What's the deal with the 250 mini-earthquakes at Yellowstone?

Radley Balko of The Agitator is having fun by posting a news brief about "250 small earthquakes that have occurred in Yellowstone National Park since Friday," along with a link about the supervolcano sleeping under Yellowstone:

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.
...
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."

Supervolcano at Yellowstone

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

Only until January 20th, then it’s Obama’s fault.

In fact, it may just be his way of getting a jump on things.
Bitgod

Darn it, I was gonna blame Bush too. :)
acrocker

Obama will solve this, I’m sure.
angusm

“I got your Fimbulwinter right here, buddy.”
Giraffe

heres a great writeup from the netherlands: http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/region/northamerica/090108-yellowstone-volcano
Sean Eric FAgan

See, global warming can be solved during Obama’s term!
Takuan

volcano shmolcano, I’m looking forward to the Subduction Event. It’ll be great, the whole west coast gone, nuclear mega-leakage, economic catastrophe and political turmoil. All worth it so long as Hollywood gets it.
absimiliard

Ooooh, brill my friend. Totally brill.

“My dear friend,

I represent the famous Zimbabwe “Pastor” Robert ‘Bob’ Mugabe, alas brother Mugabe no longer has need of the vast amount of prayers he has accumulated, since he now serves the Prince of Darkness, Master of Evil, Lord of the Underworld, and Opposer of God, George W. Bush. Since prayers to God anger his new Lord Bush he has decided to donate his prayers to a worthy recipient in your United States.

I’m very pleased to announce you have been chosen to be the recipient of all his prayers.

In order to facillitate the transfer of prayers we will however require a quick prayer transaction involving Heaven, just so we can confirm the account your prayers will be transferred to.

If you could pray, most sincerely, for Robert ‘Bob’ Mugabe to immediately become Absolute Ruler of The World we will be happy to confirm your account with the Heavenly Administration and forward all of Brother Mugabe’s prayers to you.

Most Sincerely,

Bill ‘the Cat’ Simbwalale
Minister of Prayer, ex officio
Zimbabwe, Africa”

-abs thinks that perhaps we might be pushing the joke a bit too far, but in light of further consideration is pretty sure he’s wrong
jewbacca

Several other threads I’m reading, aside from implicating a shadowy Cheney conspiracy and bitching about FEMA (…sometimes I’m really glad I read BoingBoing), have many comments to the effect of “what’s the big deal, let’s slap a geothermal station on it. We can quench it and solve our energy crisis at the same time”.

I think both the absurd conspiracy theory that even the most powerful humans/undead nazis in the world could possibly have much more power over something like this than a starving Calcutta street urchin, and the slightly less absurd heatsinking proposals, all stem from a similar misunderstanding of the scale of energy we’re talking about here.

A quick and filthy calculation. But from the result, even if my estimates are orders of magnitude off, nothing really changes:

I’ve read but cannot find a source right now that the energy released in an earlier Yellowstone Caldera explosion was on the conservative order of 100,000 Tsar Bombas (the largest nuclear test ever.

100,000 * 50 megatons * 4.2E15 joules / megaton = 2.1E22 joules

21 zettajoules. I bet you’ve never even heard that prefix. 21 sextillion joules. 21 followed by 21 zeroes.

Now, all of human civilization uses about 500 exajoules per year. So:

2.1E22 joules / 5E20 joules = 42 years of the entire energy production of humanity. Released in a matter of seconds.

That’s just the immediate release of energy, not the destruction of the ashfall, not what the nuclear winter will deny us over the following century.
Giraffe

another one: http://newsblaze.com/story/20090107174820zzzz.nb/topstory.html
yrogerg

Damn it! I was hoping to make it into the thread before Takuan blamed it on Bush! :-P

At any rate, I think people are massively underselling humanity’s chances of surviving a cataclysmic supervolcano and subsequent ice age. In fact, I think people massively undersell humanity’s chances of surviving ELEs, in *general*.

