As with all volcanologists, they don't put on an exact date. Did you read the article? It is VERY well written, even USGS involved. When it goes, it could be a slow weap as in many island displays, but it could well simply explode. The size of the crater, puts it on a size unrecorded in human history.
" Supervolcanoes
BBC2 9:30pm Thursday 3rd February 2000
NARRATOR (SINĀAD CUSACK): Yellowstone is America's first and most famous National Park. Every year over 3 million tourists visit this stunning wilderness, but beneath its hot springs and lush forests lies a monster of which the public is ignorant.
PROF. ROBERT CHRISTIANSEN (US Geological Survey): Millions of people come to Yellowstone every year to see the marvellous scenery and the wildlife and all and yet it's clear that, that very few of them really understand that they're here on a sleeping giant.
NARRATOR: If this giant were to stir, the United States would be devastated and the world would be plunged into a catastrophe which could push humanity to the brink of extinction.
PROF. ROBERT SMITH (University of Utah): It would be extremely devastating on a scale that we've probably never even thought about.
PROF. BILL McGUIRE (Benfield Greig Centre, UCL): It would mean absolute catastrophe for North America and the problem is we know so little about these phenomena.
NARRATOR: In 1971 heavy rain fell across much of east Nebraska. In the summer palaeontologist Mike Voorhies travelled to the farmland around the mid-west town of Orchard. What he was to discover exceeded his wildest dreams.
PROF. MIKE VOORHIES (University of Nebraska): Well I was walking up this gully looking for fossils, the way I'd walked up a thousand gullies before, keeping my eye on the ground looking for pieces of fossils that might have washed down in the rain the previous night and I scrambled up to the top and I saw something that completely astounded me, a sight that no palaeontologist has ever seen.
NARRATOR: It was a sight of sudden, prehistoric disaster. Voorhies's digging revealed the bones of 200 fossilised rhinos, together with the prehistoric skeletons of camels and lizards, horses and turtles. Dating showed they had all died abruptly 10 million years ago.
MIKE VOORHIES: It suddenly dawned on me that this was a scene of a mass catastrophe of a type that I'd never, never encountered before.
NARRATOR: The cause of death, however, remained a mystery. It was not from old age.
MIKE VOORHIES: I could tell by looking at the teeth that these animals had died in their prime. What was astounding was that here were young mothers and their, and their babies, big bull rhinos in the prime of life and here they were dead for no, no apparent reason.
NARRATOR: For the animals at Orchard death had come suddenly. There was another strange feature to the skeletons, an oddity which offered a crucial clue about the cause of the catastrophe.
MIKE VOORHIES: We saw that all of these skeletons were covered with very peculiar growth, soft material that I first thought was a mineral deposit. Then we noticed that it was cellular. It's biological in origin so there was something actually growing on those bones. I had no idea what that stuff was, never seen anything like it.
NARRATOR: A palaeo-pathologist, Karl Reinhard, was sent a sample of the bones.
PROF. KARL REINHARD (University of Nebraska): This specimen is typical of the rhino bones. You see this material, in this case it's a whitish material that's deposited on the surface of the original bone. This is peculiar to me, but as I thought back in my experience I realised that this was similar to something that turns up in the veterinary world, a disease called Marie's disease.
NARRATOR: Marie's is a symptom of deadly lung disease. Every animal at Orchard seemed to be infected.
KARL REINHARD: One of the clues was that all of the animals had it. Now that is a very important observation for all the diseases, all the animals to exhibit this disease there had to be some universal problem.
NARRATOR: Scientists discovered the universal problem was ash. 10 million years ago ash had choked them to death.
KARL REINHARD: It may have been a bit like pneumonia with the lungs filling with fluid, except in this case the fluid would have been blood for the ash is very sharp. There'd be microscopic shards of ash lacerating the lung tissue and, and causing the bleeding. I would imagine these animals as stumbling around the thick ash, spitting up blood through their mouths and gradually dying in a most miserable way.
NARRATOR: Only a volcano could have produced so much ash, yet the wide flat plains of Nebraska have no volcanoes.
MIKE VOORHIES: I remember some of my students and I sitting around after a day's digging and just speculating where did this stuff come from? There, there are no volcanoes in Nebraska now. As far as we know there never have been. We, we obviously had to have volcano somewhere that, that produced enough ash to completely drown the landscape here, but where that was really was anybody's guess.
NARRATOR: One geologist in Idaho realised there had been a volcanic eruption which coincided with the disaster at Orchard 10 million years ago, but the site was halfway across North America.
PROF. BILL BONNICHSEN (Idaho Geological Survey): It seemed like a really fascinating story which made me think, because I had been working on volcanic rocks in south-western Idaho that potentially could make lots of ash and, and there was some age dates on that that were around 10 million years and I began to wonder wow, could this situation in Nebraska have really been caused by some of these large eruptions that evidently had happened in south-western Idaho.
NARRATOR: The extinct volcanic area, Bruneau Jarbridge, was 1600 kilometres away, a vast distance. How could this eruption have blasted so much ash so far? Bonnichsen was sceptical."
And of the earth heaving, these professors wrote?:
"ROBERT SMITH: I was working at the south end of this lake at a place called Peal Island. I was standing on the island one day and I noticed a couple of unusual things. The, the boat dock that we normally would use at this place seemed to be underwater. That evening as I was looking over the expanse of the south end of the lake I could see trees that were being inundated by water. I took a look at these trees and they were be, being inundated with water a few inches, maybe a foot deep and it was very unusual for me to see that because nowhere else in the lake would the lake level have really changed. What did it mean? We did not know.
NARRATOR: Smith commissioned a survey to try to find out what was happening at Yellowstone. The Park had last been surveyed in the 1920s when the elevation, the height above sea-level, was measured at various points across Yellowstone. 50 years later, Smith surveyed the same points.
ROBERT SMITH: The idea was to survey their elevations and to compare the elevations in the mid-70s to what they were in 1923 and the type of thing that we did is to make recordings at a precision level of, of a few millimetres.
NARRATOR: The two sets of figures should have been similar, but as the survey team moved across the Park, they noticed something unexpected: the ground seemed to be heaving upwards.
ROBERT SMITH: The surveyor said to me there's something wrong and he said it's not me, it's got to be something else, so we went through all the measurements again trying to be very careful and the conclusion kind of hit me in the face and said this caldera has uplifted at that time 740 millimetres in the middle of the caldera.
NARRATOR: As the measuring continued, an explanation for the submerged trees began to emerge. The ground beneath the north of Yellowstone was bulging up, tilting the rest of the Park downwards. This was tipping out the sound end of the lake inundating the shoreside trees with water. The vulcanologist realised only one thing could make the Earth heave in this way: a vast living magma chamber. The Yellowstone supervolcano was alive and if the calculations of the cycle were correct, the next eruption was already overdue.
ROBERT CHRISTIANSEN: Well this gave us a real shiver of nervousness if you will about the fact that we have been through this 600,000 year cycle and that the last eruption was about 600,000 years ago.
ROBERT SMITH: I felt like telling people, that is we basically have on our hands a giant."
bbc.co.uk
How do I class it in the terms of "worries"? Don't think I'd but land outside Cody, Jackson WY, or West Yellowstone MT for use by my wife's kids or grandkids. I'd also consider closely investments in that general area(300 Mi. radius - Micron?)
This is one of those things "who know when" perhaps not in out lifetimes. The recent activity seems this scenario less likely & something far worse more likely.
Isn't science fun?
richard
|
