion of the monitor horizontally.
Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other and therefore whose field of view has a greater extent in the horizontal rather than vertical direction.
Admittedly I don't understand where the vertical recording fad comes from. Personally I take pictures and photos that are almost exclusively horizontal except in rare cases like taking a picture of a very tall building.
1. the people doing the recording being too lazy to rotate their phones, and/or the people doing the recording catering to the lowest common denominator of expecting viewers to be too lazy to rotate their phones;
2. so many "influencer" and related videos these days consisting solely of the narrator's face being right in front of the camera, which makes for vertical being the optimal orientation, due to the human face being taller than it is wide (hence the term "portrait orientation"!).
I also hate it, and I also still shoot almost all my photos and videos in horizontal / landscape orientation. I guess that makes me old.
Nobody expects to have to turn their video camera sideways to capture in the "correct" orientation... but you must on a phone.
When you go yo take a selfie of something other than your face, you just keep the habit.
When I'm sitting, holding vertical feels natural, holding horizontal feels awkward again. I can put my hand on a lap and basically rest in vertical. High risk of dropping it in horizontal (and while rotating). Same for walking.
I don't really see how you can do it "easily" apart from purely geometric considerations. I can rotate my PC display more easily cause it's arm-mounted (which is one of the PC life changers).
where the vertical recording fad comes from
Most popular content today is "person focus". People are vertical.
pros:
- band aid on global temperatures
- interested in any others commenters may know of
cons:
- several states getting reset
- volcanic ash covering the North American bread basket
- pretty long list really
I’ve taken liquefaction maps into account previously when finding places to live, but not had to look up magma chamber reports yet.
How high were your basement ceilings - was there any breathing room at all?
Avoid risky areas unless you can afford to lose your home.
Lots of people in Australia got caught out during floods, in part due to unobvious exclusions. https://mdlaw.com.au/news-insights/flood-insurance-australia...
In my city Christchurch, an earthquake led to problems for many many people.
Oh no! Wyoming might lose 0.007% of their GDP. I hope the governor can save them in time!
https://hypotheticalvolcanoes.fandom.com/wiki/2081_Eruption_...
I’ll be sure to give it a wide berth in 2081
If it goes boom, I'll try to take pics and report back.
Better do a livestream then, in case we cannot recover your camera/mobile.
No, nations do not have the means to feed their constituents in a nation ending disaster. It's easy to move food from Florida to California in a state sized crises, but the logistics of maintaining a just in case food supply for hundreds of millions distributed around the country? It's a safer bet to assume you'd die in the disaster than to convince people to plan for the future.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1bvy6sz/by_popular...
- would set back solar adoption
- volcanic ash would replenish the NA bread basket soil erosion
Not only is fertilizer very energy intensive to produce, it also contributes to de-oxygenation of lakes, rivers, and the ocean. It's no exaggeration that this might well end civilization on earth. If we lose the oceans (which are already becoming oxygen depleted) it's going to be that much harder to feed everyone.
So I'd consider volcanic ash a pro, not a con. Sure we might lose a single growing season, but could help us for centuries, if properly managed.
Also, the mining process leaves very toxic tailings, but that is true for most mining.
On the positive side, I believe most phosphate fertilizer is not immediately absorbed by plants, but instead goes into forming relatively insoluble phosphates in the soil (phosphate fertilizer is formed by solubilizing phosphate minerals by treatment with large amounts of acid). This forms a phosphate bank in the soil. Over time, if I understand correctly the residual solubility of these minerals (especially under the influence of organic acids secreted by plant roots) will reduce the need for additional phosphate additions, assuming the soil doesn't erode away.
It also pulverized rock and volcanic glass, which causes all manner of hell when the wind blows.
> These very large and violent hydrothermal explosions are independent of associated volcanism. None of the large hydrothermal events of the past 16,000 years has been followed by an eruption of magma. The deeper magma system appears to be unaffected even by spectacular steam explosions and crater excavations within the overlying hydrothermal system.
Look at the White Island eruption a few years back. If you are on the island it was an awful event. But in terms of eruption scale it was so small it barely registered.
lowercase t, probably
Is something like this realistic and considered in national security?
