Well… Yellowstone probably would kill everybody… If Mount Rainier goes, it will probably just kill Seattle and the suburbs.
I mean, look at what Mount Vesuvius did to the “little“ town of Pompeii…
If I lived out there, I would be very concerned. I read something a while back where they did radar mapping of the ocean floors just off Seattle, and previous pyroclastic flows from Mount Rainier went right through Seattle into the ocean.
So, yeah. If I lived out there, I would be concerned.
Might not happen today. Might not happen tomorrow.
But it is going to happen someday.
If Mount Rainier goes, it will probably just kill Seattle and the suburbs.
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It depends how a 14,400 foot tall volcano behaves - does it just blow its top as you suggest, or as a geologist suggested it would just blow up - the whole mountain - gone.
That could happen, if there is not enough pressure to push the magma up 14,400 feet. The magma would blow out the bottom of the mountain, collapsing the entire structure, wiping out everything from Portland to the Canadian border to the Cascade mountains, killing millions instantly - and that is just from the initial blast.
So you are saying no Americans would be harmed. Great!