Yellowstone Lake Hints at Buildup to Hugh Blast.

Denver Post ^ | August. 10th, 2003 | Diedtra Henderson, Science writer

[Drammach]

Being in Kansas City, MO, I find this "interesting"

Yellowstone caldera on one side,
New Madrid fault on the other.

Hope I'm far enough away from both..

[jammer]

Thanks for the links. We made fun of "hugh", but it DOES look potentially ominous.

[Crawdad]

I wonder if he found my wife's car keys?

[Kozak]

heard one of the guests on the Coast to Coast AM radio show say that if Yellowstone blows it could trigger a chain reaction causing all the volcanos in the United States to erupt. He said that there are about 30 volcanos in the lower 48 states.

But would it threaten the Chupacabra and Bat Boy?

[Core_Conservative]

thousands of years ago ... if memory serves me

I didn't think you were that old - you hold up extremely well /sarcasm

[Kozak]

If your east of the Missippi River, the most you should see is only a couple inches of ash. At most. No big deal.

Right. And you will have plenty of neighbors to skin and eat to avoid starving. An eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would be a world climate changing event. It would be The End of the World As We Know It. fortunately it is also unlikely in the extreme in our lifetime. I sincerely hope.....

[hardhead]

Very comforting, as I live 150 clicks from Jellystone.

[abner]

I just looked at the seismo links and just what do they mean? Specifically- August 6 & 7 th for the lake region.

[Prof Engineer]

Buildup to Hugh Blast

Oh no, we must save the moose.

[hemogoblin]

(My family visited Yellowstone in June and I wrote this upon first hearing of the bulge a couple of weeks ago. I did not want to do a vanity but I'll post it here ...)


I took a lot of pictures at Yellowstone, reviewing them daily on my digital camera, throwing out the ones I didn’t like, making more room on my memory card for new ones tomorrow.

I got the bison, I got the 1000-foot depths of the canyon bathed in evening sunlight, I got Old Faithful erupting (never as good in any photo), I got the blooping, hissing mud pots, the crumbled miles of rock near Bunsen Peak and the opalescent, swimming-pool aqua of the hydrothermal springs, searing enough to take skin off your body.

I also got the view everyone gets: The Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, at a distance, hurtling down in a plume of wedding-gown white, churning up clouds of roaring, sun-raked mist that climb nearly as high as the water fell on its way down.

That particular view looks as old as time; it’s pristine, grand, unsullied by man (you can barely see the little railed platform at the lip of the falls), and, strangely, it’s made even more eternal by the fact that it looks exactly like about a thousand postcards going all the way back to 1920.

Which is a long time.

The pictures went into my computer when I got home, went onto the web site to be viewed by friends and relatives. Life went on.

Then came a stray news story on a Web bulletin board. A lump is growing under the northeast corner of Yellowstone Lake, which in fact is near the center of a giant volcanic crater. The entire park is largely a caldera, blown into its current state about 640,000 years ago and long since recarpeted with millions of trees, washed clean by clear waters, scoured by winds, bleached by sun, populated with bison, mule deer, Uinta ground squirrels, deer mice, ravens, mule deer, dippers, magnolia warblers, moose, Clark’s nutcrackers, Winnebagos, and on and on and on.

But the lake, which is clear as glass and swarming with meaty cutthroat trout, has a big lump underneath. The lump is getting bigger.

Then, another story. Actually a press release from the park itself. The back trail of the very active Norris Geyser Basin has been closed to the public due to even more intense hydrothermal activity. Dormant geysers have awakened. Lazy pools have become hissing fumaroles. New mud pots have erupted. Vegetation is dying, because the ground, in spots, has hit 200 degrees.

Further research led to an alarming BBCi Web page about supervolcanoes, on one of which Yellowstone sits. Geologists estimate that this particular one, which my family was frolicking around on top of in mid-June, erupts about every 600,000 years. The last eruption was about 640,000 years ago.

It could be nothing. Then again it could be 40,000 years of borrowed time.

I quickly got a book to read with my son, about Mt. St. Helen’s, which blew spectacularly in 1980.

