Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future and says, I don't know
Speaker 1: where I'm I gonna go when the volcano blow. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today, yeah,
Speaker 1: today we're gonna talk about Lauren and something terrifying. Super volcanoes.
Speaker 1: A volcano was super volcano? Yeah? Now is a super
Speaker 1: volcano bigger than an ultra volcano? Or less? I know?
Speaker 1: It has a cape on it and during the day
Speaker 1: it's a mild mannered reporter for a local newspaper. You know,
Speaker 1: people want to know. I feel like we've gotten this
Speaker 1: question before. Is a super volcano going to erupt and
Speaker 1: into the world or at least wipe out a huge
Speaker 1: percentage of species on Earth? And I can understand that
Speaker 1: fear because I actually this, uh, this idea sort of
Speaker 1: entered my mind and infected me with strange fears years
Speaker 1: ago back when I read a book. I read a
Speaker 1: book called The Road by Cormick McCarthy. What a cheerful
Speaker 1: book that was. It is a very good book, but
Speaker 1: It is not a cheerful book. It's sort of a
Speaker 1: I don't want to say too much about it, you know,
Speaker 1: go read it if you're interested, But it's a story
Speaker 1: of a journey in a very desolate post apocalyptic landscape. Um.
Speaker 1: And I was wondering after I read the book, Huh,
Speaker 1: I wonder what it is that the author had in mind,
Speaker 1: because he never said what it is that happened that
Speaker 1: sort of ruined the earth. Frequently in these post apocalyptic
Speaker 1: media's media's, yes, that is totally the way that you
Speaker 1: pluralize that word. Um. You no one ever tells you
Speaker 1: exactly what happened, or if they do, it gets cheesy.
Speaker 1: And I think that's why the rest of them don't sure.
Speaker 1: And so the question is wondering here, like was this
Speaker 1: supposed to be like a nuclear war or was it
Speaker 1: supposed to be like an asteroid impact, some kind of
Speaker 1: a natural, purely earthbound event. Yeah, yeah, I didn't know.
Speaker 1: But it describes a scenario where like all the plant
Speaker 1: life is dead, and it's very cold, and the sky
Speaker 1: is always gray and dark, and there's ash everywhere, and
Speaker 1: and I wondered until I read somewhere on the internet,
Speaker 1: I don't remember where it was now, this was years ago,
Speaker 1: but I read a blog post with somebody having a
Speaker 1: theory that said, oh, well, obviously what has happened in
Speaker 1: this scenario is that it was an eruption of the
Speaker 1: yellow Stone supervolcano. And that makes a lot of sense
Speaker 1: from the as you read the book, if you think
Speaker 1: of it in those terms, the conditions that are mentioned
Speaker 1: in the book seemed to go pretty well. Was something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, I think it's a very good possibility.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's also possible that the author didn't actually
Speaker 1: have any one particular thing in mind. But and ultimately
Speaker 1: it doesn't really matter, that's not the point of the story.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting to think that that could have
Speaker 1: been the triggering event. Sure, a caveat. Though it's possible
Speaker 1: that it is the triggering event in this story, it
Speaker 1: is extremely unlikely that this will actually happen, certainly within
Speaker 1: our lifetime. Yeah, we want to be clear that we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about some stuff that is really scary,
Speaker 1: I mean tering you know, and it's it's is legitimately
Speaker 1: scary stuff. However, we also want to point out that
Speaker 1: there is no reason to believe that there is any
Speaker 1: oncoming eruption even within like the century or or several centuries,
Speaker 1: that the likelihood of such an eruption happening in any
Speaker 1: any given years one and seven hundred thousand. That was
Speaker 1: one of the figures I saw. So, uh, let's start
Speaker 1: off by saying, we're going to talk about what could
Speaker 1: happen with a super volcano eruption, but let's also acknowledge
Speaker 1: there's no indication such a thing is going to happen
Speaker 1: in time soon. Yes, and I imagine big friendly letters
Speaker 1: on your screen that just say don't pan. Yes, yes said.
Speaker 1: It definitely makes me feel better. And now I want
Speaker 1: some something that is almost but not quite exactly unlike tea.
Speaker 1: I mean, raining burning ash and lava everywhere, but don't
Speaker 1: panic because it's because yeah, like like you said, it's true.