Also, similar things like "the Big One is due in the Northwest" are just sensational headlines. The Cascadia Subduction Zone indeed produces earthquakes every 3-500 years and the last one was in 1700 but that doesn't mean there's an equivalent of a hourglass. It just means there's a historical average of that.
And it's the concern of FEMA to act after something like this happens, not a matter of national security. National security concern, I imagine, would involve defusing these via some military ways and defusing such events are far beyond the capability of humankind at this time.
I know it’s armchair quarterbacking but please don’t be like the people in the video. If the Earth is erupting in front of you: turn and run. Don’t stay there filming. Don’t gently jog while constantly checking over your shoulder. Turn. And run.
I’m not saying panic. I’m not saying trample anyone in front of you. But get to a safe distance with alacrity. You have no idea if the situation will rapidly escalate, and you may only have one opportunity to put enough distance between you and the unfolding situation. Assume the worst until you know better.
In this scenario, falling rocks are a concern. Superheated steam is a concern. Poisonous gases could have been a concern. Corrosive liquids could have been a concern. Lava could have been a concern. Further eruptions could have been a concern. For all of these your odds are improved with distance. In the moment you have no idea of the full extent of the dangers and in many cases by the time you realize it’s too late.
That said I’m very thankful nobody was hurt in this incident.
All I could think was how colossally dumb you had to be to assume the waves just going to sit there crashing below you. It was clearly a huge storm surge. And then how horribly tragic and preventable the outcome was. Some people, man.
EDIT: Misremembered it. Three people were swept out, and it was the 7-year-old daughter who died. God damn, how awful.
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2009/08/23/news/three-swept-...
It's natural to qualify and rate tragic events by degree of perceived "innocence". Families swept off quiet beaches to their doom without warning is about as innocently tragic as you can get. That said, some incidents are arguably less innocent then others, such as fishermen venturing onto narrower stretches of beach at low tide during winter, when Pacific surf is stronger and more varied. But even then usually it seems people aren't doing anything that onlookers would consider inviting tragedy, and quite often it happens on well trafficked beaches and during times of the year that people wouldn't consider risky.
Fortunately I grew up along the Gulf Coast so Pacific surf has always felt ominous to me. OTOH, I have a higher risk tolerance than many others, especially of younger generations, so maybe it's a wash for me.
Then, sneaker wave. I basically had her jump up "into my arms" so to speak, wrap arms around my neck, legs around my waist, while I situated myself as best I could, and grabbed onto rock with both hands. The water came up to my waist.
That was a genuinely terrifying experience.
Now, near the ground before the aircraft is pressurised, it could be dangerous mostly because it could pose a risk to the aircraft structure or systems if it tears off and impacts the aircraft in flight. Other than that, a jetliner can fly perfectly well with a door open at low altitude. (Not sure about special large cargo doors though)
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/passenger-arrested-after-plan...
Again, typically the brain will skip these checks and go into fight or flight mode where you punch or run without knowing what you are doing. I'd like to think we break a lot of this response in the modern world by not being around a lot of spontaneous dangerous stuff, which leaves us gawking at times.
Remember, most people in the western and especially American world, simply do not experience real world risks and dangers, everything is so sanitized and cleaned and protected and safe, that they simply do not connect reality with their own demise or even a risk to it. On a related note, it is alway why I believe there are so many and increasing numbers of injurious contacts with bisons, moose, elk, bears, etc in Yellowstone, because they think they’re cuddly animals that they saw in wildlife documentaries and know from cartoons and tv stories of the child that is friends with the talking bear, etc. most people are simply so detached from reality that they simply have no reference for what they are doing that is extremely dangerous to their continued state of being alive.
On the other hand, my two year old (who had been hitting kids in preschool and getting a lot of "don't hit" messaging, turned and queried, of an alligator on the boardwalk about ten or twenty feet in front of us "No hit the Alligator?"
While my heart and heart rate spiked, I swiftly grabbed him up and agreed, "yes, no hit the alligator!"
Real life, a lot less so.
Some of the runners are shambling or in a very light jog, but that looks like it's down to form or fitness rather than being blasé. I don't see anyone "strolling".
These people have no sense of urgency around danger, or they cannot recognize danger.
