From: Gladrags2@webtv.net (Anita Bush)
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 02:40:24 -0600
To: end-times_news@associate.com
Subject: E&E: The Sleeping Dragon: Yellowstone Update
Yellowstone Super Volcano Update
By Dr. Bruce Cornet
Geologist, Paleobotanist, and Palynologist
http://www.rense.com/general41/yellowstoneupdate.htm
Mt. Sheriden has been rumbling (15+ micro-quakes) between 1:00 pm and now (9/7/03). There were three small earthquakes at Yellowstone lake between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm MT (9/7/03), which were felt at Norris Junction.
There were some small quakes between Midnight and 6:00 am (9/7/03) at Norris Junction.
There was a whole string of micro-quakes (25 or more) at Madison River between 6:00 am and now, which are continuing. There have been sporadic micro-quakes (32+) all day at Mammoth Hot Springs. Micro-quakes started
around Noon and have continued to the present at Mirror Lake Plateau.
All in all, activity is picking up from a lull for about two weeks, before which a series of small and large quakes (including a 4.4) occurred. That quake prompted the web report.
Steam pressure is apparently building again, and hydrothermal fluids and steam are working their way up through fractures and vents. I do not expect anything
unusual or extreme to happen in the immediate future, but if the trend continues, and the number of earthquakes gradually increase with time, more warnings from geologists will ensue.
What you should be alert to is any report that mentions increasing geyser activity, with new fumaroles and steam vents appearing near or on top of the rising dome. The dome has risen about three feet in the past few years,
and magma has risen to within 3.7 km of the surface based on quake data. Earthquake loci measured to within 0.5 km under Mt. St. Helens, and people still didn't think it would erupt.
But everything has to be scaled up for Yellowstone, meaning that 3.7 km is not a safe depth. Ground temperatures in the northwestern part of the park
are apparently on the rise (up to 200 dg F in some places), killing the vegetation.
Large areas of the park are now closed, including areas with geysers, because their water temperature is now scalding and dangerous for visitors.
If more steam vents appear, that means a continuous pathway for pressure release has been established to the magma chamber. If that happens, the pressure in the magma chamber will continue to drop until it reaches a critical
stage when the superheated water within the magma explodes. When that happens the super-volcano will blow violently, blowing out a chunk of its cap-rock and
sending millions of cubic feet of ash into the atmosphere in a Pompeii-like explosion, but 100,000 times worse.
When you hear those reports, you will have about two days to "get out of Dodge" before the eruption. Unfortunately, as the steam venting subsides, there will be a false sense of security. People will think it was just another
cyclical event, and the danger is over. But that will be the farthest from the truth.
It will be the quiet before the storm. A major earthquake will suddenly rock their towns for hundreds of kilometers around Yellowstone, and soon thereafter 1,000+ degree pyroclastic flows will descend on them at hundreds of miles per hour, extending out to 600+ km.
That 600 km radius around the caldera will experience total devastation. The next 600 km out may receive as much as 5-10 feet of ash, depending on wind direction. The thickness of ash will decrease away from the super-volcano, but will reach the crop belt in the Midwest (Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, etc.), destroying most of the fertile croplands of the United States.
California will be hit hard by falling ash, with its central wine valley severely damaged (the French will love it). Agriculture will have to shift east of the Mississippi for years. The Garden State will once again live up to its name.
In northern Idaho you will have to contend with several feet of ash and isolation. Roads will be closed. Power will be out. Phones will be out.
Communication will depend on Ham radios and local stations that have generators. Rescue will take weeks or months. Some areas will never see rescue teams. The survivalists will be best prepared to make it through the difficult
months following the eruption. Make new friends.
Have plenty of dust masks on hand, because you cannot breath any airborne ash if you want to avoid lung
disease. It's what caused mass kills of plains animals 12 million years ago, resulting in extensive bone beds beneath the ash. Drinkable water will sell at the price of gold.
To recap, I don't expect anything to happen in the near future. But with such an unpredictable event, being prepared is your best ticket to survival."
Dr. Bruce Cornet
Is the Super Volcano Beneath Yellowstone Ready to Blow?
http://www.unmuseum.org/supervol.htm
About 4 miles beneath Yellowstone National Park's beautiful scenery is a forty-mile-wide chamber full of molten rock under incredibly high pressure.
This magma is what powers Yellowstone's fantastic geysers and hot springs, but is it about to erupt in a cataclysmic explosion that will decimate the western United States and push mankind to the brink of extinction?
Yellowstone is the crown jewel of the United States national park system. Its mountain vistas, wildlife and geographic features are visited and admired by people from around the world. More than any of those, however, it's the
park's thermo-geological features that make it unlike any other part of the globe. No place on earth has as many steam vents, hot springs and active geysers as Yellowstone.