Speaker 1: I think many, um many people who have explored the
Speaker 1: possibility of a super volcano eruption, especially specifically the eruption
Speaker 1: of the yellow Stone super volcano in North America, have
Speaker 1: sort of pursued it with a kind of like you know,
Speaker 1: playing up the drama and like, oh, this this looming danger.
Speaker 1: We we do want to say at the beginning, it's
Speaker 1: not very likely yeah, it's it's calm yourself down. It's
Speaker 1: kind of the similar look at what would happen with
Speaker 1: the doomsday scenario of an enormous asteroid heading towards Earth.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that you know, it's important
Speaker 1: to know what you're up against in the unlikely event
Speaker 1: that had happened, because if you play the long game,
Speaker 1: and we're not talking about your lifetime or the lifetime
Speaker 1: of the next like five generations, I'm talking over the
Speaker 1: span of thousands of years. If you play the long game,
Speaker 1: it will happen eventually. But the key word there's eventually.
Speaker 1: And the important thing is to say, all right, well,
Speaker 1: what can we do with this knowledge? And we will
Speaker 1: talk about what some serious science researchers are are planning
Speaker 1: for in in case this happens to happen, um, because
Speaker 1: we'll have some warning, y'all. But in the meanwhile, let
Speaker 1: us define what a super volcano is. Right. We're not
Speaker 1: going to get to what to put in your volcano
Speaker 1: kit yet. Okay, yeah, what is a super volcano? Okay? Well,
Speaker 1: I was curious about this, so I looked it up
Speaker 1: and it seems to me that one of the ways
Speaker 1: that scientists measure the magnitude of a volcanic eruption is
Speaker 1: the volcanic explosivity index or the v I, which sssive
Speaker 1: the index that's so great it sounds to me like
Speaker 1: a Tenacious D album. Yeah, the v E I. So
Speaker 1: it's a numerical score for how bad it done blowed
Speaker 1: up that makes sense, ranging from zero to eight. And
Speaker 1: it's a sign based on a number of criteria, like
Speaker 1: the volume in cubic kilometers of ejected pyroclastic materials, all
Speaker 1: the hot stuff that comes out of the volcano in
Speaker 1: cubic kilometers. Yes, yes, dwell, well, but it's some of
Speaker 1: these scores. It's like point zero zero one cubic kilometers.
Speaker 1: That's somewhat more comforting. I suppose a right, how high
Speaker 1: the eruption column reaches into the sky. And then also
Speaker 1: they're like subjective qualities about the character of the eruption, right,
Speaker 1: I think it was brassy or exactly, you know, classy eruption.
Speaker 1: Right's right. So it's kind of similar to the Richter scale. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's similar to the Richter scale that we use for earthquakes,
Speaker 1: like the Richter scale at the upper level. Also, the
Speaker 1: v e I at least it's the scores are logarithmic,
Speaker 1: meaning that an increase in one number to the next
Speaker 1: is actually an increase in an order of magnitude. So
Speaker 1: from one number to the next could be a dramatic
Speaker 1: increase in the actual output of the volcano. Right, So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you the examples of those upper levels.
Speaker 1: So a five on the v I is uh, it
Speaker 1: corresponds to one cubic kilometer. That's a little bit less
Speaker 1: than a quarter of a cubic mile. Yeah, of of
Speaker 1: ejected of what's called ejecta, all this stuff that comes
Speaker 1: out and then settles down on the ground. These words
Speaker 1: are great. Yeah. So the so the nineteen eighty eruption
Speaker 1: of Mount St. Helen's was a five, and that that
Speaker 1: was a big eruption. Yeah, that was huge, But it
Speaker 1: was a five. Okay, wait six? Who here was alive?