So we come to an uncertainty. This seems pretty big, and probably is not normal, isn't it? Or it is? So you are not sure, should you shake off social norms of behavior (being calm, not shouting, acting like a grown adult) and to switch to a survival behavior (running away, shouting commands "run" to others, dragging people with you by their limbs, or doing whatever you think is the adequate behavior for such a situation).
Looking at the video carefully, people in a few seconds come to a conclusion that this is dangerous and start moving away, but they didn't get away from norms of everyday behavior. These two different priorities (to act normal or go to the survival mode) are still there, and they are still fighting in minds of people for a dominance.
Their response was "gently jog while constantly checking over your shoulder", because they decided it is dangerous and you need at least jog away, but they are feel that they may be underestimating (or overestimating) the danger, and they keep themself aware of the events to be able to change their behavior accordingly to them.
The very situation prompts for rapid change from a normal mode of existence to a survival mode, and there is no clear unambiguous signal that it is the case. The geyser erupts? Didn't we come here to watch geysers? Wouldn't it be embarrassing to run from the geyser? There are a lot of questions, and System 2 is a slow one. People are educated to keep System 1 in a check and to think things through. They are educated to know some dangerous situations and they can react to them immediately, but this is something unusual, they are not trained for it, and their minds become overwhelmed by a massive visual stimulus and by all the thoughts and ideas that may be relevant, but only System 2 could decide and to prioritize them properly.
When I was watching the video I instantly saw that it is dangerous, but I was prompted about it by the article, so I was ready to see something impressive AND dangerous. Therefore I'm not sure would I be better in that situation if I was watching it in real life without any prompting.
> they have lived such safe and sheltered lives that they cannot identify real danger.
I wrote about it above, but I want to stress it out:
1. we are conditioned to think before acting,
2. most of us have no experience with geysers and we cannot access the hazard level of a geyser at the first glance, and we know that we can't, so... goto 1.
This is a real psychological phenomenon. Most people don't want to be the first person to yell "fire!", or to appear to take a situation more seriously than it warrants, because they might be wrong and they'd stand out as being wrong and feel embarrassed. That feeling can "stick" shockingly long after you'd think the situation was obvious.
We have not socially normalized and trained the concept that it's better for people to occasionally be understandably wrong than to delay reacting to problems. The right reaction to quick reactions that turn out to be incorrect should be "Thanks for calling attention to what might have been a problem!", not an array of signals that all convey "what a weirdo".
Also, you are likely to visit this area before Old Faithful, so the most you will have seen is some steam going up. My visit was the first time I'd ever seen a geyser, so I would have had no idea what to expect, and presumably the boardwalk is in a safe location. If it were unsafe, they wouldn't have built the boardwalk there, right? (And it doesn't seem like anyone was injured, so...)
Most predators can outrun deer (and ever more so, humans). If you start running, they WILL instinctively chase and kill you. If you stand there, look big, and stare at them like you don't give a shit, predators actually start to question their own confidence and there is a good chance they will walk away rather than take a chance with you.
As for geological events, I imagine evolution hasn't really optimized much for that. They are extremely rare, if you're a deer standing on an erupting volcano you can't exactly outrun it either.
It's thoughtful of you to encourage people here to be more vigilant, but the lack of that vigilance is a direct outcome of the park trying to culture an experience of safety and wonder instead of danger and awe (in its traditional meaning).
It takes processing time before people even realize that this isn't normal. Also there's social proof all over. When it goes off people look around, see that nobody else is bailing, so they assume things are ok. It takes a little time to override that tendency and get people to start moving.
This could be said of life generally. It seems like very few people even have a minimal level of situational awareness while walking to the mailbox or walking through a store.
However, it may be prudent to tune in when you are in a new environment or you hear a new sound in an environment you’re used to.
What you've just described is situational awareness.
Maintaining condition yellow "relaxed awareness" should not be hard to do at all.
It's super easy to have basic awareness. Crossing the street is a great example because you need the awareness that you're near a street. Then the awareness to see if it has a crosswalk/light/etc. Then what the light status is (if applicable). Finally looking for cars.
People who lack any awareness at all are the ones you hear about falling in manholes because they were looking at their phones.
"People don't pay for things they don't plan on using."
> while walking to the mailbox or walking through a store.