To create these features requires two elements in abundance: lots of water and lots of heat. The water is provided by the generous rain and snow the region gets. The heat comes from deep inside the earth: volcanic heat. Though you might not be able to tell from just looking at it, Yellowstone National Park is built on an ancient volcano. Not just a regular volcano, either. It lays
on top of what some people have started to call a "super volcano."
Super Volcanos
There is no exact definition for a super volcano, but the term is often used to refer to volcanos that have produced exceptionally large eruptions in the past. When one of these large eruptions occurs, a huge amount of material is
blasted out of the super volcano, leaving a giant crater or caldera.
Such a caldera can be as much as forty or fifty miles wide. At Yellowstone, the caldera is so big that it includes a fair amount of the entire park. In fact, it is so big that at first scientists didn't even see the region had a caldera until it was photographed from space.
Since there is no firm definition of what a super volcano is, it's hard to say how many of them are found on the earth. Usually people list Long Valley in eastern California and Taupo in New Zealand as super volcano sites along with Yellowstone. The last known explosion of what might be considered a super volcano was Toba in Indonesia.
Toba erupted with a titanic explosion about 74,000 years ago. The force of the explosion was estimated to be 10,000 more powerful than the blast that destroyed Mount St. Helens, in Washington.
Tremendous amounts of rock and ash were ejected into the air, blocking the sun for months. The temperature around the globe was thought to have plummeted as much as 21 degrees. Perhaps as much as 75% of plant life on the North
American continent may died out.
Old Faithful geyser, as well as Yellowstone's other geothermal wonders, is powered by the heart of one of the most powerful volcanos on Earth.
(Copyright Lee Krystek, 2000)
A super volcano differs from a regular volcano in that there is often no mountain peak associated with it. In a regular volcano hot magma under pressure flows up from the depths of the earth. A hole forms in the surface and the
magma, now lava, pours out. As it cools, it forms a cone that eventually builds up into a mountain.
If the passage is blocked off, the pressure can build up in the mountaintop and explode with a monstrous force. That's what happened at Mount St. Helens. The pit formed by the explosion becomes the new caldera.
In a super volcano the magma is blocked from ever reaching the surface. Instead, the pressure just builds and builds until more and more rock in the area melts and becomes magma too. The area under the surface becomes one huge
underground sea of semi-molton rock.
Finally, the pressure becomes too much to hold back and the entire surface above the underground chamber, which can be many miles wide, is blown away by a titanic explosion that can be thousands of times more powerful than that of a regular volcano.
Yellowstone's Catastrophic Eruption This last happened at the Yellowstone volcano approximately 650,000 years ago.
The caldera that it left is 53 miles long and 28 miles wide. In the area surrounding Yellowstone, 3000 square miles were subjected to a flow of pyroclastic material composed of 240 cubic miles of hot ash and pumice.
Ash was also thrown into the atmosphere and blanketed much of North America.
It can still be identified in core samples from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico. Since this occurred more than a half million years ago this is all ancient history, right? Not quite. Yellowstone continues to be geologically
active even today. Smaller explosions caused by hydrothermal activity (water or steam heated in an underground chamber until the top blows off) have been much
more common and recent in Yellowstone's history than the massive caldera-forming eruptions.
One of these happened as recently as 13,000 years ago, creating a three-mile wide crater that is now a portion of Yellowstone Lake called Mary Bay. Also, smaller volcanic eruptions with flows of lava, ash and pumice have
occurred. Flows like these have filled in much of the old caldera since its creation.
Another catastrophic eruption is also possible. The effects of such a disaster are hard to even comprehend. Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at the University College of
London told the UK Daily Express, "Magma would be flung 50 kilometers into the atmosphere.
Within a thousand kilometers virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometers of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the
whole USA with a layer 5 inches thick." He adds that it would once again bring "the bitter cold of Volcanic Winter to Planet Earth. Mankind may become extinct."
Reasons to Worry?
Scientists have known about Yellowstone's explosive history for quite some time, but events in the fall of 2003 suddenly had people concerned about the possibility of another massive explosion. Areas of the Norris Geyser basin have been closed due to unusual activity.
In August of 2003 a new high-resolution sonar map of the bottom of Yellowstone Lake showed a bulge, or "inflated plain" there that was 2000 feet long and 100 feet high. Was it being pushed up by hydrothermal or even volcanic
forces?
At about the same time there were some unusual changes at Norris Geyser basin some 20 miles north of the lake. Areas formally dry suddenly had hot springs.
Other hot springs dried up. A long dormant geyser became active and forced the closing of some of the trails through the basin.
Rumors also spread that the land near the center of the Yellowstone caldera has been rising, perhaps a sign that the humongous magma chamber below was about to blow.
Some amateur geologists connected these events with the history of the Yellowstone volcano and came to some troubling conclusions: The catastrophic caldera making eruptions have occurred. at 2.1 million, 1.3 million and
650,000 years ago. Was another one about to happen? Was the next explosion overdue?
