Underground heat from Yellowstone's immense magma chamber has essentially melted a road into several major tourist attractions:
http://news.msn.com/us/hot-spot-yellowstone-road-melts-closing-sites
For the only semi-paranoid, these geologic facts:
1. Yellowstone is one of the three or four hugest and scariest volcanoes on the planet. The only rivals i can think of are Toba, in Sumatra, and Long Valley, also in the U.S., in California.
2. Volcanoes that erupt very rarely tend to be extremely violent. Yellowstone's last three eruptions happened ~2.1 million years ago, ~1.3 million years ago, and ~650,000 years ago. Do the math.
3. The last eruption of any volcano of this scale was Toba, 74,000 years ago. Coincidentally, geneticists have used their mathematical mumbojumbo to determine that the human genome was constricted severely about 75,000 years ago, suggesting that the entire population of the human species may have been reduced to about 3,000 closely related individuals.
4. Nothing even remotely close to the level of a supervolcano eruption, as happens at Yellowstone, has been experienced in recorded human history. The biggest one we have recorded, Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, caused a massive disruption to the world climate for 2-3 years, with snow in midsummer in New England, crop failures all over the northern hemisphere, and countless deaths due to famine. A Yellowstone eruption of the scale of any of the last three events would be about 100X Tambora. And 10,000X Mt. St. Helens in 1980.
5. Stay tuned.
caw
http://news.msn.com/us/hot-spot-yellowstone-road-melts-closing-sites
For the only semi-paranoid, these geologic facts:
1. Yellowstone is one of the three or four hugest and scariest volcanoes on the planet. The only rivals i can think of are Toba, in Sumatra, and Long Valley, also in the U.S., in California.
2. Volcanoes that erupt very rarely tend to be extremely violent. Yellowstone's last three eruptions happened ~2.1 million years ago, ~1.3 million years ago, and ~650,000 years ago. Do the math.
3. The last eruption of any volcano of this scale was Toba, 74,000 years ago. Coincidentally, geneticists have used their mathematical mumbojumbo to determine that the human genome was constricted severely about 75,000 years ago, suggesting that the entire population of the human species may have been reduced to about 3,000 closely related individuals.
4. Nothing even remotely close to the level of a supervolcano eruption, as happens at Yellowstone, has been experienced in recorded human history. The biggest one we have recorded, Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, caused a massive disruption to the world climate for 2-3 years, with snow in midsummer in New England, crop failures all over the northern hemisphere, and countless deaths due to famine. A Yellowstone eruption of the scale of any of the last three events would be about 100X Tambora. And 10,000X Mt. St. Helens in 1980.
5. Stay tuned.
caw
