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bd476 quips: "A Kiss the Ground We Live in California Bump."

LOL, you actually think you'd be safe from a super volcano by living just a few states away? Don't you realize that the distance between Yellowstone and even the farthest point in California is only 900 miles? And with an estimated 100% kill radius of 600 miles, what percent do you think might survive at 900 miles, maybe 50%? And after one year, what, maybe 1%?

--Boot Hill

Nah...

Like almost all else, the 600-mile "kill radius" is a little over-blown, a little conservative, and a very lot "random" in its effects.

Most ash damage will be downwind (almost always from the west-northwest!, and local topography will deflect and direct blast effects. Consider Nagasaki: it got hit with a bigger A-bomb than Hiroshima, but the hills reflects and deflected the blast so the net effects were somewhat less than the "valley" that focused teh energy at Hiroshima.

Bottom line: We don't when this thing will blow, but it is overdue. How much warning do we get? Days? Weeks? Years? Decades?

What will the warnings be like? Are these warnings, or just minor changes in Yellowstone's USUAL volcanic activity? We don't know.

How many early blasts are going to happen? Don't know.

Where and how much ash and dust and gasses get blown out? We don't know.

Will "venting" these gasses prevent it, or reduce its magnitiude, or simply blow the same avmount of gasses over a smaller area for a much longer period of time? Will

Is CAUSING a 150 year continuous eruption the size of Mt St Helen's "better" than a single potentially catastrophic blast that is over in only 15 days? (Remember, all the same amount of energy has to get dispursed: in a single large blast of unknown magnitude, or in looooooooooong series of smaller blasts of unknow magnitude - that might get larger anyway and encourage the single big blast.)