Interest in these developments quickly mounted. Several Internet sites sprang up predicting another explosion very soon and suggesting that the only way to avoid such a disaster was to drill holes into the magma chamber to
release the pressure.
Conditions Normal
As fascinating as the history of Yellowstone volcano is, however, most professional geologists who study the site are not concerned that the park is on the brink of a catastrophic eruption.
The bulge on the bottom of the lake may have been there for thousands of years, but not noticed until the recent
survey. Changes in the geyser activity is not unusual. New geysers have appeared throughout the history of the park, while others go dormant. Rangers often shut down parts of trails or alter them as needed.
The land near the center of the caldera did rise more than three feet between 1923 and 1985. However, between 1985 and 1992 it actually subsided six inches. Studies of the shorelines of Yellowstone Lake have led scientists to
believe this is a regular phenomenon. The caldera floor has risen and fallen at least three times in the last 10,000 years, moving as far as 65 feet.
The idea that Yellowstone may be "overdue" is also faulty. With only three catastrophic eruptions and two intervals between to go on there is not enough data to say that another one should be occurring in the near future.
Even if there was, there is little mankind could do about it. Drilling into the magma chamber to release pressure, as some have suggested, would be impractical and ineffective. The material in the chamber has the
consistency of a sponge and any "hole" opened up to the surface would quickly seal as the molten rock crept up and cooled.
The Sleeping Dragon
That doesn't mean that there isn't (as one scientist put it) a proverbial giant dragon sleeping under Yellowstone. It may well one day awake and lay waste to much of the western United States. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory,
however, watches the park carefully and analyzes the continuous geological changes occurring in the region. It is likely that the imminent threat of another catastrophic explosion would not go unnoticed by their modern instruments.
So far, however, activity is business-as-usual at the park.
Still, the super volcano at Yellowstone, and its kin around the world are a credible threat to man. Even the United States Geological Survey, usually conservative about such matters, admits that should a major eruption
occur the results would have "global consequences that are beyond human experience and impossible to anticipate fully."
My wife decided to drive east from the canyon on our way around to the Old Faithful area. We passed the Mud Volcanes and Sulphur Cauldron. The smell of hydrogen sulfide was far stronger than I had experienced on several prior trips. Far too vile and acrid to stop for pictures.
Our final bit of exercise was a 4 mile hike around Mystic Falls and the Overlook. It was a pretty strenous hike up steep mountain slopes around 7800 ft elevation.
Aside from the extra noxious smells of the Mud Volcano area, I didn't see anything remarkably different. We managed to the park about every two weeks from mid-May until this last weekend.
Godzilla review of Yellowstone report pending.
Quix -
I reviewed the report you posted and thank you for providing the second, alternative view which is closer to what I support and understand. First about the first part of the post.
Dr. Bruce Cornet is better know for his work in the arena of UFOs than he is in geology. He is extensively referenced by the UFO and paranormal folks on the web via Google search and it appears that this area is where he has focused most of his efforts since the late 1980’s. He states that he was abducted in 1981 while mudlogging at an oil drill rig. This gives me an initial tinfoil alert as to how he may view other issues.
I could not find the source of his PhD, but do suspect it is in geology, probably paleobiology or paleontology. These fields would support his background in petroleum exploration. I cannot confirm if any of his web-posted work has ever made it into a professional journal.
Regarding some of what Dr. Cornet observe at Yellowstone, more is known about Yellowstone and other volcanically active area in the US than 24 years ago when Mt. St. Helens erupted. Much of this is due to the recognition of the potential hazards as well as better tools to monitor seismological indicators of magmatic activity. This in turn has caused an increase in the known seismologic activity because of more monitoring. This increase in data creates a false image that all of sudden Yellowstone has become very active, where the truth is activity levels haven’t changed significantly over the longer period of time and just weren’t recorded and reported.
Geothermal activity at the park changes almost yearly. I personally observed changes in the Mud Volcano / Black Dragon Cauldron site located in the Hayden Valley. In 1978 the ‘sizzling basin’ portion of the circular walk suddenly changed with numerous fumarols and smaller mud volcanos developing throughout the ‘basin’ (approximately 1-2 acres). This activity continued over the next couple of years until finally by 1983 the activity had died down and the more typical ‘sizzling basin’ aspect returned to ‘normal’.
The catastrophic model Cornet is using for Yellowstone is not shared by many other volcanologists studying the volcano as well expressed in the second half of the post. Though it is true that past eruptions have been large and extensive, and that it is capable of doing so again is well known. In fact for me this is old news, we discussed this over 20 years ago while I was an undergrad. How a future eruption may develop is still disputable and it is unlikely that it would blow as unexpected as his writing implies.
Bottom line. Yellowstone deserves to be monitored, however, I wouldn’t go out and but dust masks any time soon as she will give plenty advanced notice when she awakens again.