Traditionally _not_ dangerous activities.
Jurassic Park keeps coming to mind. It must be safe as long as you observe the signs, because it's an institutionalized park, right?
I don't know at what point I, as a first-time visitor to such a park, would start to question whether what I was witnessing was unusual or just part of the show.
It's more common than you would think to come across a wild turkey(those bastards deserve the annual culling), deer, geese, coyote, a few months ago there was a black bear in tom sawyers island(they closed off a third of the park until it was captured). A few weeks ago I was leaving the magic kingdom and was going to walk from the main parking lot monorail station over to the bridge toward the Polynesian resort to the parking lot(I loathe the trams, prefer walking). I was just rounding the walkway and came across a snake that was upset about something in the center of the walkway. I think it was just a black snake, but I have a phobia for that particular type of animal. I reversed and took a different route. I have actually seen snakes a few times over the last couple years around the Polynesian resort, turkeys encounters are very common at the campground.
People think that because the parks are very safe as far as public places go that everything in the Disney bubble is "safe". If you're in an area where you aren't familiar with the local wildlife you should always err on the cautious side. But generally people are oblivious to anything around them.
> People are just generally bad at perceiving or respecting abstract danger.
Maybe? But also, all the yellowstones hydrothermal features look like the gods have cursed the land. If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around. The park cultivates a sense of safety otherwise it wouldn’t be a park.
I think you're assuming much more individualism in the primitive dynamic than actually existed. As I said, individual humans are terrible at judging danger. There was an article posted a few days back about collapses while trenching for construction, and the difficulties of getting people to take that risk seriously until it actually happens.
So at the state you're envisioning, I'd say it's more like others in your tribe telling you to stay away from those weird holes in the ground, because some tribe members had already been killed by them. And the contemporary dynamic is more like an extreme scaling up of that, with a much more nuanced understanding of the dangerous mechanisms.
It is also important to consider the context of the park itself. Roughly half of the world's known geysers are in Yellowstone. One of the primary reasons to go there is to see all the hydrothermal features. It is easy to watch this video from your laptop and know it is dangerous, but if you saw this explosion an hour after seeing this[1], the danger would likely be much less obvious.
I think we underestimate people’s reaction to dangerous events. Surprisingly, most people will appropriately respond.
Millions of years of evolution, right?
I appreciate your concern for folks' safety, though I'm not sure how the criticism applies to this instance. The bystanders behaved reasonably.
I'm not sure how OP's comment doesn't reflect HN's standard of quality. It's exactly the type of quality response that's appropriate for this instance. I'd say your response isn't quite up to it if anything because you're making an argument against someone that is encouraging safety and well-being; and for no apparent reason at all but to point out someone is flawed? I don't get it.
Are you saying they should've run away from the park for the entire rest of the day or trip?
See @Saurik's sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41051381
There is no arguing those facts, it's 100% clear from that video you linked. Am I going to stay away from the park the rest of the day? I don't know, maybe. It really depends on the circumstances. I am not a volcanologist. I'm not even a scientist. I don't understand the specifics involved here. If it were me, and I can clearly see something abnormal happened, I would NOT risk going back unless I can somehow verify it was safe to do so. That's common sense. It might involve finding a park ranger to speak with or calling the ranger station to get more information. I've been to the geyser at Iceland where they have signs that explicitly tell you about the unpredictable nature of it and how people have been badly burned. This is not a no-risk situation, especially when the situation is not the norm.
I've been to the big island of Hawaii during volcanic activity and they explicitly tell you to stay away from it due to the gasses, rocks, lava, etc. Maybe that elevates my skepticism over the safety here, but it seems that's for good reason.
EDIT: here you go mate, you don't need to look at Hacker News comments. Take it from the Park itself:
https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/news/240723.htm
> Biscuit Basin, including the parking lot and boardwalks, are temporarily closed for safety reasons. The Grand Loop Road remains open.
> Park staff and staff from USGS will monitor conditions and reopen the area once deemed safe.
Quite often, I'd say.
Disruptions in the stability of geological processes frequently have a compounding domino effect... a volcanic eruption is often preceded by the opening of smaller vents, small landslides can trigger large landslides, small sinkholes can suddenly develop large ones, a trickle over a levee can turn into a total breach, most M>7.0 earthquakes have foreshocks...