The thing is, we’re generalists, when it comes to ecological niches, and that does us *wonders* when it comes to survability. We’re considerably more likely to survive a mass-extinction event than most species out there, particularly since we’ve “evolved” the ability to convert a pretty vast variety of energy sources into food, via the material sciences and agriculture. I mean, we can survive in *outer space*, for goodness’ sake. We have an awful lot going for us, as a species.
arkizzle

ABS,

Prayer farming? I like it! Outsourcing’s newest conquest.
Cupcake Faerie

@#12 Maybe a bit more like the end of John Carpenter’s “The Thing”….

Personally, I’m still holding out for the LHC but , as bonus, there is always the chance of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan to tide us over…
Takuan

who gets to survive?
absimiliard

You have a solid point Yrogerg, we are spectacularly successful generalists.

However you might be underestimating the effect of a massive supervolcano eruption. I doubt it could happen with Yellowstone, but when Siberia went up it lasted for a million years or so, and covered most of Siberia in lava.

We could well be looking at years of darkness. And while I agree that some individuals might survive, I doubt society would, and without society to continue to support a technological solution the an ELE I am sceptical of our species ability to survive.

Not despondent, you could be right (and I hope you are), but sceptical. I’m sceptical enough that I’d happily blow the entire biosphere away with nuclear weapons if I thought it would our species permanently off the planet. I’m just 100% convinced that a single planet is far too dangerous a single point of failure at the species level.

But I’ve always thought we should infect the rest of the galaxy with us. (and after the Milky Way . . . The Universe!)

-abs is a pessimistic optimist, or maybe that’s an optimistic pessimist, when it comes to humanities ability to survive eternally on a single planet subject to the vagaries of cosmic existance
Takuan

funny story about The Thing; they spent weeks running Primacord and charges.Come the big day, the real village they blew to shit LOOKED LIKE A MODEL.
Takuan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps
Takuan

and if all those smug,posh, fat, greasy East Coast bastards are laughing in their beer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArcWdSjAkRY
Oren Beck

Gaia’s Zit?
RationalPragmatist

I hear that fatalism will be the new black in 2009. Well, that and Mimosa.

Forget about a supervolcano, I am more worried about the reactionary libertarians and anarcho-capitalists I found in the comment threads on The Agitator’s post.

I still can’t figure out how government regulation is behind the caldera. Probably because I have been indoctrinated by the mainstream media or something.

Sorry, totally off topic. I haven’t had any coffee yet this morning (yes, it’s still early in Hawaii as I put off work to get my dose of BB).
holtt

@ABSIMILIARD

The FUD here isn’t about underestimating the severity of an eruption IMO, it’s about overplaying the risk. It could happen in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years or even 100,000 years and still be “about right on time”.

Worry about car accidents. The vastly increased odds can be strangely assuring!
technabob

This whole SuperVolcano thing sounds like a song by Presidents of the United States of America.
holtt

How could we have missed this obvious joke? Thank you /.
timquinn

I’m predicting more of a whimper.
Pyre

Ongoing coverage via Google News:

http://tinyurl.com/a64u3b

Yellowstone quake chart, updated hourly at least:

http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/Yellowstone_full.html
Anonymous

I’m confused: I compared the map(ette) from the article to the USGS listing of quakes in the past week and I’m not seeing the quakes that the article references?
rAMPANTiDIOCY

Takuan:

subduction happens on the magnitude of millions of years. ever notice how slow a tectonic plate moves?
lakelady

to go along with Yellowstone & Oregon we have these that were occurring just outside Reno, NV last spring (I don’t know if they’ve stopped)

http://geology.com/news/2008/mogul-nevada-earthquake-swarm.shtml

soooo if the lava and ash are from the rockies east does that mean the west coast is safe? or gone?

just had another looks. Seems like this kind of thing may be happening on a regular basis

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs100-03/
Takuan

just as a leathery tongue drawn across your unresisting flesh slides slickly and catches alternately at irregular intervals….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone
alowishus

Time to blanket Yosemite with a gigantic geothermal power station. Relieve all that pressure AND power North America for a few thousand years.
Laurie Mann

Nah, it won’t blow until at least 2012… ;->
arkizzle

“..happens on the magnitude of millions of years.”

