The volume of the entire earth is 260*109 CM. It would be quite a feat to eject the entire earth's volume and then some. Guess it would be like a balloon deflating.
Parking on the ridge of the crest of the caldera at Yellowstone and looking into and over the caldera is pretty amazing when you can’t see the other side. (I just had to look - 35 mi x 55 miles or something).
1,000 cubic kilometers of ash vs. 20 cubic kilometers for Krakatoa.
When it happens, I think it will be pretty close to a civilization ending event. Real bad news for the USA, bad news for worldwide crops. Add in the people getting starving and getting restless, and the Russians wanting the Indian’s rice and the Chinese thinking it would be a good time to take us on, well....
Not much we can do about it.
I’m in the Seattle area, my bets are on that the huge earthquake off our coast will happen before Yellowstone blows again. Whether it will happen in my life time, while I’m betting on it (as in prepared for it) - I very well might not collect on that bet.
****Guess it would be like a balloon deflating****
Thats one hell of a zit!
That’s funny, the earth’s volume is repeatedly listed as 1.084227366 × 10^27 cm3 according to the references I’ve found:
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/KatherineMalfucci.shtml
Not being a physicist, I don’t feel qualified to quibble, but as far as I know, a loss of 10^12 cm3 would not deflate a sphere of 10^27. Maybe I’m missing something here.
From the references I glanced at, Krakatoa ejecta was ~10^10 cm3; Yellowstone’s historical estimates are around 10^12 cm3 or 2 orders of magnitude.
It’s been a few years since my college geology, but the eruption of Yellowstone would be cataclysmic on any scale.
That said, no one has any idea when it will occur. The only thing I’m certain of is that this will happen before all the catastrophic predictions of Al Gore and his disciples come to pass. Maybe we should start a campaign to eliminate volcanism—it’s a more imminent threat and just as Quixotic.