You can't tell where the peak severity will be in a cluster of geological events except in hindsight after the entire cluster is passed.
Extremely often. Just like earthquakes, the #1 predictor of a big quake is a smaller quake shortly before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=993wlZ6XFSs (not an eruption, but eruptions are a type of explosion)
Another - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNJ2Z6hrCPc
There's no way to know if you're dealing with that until after the fact. A lot of the gawkers taking video ended up with serious injuries (not sure they all survived, some of those videos are quite close in retrospect)
Looks to me like they are forced to walk back to get home. A couple of people are dawdling, otherwise it's an exit. Do you want to disagree and OSINT it?
Map to get started - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Biscuit+Basin+Geyser/@44.4...
I don't want to argue with dumb nerds flipping out brain farts. Have you thought about it from the safety of your own home and felt like they actually went back in that video or is this thread a waste of time?
Under your "anywhere could explode" "theory" you'd be getting angry if they sheltered in place and waited for helicopters.
HN is why women don't like men anymore, sitting around circle jerking about being irrationally afraid of stuff that hasn't and won't happen to them. How will they ever do... public speaking?
If you saw this same video but without the black color, would you have run? Because that would feel a bit silly to me: these kinds of explosions are happening all around you the entire time you are there. Some are even larger than this one, and you don't just stay as they happen: you sit on a bench and wait for an hour or two hoping to see it while you are there, and there are giant clocks trying to estimate when the next eruption will be.
Now like, what if the color were grey and there was mud? Some of the geysers have mud. Most of these are not a concern. What was a concern here was the black color... but as someone who has spent a bunch of time filming these geysers I found the black color so confusing that it really took me a moment to go "oh shit those are rocks". I could easily see myself having that pause we see from the other people before they all start running.
But, again: I don't feel like you are saying "these people should know rocks are dangerous" or "this was obviously different and you should be informed and on your toes ready to run"... you seem to be saying that, if you were standing somewhere and the ground suddenly exploded that you'd of course run; and, maybe that would be the absolute safest thing you could do, but then... why are you even there in the first place, if not to see an explosion of superheated steam?
Also, remember that the entire region seriously smells like sulfur and other strange gases... this is an area of terrain that people have long ago artistically (maybe even mythologically) described as the doorway to hell, between the smells, the color, the explosions, and the regions of trees that are either scorched, petrified, or merely poisoned. It honestly does make sense to question why people visit such an area in the first place, but once you decide to be there... well, it seems strange to question why you don't see everyone panicking about the explosion.
Even on a conscious level, this advice just doesn't work. If you duck for cover because a nearby car misfires, you're gonna get mocked or worse. Modern life gives as far more opportunities to overreact than to underreact to risk, so to appear rational and function in a society, we learn not to be too jumpy.
Yes it’s easy to armchair quarterback. I have no idea if I would perform any better than those in the video. But we should all aim to respond more accurately when in actual danger.
When people are in groups, they make decisions about risk differently from when they are alone.
> please don't be like the people in the video
A person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when other bystanders or witnesses are present.
A minute after we left the area, everyone else came out - not all willingly, it seems. Fortunately, the fire turned out to be nothing (flare up in the kitchen, I heard) and we were let back into the club after a bit. I learned quite a bit about human nature that day.
Can we somehow instead create an socioeconomic system that instead rewards those that turn and run?
Like if you can prove that you turned and ran, you don't have to pay taxes that year to the IRS.
The government in turn saves money on rescue efforts of sorts. It all works out.
What's unfortunate about that? Everyone else benefits from the recording.
Every time I see posts like this admonishing people I am astonished by the apparent ego of the authors and the power of assumptions.
> Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
More to enjoy...
The Precession of Simulacra" by Jean Baudrillard, Translated from English into American by Sean Joseph Patrick Carney
https://continentcontinent.cc/archives/issues/issue-2-2-2012...
I know of a scenic overlook someone falls off every couple of years, going well back before the smartphone selfie era.
Secondly, the mining stations will be limited. Yellowstone is a vast land. There is expected to be no diminishing of the forest.