You do realise it’s Takuan your talking to, right? It has seen aeons!
aeon

Our local Lake Taupo is another supervolcano that rivals Yellowstone in size:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oruanui_eruption

If any of them are going to blow in the near future I’d prefer it be ours. Rapid boiling & suffocation in a pyroclastic flow is preferable to starving slowly in the dark…
tacodeluxe

And Feline AIDS is the #1 killer among domestic cats.
-DD
thatbob

The video is (obviously) fiction. But what’s the point of the press release? It’s not quite a prank because the information is (?) factual. But like the website it’s written to imply a maximum threat where the actual threat is really small (right?). But why? Is it just to draw attention to this scientific phenomenon? Or to generate fear? Or to see of the MSM will grab it and run with it? For once boingboing leaves me feeling dumber instead of smarter: I don’t get it. I guess I’ll have to see where this all goes.
OM

…Looks like it’s time to drop a nuke or three down that hole and try to relieve the pressure a bit :-/
Anonymous

http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/Yellowstone.html

A little bit sary when you look through the seismic charts. I counted 12 tremors in the 3+ range just in the last few days.
claud9999

Seems that old faithful isn’t the only geyser seeing quakes…

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11367325?source=rss

(Summary: mag 4.4 and 2.0 quakes hit Geysers, CA.)
jewbacca

Is it just me or has anybody else been incredibly worried about this all day?

I like to think I have a pretty wide-ranging understanding of the world, but every once in a while something absurdly fundamental I know very little about comes along and humbles me. I think it’s only in a cynical, self-deprecating awareness of this (in reflection of similar ignorant panic I’ve seen in others about things I do understand well) that I can temper my sense that the sky is falling having come suddenly into awareness of the nature of this.

But holy shit. I mentioned this (or, rather, no more than “hey, check it out, there’s been like hundreds of small earthquakes in Yellowstone in the last few days”) in the morning to my little sister, who’s put a whole lot more geekery points into seismology than I, and she immediately launched into caldera apocalypse (a strange particular flavour of geek-out excitement I usually don’t see in the lil’ JAP — an actual, we’re all going to die fatalism).

This was on the way to lunch, and we both did more research on return — I was halfway through the wikipedia article on ‘Basalt’, and it seems she was more coolly desperation for salvation than she let on, because she came back with “happened in ’85 and it was fine”. Which put me at ease for a while.

But she’s left on an unrelated flight for the coast since, and on this evening’s further research I’m finding little reason to write this off as “no big deal” aside from how it’s receiving no coverage or rogue geologist chicken littles, and the sort-of-anthropic argument “well we’ve only recently been able to measure it, this has probably been happening all over.”

Maybe I’m just overcome suddenly faced with the magnitude of sudden seismic impulse at all, which I usually only consider as gradual, geological-time averages. But all I can see is that if this happens at all and I don’t immediately die (I live most of the year in Vancouver, my family in Toronto and Montreal), it means the collapse of civilization at first, and if not immediately the extinction of humanity (I we all conjecture plausibly about how behaviour in these scenarios multiply the hypothetical unpanicking human toll by orders of magnitude), then soon, unassisted, plausibly naturally as before.

And that this event is unprecedented… uninformed pop-geology, the only way I can envision this happening is exactly like this — the only Big One will be the final explosion, preceded by a rapid cascade of tiny little pops of expansion as the cap expands, breaks, erodes and thins. Which looks to be exactly what’s up.

And if it is, if we somehow miraculously had some warning, could we do anything preventative? Relieve the pressure, burrow escape vales with nukes, hope FSM shores up the crust with a spare meatball?

