Yellowstone Caldera

[The PIT]

http://www.swvrc.org/restless.htm

Interesting Bulge in the lake.

[KRSESQ]

Dead link.

Kevin

[MultimediaMan]

Linky work now...

[KRSESQ]

Morgan plans to return to Yellowstone this month to study the lake from a raft-like boat. The boat will carry a submersible robot that will take rock and sand samples from the lake bottom.

Is she QUITE SURE that poking around the thing is such a good idea?

Kevin

[RedRed]

I dont think she is planning any digisiesing with nukes

not with her on top

RedRed

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm less concerned with that lake than the whole region in general. It's been uplifting for some decades now, and that whole area is a verified Super Volcano. Last time it went off it buried everything to St. Louis.

Dr. Mordrid

[MultimediaMan]

Yep....but that is like a once in a 250 Million year event. But, who knows, Yellowstone might have the winning Lotto ticket.

[KvHagedorn]

The caldera itself is about 30-40 miles wide. Here is a map of the ashfall from the last eruption:



another link:

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Yellowstone/OFR95-59/OFR95-59_inlined.html

[Drizzt]

And I thought this was a thread about Linux...

[Jessterw]

Guess moving back to the east coast wouldn't be such a bad idea then.. if it ever looked to go active again that is.

I wonder what kind of fallout there would be if the bulge resulted in an explosion (non-volcanic) such as is described. In terms of area affected and such.

[The PIT]

Well if it went up the terrorists would have to find someone else too hate.

[KvHagedorn]

By the way, that eruption of Yellowstone which produced ashfall over the whole continental US west of the Mississippi was mild compared to earlier ones: The Huckleberry Ridge Tuff represents an eruption that spewed 2 1/2 times the volume of ejecta. Such events can cause Ice Ages. The Toba eruption 70,000 years ago did just that, bringing a wave of extinctions and reducing the Earth's entire human population to about 10,000.

http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/southeast_asia/indonesia/toba.html

edit: here's one of my favorite volcano links.. it is the VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) chart. This gives you an idea how powerful different volcanoes are. In case you thought Mt. St. Helens was a big deal, notice that Yellowstone and Toba are three orders of magnitude greater in the amount of material ejected.

http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/eruption_scale.html

[Jon P. Inghram]

And just in case you don't think it'll happen again here's a map of the area showing the nice big valley that the hotspot that's under Yellowstone currently has blasted out of the mountains...

[The PIT]

Kilauea has been erupting nicely for 20 years showing no signs of stopping. The bad news for the Hawians is that Mauna Loa has resumed it's swelling so an eruption is due from there as well soon.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Oh, and don't call them "Super Volcanos." They are very sensitive and can become angry when they are called by names that the media made up because their proper description of "Resurgent Caldera" doesn't sound ominious enough.