In other words, such a thing is completely infeasible given our current understanding of science and technology.
The time required to develop such a capability would span so many lifetimes that is it effectively science fiction.
It is that we start at the periphery, very gradually going inward over a thousand year period. We should have enough data of the effects of our peripheral perturbations in the first few hundred years. It should provide a testable model for how to proceed safely as we go inward.
Via a flagged comment, a counterargument is deep geothermal, accessed via boreholes, and not strictly limited to extant surface geothermal fields:
Thomas Homer-Dixon is also an advocate that I'm aware of: <https://homerdixon.com/a-big-bet-on-geothermal-could-help-pr...>
I'm not sold on this (deep geothermal pilots such as the Geothermal Habanero project in Australia have proved expensive busts, and the productive lifespan of a given borehole is limited to a few decades). But it's worth consideration.
I've written on Habanero previously. The project consistently overran time and cost estimates, and delivered far less power than initially planned. That's not to say that the concept is fatally flawed, but it's also not the panacea first projected. By contrast, surface geothermal fields have been and are developed at commercial scale worldwide, and have been for years: The Geysers in California, in Iceland, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, and elsewhere. In fact most viable fields have already been tapped, with the largely untapped resources now existing in the African Rift Valley (largely within Kenya, where it could hugely bolster the country's fairly anemic generating capacity), and of course Yellowstone in the US, where there are significant environmental and political barriers. A USGS survey getting on two decades ago of US geothermal resources conspicuously excludes Yellowstone from any consideration at all. From 2007: <https://www.usgs.gov/publications/usgs-national-geothermal-r...>
See:
"Habanero Geothermal Project Field Development Plan". A largely sober summary of the project, noting that it's been concluded rather than expanded. <https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/habanero-geothermal-proj...>
My own 2014 summary: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230601073717/https://old.reddi...>
Secondly, there exist efficiencies of scale that come with drilling at ten or a hundred sites rather than just one or a few.
Geothermal in Yellowstone is no better or more useful than geothermal at many other less important places. It isn't even the place with the most surface level geothermal energy in the first place. Overall geothermal technology advancement makes a lot of sense but starting said advancement via sandbagging for an outcome 1000 years after developing one of the best national parks to do so does not make sense.
Regardless of all of that, there are significantly more than the two possibilities of either starting drilling today or having catastrophe in an eruption.
Regarding the investment, if a 5 km well is dug, I don't expect it to exhaust its energy without a significant payback.
Geological diagram of Old Faithful: <https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/bd/06/bd0603df...>
From this Smithsonian article: <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/seeing-beneath-old...>
"Old Faithful's Geological Heart Revealed": <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005190243.h...>
Mostly addresses seismic activity, though there's some discussion of inferred structures from that. Based on the journal article by Sin-Mei Wu, Kevin M. Ward, Jamie Farrell, Fan-Chi Lin, Marianne Karplus, Robert B. Smith. "Anatomy of Old Faithful from subsurface seismic imaging of the Yellowstone Upper Geyser Basin". Geophysical Research Letters, 2017; DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075255 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075255>
(The Smithsonian piece is based on the same article.)
Yellowstone has accessible thermal gradients. Even if a remote approach is made, say, outside the National Park boundaries and intended to minimise surface impacts, necessary drilling should be minimal, and a small number of wells should provide far more energy return than a large number of deep boreholes.
That said, I'm, ahem, well out of my depth here ;-)
The ability to achieve a high, long-term return on relatively shallow drilling operations probably trumps any learning-curve efficiency improvements in drilling itself. Sites such as Yellowstone (based on some former research I'd made) contribute significantly to US baseload electrical generation, should the US choose to exploit them.
It's also worth noting that there already is considerable expertise in drilling generally, with over 160 years of experience over millions of individual wells, and that the efficiency / improvement curve is likely fairly ... well ... exploited.
"Geothermal Drilling Costs" (2006) <https://www.thedriller.com/articles/84584-geothermal-drillin...>
"Cost analysis of oil, gas, and geothermal well drilling" (2014) <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092041051...>
I quite often think how people should be encouraged more to go to the natl. parks, they really take your breath away and are something to cherish. Buffalo running wild, Grey wolves if you're lucky, crazy weird geysers, go!