Somebody who has a clue, please reassure me we’ll outlast the decade, if possible without the sword of damocles hanging over our nuts for the rest of our lives.

AAAAAAH! Help. Facts and informed conjecture, plox.
Anonymous

I’m really worried about this.
Takuan

maybe the thin spot will get smacked by an asteroid.
Talia

That would really blow.
TJ S

Sorry guys. If Yellowstone goes off, it’ll be my fault. That would be due to karma getting me back for being smug about living in Denver every time someplace gets hit by a hurricane.
Takuan

http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/Yellowstone.html
Frank_in_Virginia

“He adds that it would once again bring “the bitter cold of Volcanic Winter to Planet Earth. Mankind may become extinct.”"

Don’t invite this guy to a party. He sounds a “bit” negative.
Mojave

Uh-Oh….
OLAF9000

I say we pre-emptively strike yellowstone with nukes because it harbors a terrorist supervolcanoe of mass destruction! shock and awe the volcanoe into submission! the liberated yellowstonians will welcome us as liberators from the tyranical constant threat of volcanic destruction that they currently cower under!
absimiliard

If anyone here is the prayin’ sort, which most of us are clearly NOT, they should pray real damn hard that the supervolcano under Yellowstone doesn’t blow.

It might not be as bad as the Russian supervolcano that caused the Permian extinction event, but I bet it would wipe humans off the face of our planet quite handily.

-abs cites this, along with a major asteroid strike, as two of his prime reasons for believing our species needs off this planet at any cost, even the entire biosphere
holtt

You realize that in the grand scheme of things, people have only been monitoring these things for a very short time? Given the IMMENSE time between events at Yellowstone (650k years), it could happen today, next year, or 10 thousand years from now and be well within normal parameters.

FUDmologists on the other hand have seen a recent rise in FUDquakes. Generally they are harmless and can be ignored.
Halloween Jack

Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
claud9999

Geez, lots of snide comments today, folks.

I love the Yellowstone area, Bozeman is such a cool town (with a cool school, amazing downtown [no chain stores downtown!] and a wonderful museum of archaeology with the largest t-rex skull in the world) and Butte is wonderful too, I’d hate to see anything happen to the area. (Hint, visit in the fall or winter to avoid the crowds and the kiddies.)

Yeah, it’s inevitable that it will blow again, here’s hoping that it will give sufficient advance notice to evacuate the nearby towns.

Oh, and props to “The Clintons”, a local staple that put on a 4.5 hour show at a local dive in Butte for a $10 cover charge. Best…concert…ever! Saw ‘em on a whim and am enamored.
phillamb168

@Takuan nah, didn’t you see The Core? There’ll be some sort of perfectly round ozone hole that’ll zap it and burn all the way through.
Dark Cloud

Maybe the Global Warming will balance it out.
FoetusNail

Kinda puts the Mtg Crisis in a different light.
sammich

Holtt @ 36 – FUDmologists? FUDquakes?
lazarus

The day of the lord will come as a thief in the night.
so,it makes no sense to worry or talk about what you have no control over.
that is unless you’re an atheist :)

it is quite obvious by past/present data that a super volcano will erupt again and again over time.
go figure if it happens during my lifetime,what a crap luck of the draw that would be.

one should be more afraid of todays
morally,politically and socially divided country than of any sneaky meteor or sleeping volcano.

when you walk down the street today knowing that 50% of your countrymen no longer share the same views/values as yourself, u.s. civil war becomes more plausible than a natural disaster of some kind.

further, with the economy going down the drain in short order, I fear being poor , standing in food lines, or having steal my next meal, long before hot ash raining down , snuffing my life force out.

topics like these are really no laughing/joking matter. but he who laughs last laughs the best if that means anything.
absimiliard

@arkizzle in #21

“ABS,

Prayer farming? I like it! Outsourcing’s newest conquest.”