We looked at the pictures of what came out of the earth there, and it was all very gray. Trees, rocks, water, sand, animals — all seemed to have been cast into a huge, churning vat that evened out the coloration of every component into a neutral, lifeless gray and dropped it all back to earth.

Biologists say the main blast on May 18 killed every bird on the north face of the mountain in seconds. Every tree was snapped and splintered. They all became part of the gray amalgam that heaved up, rained down, turned the Toutle River to sludge, choked Spirit Lake and blanketed the remains of the mountain, which had gone from a majestic peak to something like a titanic, rotted molar.

But back to my Yellowstone pictures, which I hadn’ t looked at since absorbing all this unreassuring information.

Could it all be blown away? The forests turned to gray wreckage, choking rivers crawling like wet cement under lowering clouds of ash? Cliffs shattered, rivers and their trout flashed into steam, animals slain by the millions, geothermal basins and their sculptures of geyserite blown to smithereens? Human roads and restaurants annihilated in the first volcanic breeze?

... All this beauty burned, smashed, pulverized and upended as about 200 square miles of earth rocket skyward in a few seconds, propelled by an expanding cloud of searing, poisonous gas and vaporized rock?

It seems horribly unfair.

But, then again, how do you think it got the way it is now?

[null and void]

"Mars is bright tonight, unusually bright." - Firenze in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets...

[RadioAstronomer]

U.W.-Madison

Where my dad got his PhD in geology. :-)

[null and void]

Seriesly..., the hugh conspiracy is vorking....

It's vey successful...

[StolarStorm]

"(respected folks like pastors etc.) "

You're kidding right? Here in the south, pastors are like used car salesmen. I wouldn't trust my money or my wife alone with one.

[Eagle Eye]

If I recall, a lot of people laughed when Mt. St. Helens was doing the same thing.

Stop, you're killing me...seriesly...

I guess by now you should realize that you are playing stright man to a whole bunch of comedians.

[HamiltonJay]

Prevailing winds are west to east over the US, but whenever that caldera goes, it will affect pretty much the entire western US, and the ash will affect weather for years.. throughout the entire northern hemisphere if memory servers. I forget how far away they found ash from the last blow, but it will make Mt St Hellens look like sparkler at best.

This type of volcano (caldera) is incredible... the force with which they erupt is really unfathonable, there is nothing that can really "compare" it to. Because the Magma chamber is below ground and has no vents to the surface, it fills not only with lava, but the lava becomes filled with pressurized gases that normally would escape through traditional volcanos... sort of like a gigantic pressure cooker, and when I mean gigantic I mean gigantic... when the magma chamber finally gets a vent to the surface, all those pressurized gasses in the lava, now can escape, and do so with an explosive force that really can't be fathomed on a human scale... we are talking NUCLEAR WEAPONS type of scale, lots of them all at once at the same point and time. The blast wave alone will affect a huge area, let alone the ash.

To give you some example, when krackatoa blew up in the late 1800s the explosion could be heard in something like a 1 or 2000 mile radius or something rediculous... and that was a traditional volcano, nothing on the scale of yellowstones Caldera.... It will be a VERY VERY VERY bad day in the neighborhood when that thing goes.

When it will go? No one really knows, they do know that Yellowstone is bulging up and has been for years, they know its blown up at least twice at regular intervals before, and if memory serves it is due anytime if it keeps that cycle... but when exactly? No one can really say, eventually it will rupture again, no doubt... all they really know is 1) it will blow up again eventually and 2) the longer it takes to blow, the bigger the eruption will likely be.

[HamiltonJay]

[null and void]

explosive force that really can't be fathomed on a human scale... we are talking NUCLEAR WEAPONS type of scale

Just a quibble, a nuclear weapon would look like a kid's cap gun next to a major caldera eruption...

[Protagoras]

Who is Hugh Blast?

[HighWheeler]

"If the temperature increases another 25°, the lake will start to boil."

212 degF is the boiling point of water at standard atmospheric pressure. But underwater, the pressure, and thus the boiling point, go up considerably higher.

If you have ever seen video of underwater lava flows, you can see the water boil off close to the lava, but quickly quench only an inch away from the molten lava.