Of course since I’ve played wayyy too much Ultima Online, and a few other MMO’s, I read this with a particularly odd eye.

I immediately thought about going out and farming prayers. You know, you go find people praying and prey on them to take their prayers. After which, when you get enough of them, you turn them in for a rocking artifact or a level up or something the GMs devised as a prayer-sink because too many prayer-farmers were crashing the value of prayers.

I then wondered if maybe we had too many Chinese prayer-farmers and if maybe that was why our prayers seem worth so much less now.

(because prayers have never worked very well for me, so they must be worth crap, but in the past certain crazy books tell me that they used to be incredibly effective, and those books would NEVER lie to me, they assure me they’re the absolute truth, no interpretation or metaphors allowed . . . .)

-abs is feeling a bit odd and is in a mood to misinterpret almost anything anyone says if he can do so in a humorous vein today . . . . get it . . . veins . . . .. bodily humors .. . . . OH COME ON PEOPLE, IT’S A JOKE, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LAUGH!!! (ok, it was a bad joke)
franko

dammit, if that volcano blows and ends the world before barack can take office, i’m gonna be SO PISSED.
igpajo

Ok, living in the Seattle area, the combination of the Yellowstone earthquakes and the Oregon earthquakes has me hoping there’s not something building up in the region. Seattle is due for a Major earthquake anytime now. In the 9.0 range if experts are to be believed.

The Yellowstone caldera thing was news a couple years back when one of the lakes there kind of tilted, draining one side of it towards the other. There’s been some off gassing along some of the trails too that killed off a few buffalo too. Armageddon websites and end of the world paranoia sites have it listed as one to watch. It’s the fire and brimstone end of the world.
This website has a couple good graphics that show the extent of ashfall from previous yellowstone calderra eruptions Basically covered everything between the Rockies and the Mississippi with ash. Pretty scary stuff if it were to really happen.
Mingross

Maybe the big, unspecified disaster in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was the Yellowstone “supervolcano” erupting. That’s a little spooky to think about.
Dorkomatic

I *knew* this would happen!!!
But then I’m a paranoid volcanophobe.
gollux

When it blows, there will be a lot of cheering that the great Satan has been punished for its sins and that (G|g)od(dess) be praised for finally answering their prayers. Shortly thereafter realizing what their prayers really meant as they start shivvering.

Cue creepy rising crescendo here…

Almost as good as the ending scene of “Dinosaurs”
Ugly Canuck

I don’t know
Where I’m gonna go
When the volcano blow.

PS Happy belated b-day to Mr. Parrothead.
Pam Rosengren

The second link given by Lakelady http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs100-03/ shows that it was way worse in 1985, with 3,000 quakes in the autumn that year. That swarm of quakes related to the onset of subsidence of the Yellowstone Caldera. It rises and subsides periodically.

The caldera has recently been rising. Perhaps it is subsiding again.

I am not letting this worry me. Happy new year to all (from about as far away as you can get from Yellowstone). Hmmmm… now why is Paris Hilton partying in Sydney this new year? ;-)
Takuan

this is Bush’s fault.
jewbacca

@ 52 (Yrogerg):

@ 53 (Takuan)
> who gets to survive?

I think that trumps whatever technological progress we’ve made beyond a primitive natural state*

Your neighbour has a canned food cache? Why the fuck should he live, I have a family!

Your neighbour state has an algae processing plant? Why the fuck should he live, we need it!

Basically: if this happened, even if you survive the blast, even if you survive 10 feet of heavy burning ash burying every single square inch of the western 2/3rds of the continent, you’re going to have to fight 6 billion people for the scraps of the last crop humanity will harvest for 100 years.

—–

* Unless we can make it to being able to all ride it out in abject comfort (which we’re about a Kardashev level away from).
Antinous

If this is the unicorn chaser for the Gaza bombings and dead cat threads, it didn’t work.
Takuan

must blend 419 letter with prayer farming…