Speaker 1: And that during the nineteen eighty amount St Helen's eruption
Speaker 1: just me, okay, let's keep going. It wasn't, but I've
Speaker 1: seen pictures. Yeah, not go on. A six core spunds
Speaker 1: to ten cubic kilometers. That's about two point four cubic miles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: A seven corresponds to about a hundred cubic kilometers twenty
Speaker 1: four cubic miles. You can see how the math is
Speaker 1: working out here, and an eight corresponds to a thousand
Speaker 1: cubic kilometers two miles. Okay, So one way of defining
Speaker 1: a supervolcano is that it's a volcanic eruption that's greater
Speaker 1: than an eight on the v e I eight or
Speaker 1: great so, so a thousand cubic kilometers are more, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which translates to about two hundred forty sometimes people say
Speaker 1: about two hundred fifty cubic miles of ejecta, all this
Speaker 1: hot stuff that comes up out of the volcano and
Speaker 1: then settles down on the Earth. Now, people don't people
Speaker 1: don't always use the v I because it has some limitations,
Speaker 1: like it can't measure equally across all time scales like
Speaker 1: way back into the past. Um. And it does measure
Speaker 1: the release of volcanic gas, which can actually be one
Speaker 1: of the most important effects of volcanic have a very
Speaker 1: long lasting climate effect. Yeah. Um, So a less complicated
Speaker 1: metric is just that level that volume of ejecta we
Speaker 1: were talking about, So a volume greater than a thousand
Speaker 1: cubic kilometers of stuff. But a thousand cubic kilometers I'm
Speaker 1: having trouble picturing in my head. Give me, give me
Speaker 1: a concept here. I tried to come up with a couple. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's a lot, so it doesn't really compare much to like,
Speaker 1: you know, this mini buckets. It's do you remember the
Speaker 1: comment six? And then a couple of Russian names. It's
Speaker 1: the one that the e s a rosette emission and
Speaker 1: ye okay, so yeah, you remember that comment. And then
Speaker 1: that was a wonderful emotional time seeing that lander set
Speaker 1: down on the comet. It was beautiful. But now imagine
Speaker 1: because that comment had a volume of twenty one point
Speaker 1: four cubic kilometers, So the smallest possible supervolcano eruption ejects
Speaker 1: about forty seven of this commet's worth of pyroclastic material.
Speaker 1: So that comment forty seven times burning hot raining down
Speaker 1: on the earth. So we need forties seven probes to
Speaker 1: lent is. I think I might have taken the analogy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: another comparison, A thousand cubic kilometers is more than the
Speaker 1: volume of Lake Titicaka in Peru. If you want to
Speaker 1: look up this lake on the internet, look up a picture.
Speaker 1: It's big. A thousand cubic kilometers is also more than
Speaker 1: double the volume of Lake Erie in North America, which
Speaker 1: is four three cubic kilometers. This is, this is huge,
Speaker 1: and these really big eruptions get bigger than a thousand
Speaker 1: cubic kilometers. But so we should we should put it
Speaker 1: in perspective how often these things happen. Large eruptions are
Speaker 1: much less common than small eruptions. Eruptions that register low
Speaker 1: on the v I scale happen all the time. There's
Speaker 1: one happening right now, They're they're always going on. The
Speaker 1: middle of the scale gets pretty rare, and the top
Speaker 1: of the scale is very rare. In fact, there have
Speaker 1: been exactly zero supervolcano eruptions in recorded human history. Uh,
Speaker 1: there have been no supervolcano eruptions in the entire Holocene epoch.
Speaker 1: But there have been supervolcano eruptions since humans have existed.
Speaker 1: And one example that I thought would be good to
Speaker 1: talk about would be the Toba supervolcano eruption about seventy
Speaker 1: four thousand years ago. Yeah, that happened on the island
Speaker 1: of Sumatra in present day Indonesia, and it included at
Speaker 1: least two thousand, eight hundred cubic kilometers of stuff. That's
Speaker 1: about six hundred and seventy two cubic miles. I did
Speaker 1: not do the calculation for how many comets that is,
Speaker 1: but that's a lot of comments. I did a calcula
Speaker 1: lation of my own in order to put it into
Speaker 1: something vaguely understandable and yet not helpful at all. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are some one point one trillion gallons in a
Speaker 1: single cubic mile, so the stuff that came out of
Speaker 1: this volcano equalled about seven hundred and forty trillion gallons. Wow. Sure,
Speaker 1: it's a bunch um like, like billions of tons of
Speaker 1: hot ash and rock flowing onto the surrounding area, plus
Speaker 1: hundreds of cubic kilometers of of ash and gases spewing
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere. Um. It was so violent that the
Speaker 1: mountain containing the volcano collapsed, uh, leaving what's now Lake Toba,
Speaker 1: which is the largest volcanic lake in the world, with
Speaker 1: a surface area of some one thousand, one hundred thirty
Speaker 1: square kilometers or four d forty square miles in a
Speaker 1: depth of about five or uh feet. That's just fifty
Speaker 1: square miles less than the area of Los Angeles for comparison,
Speaker 1: that's the lake leftover, Yes, that's the crater. Researchers out
Speaker 1: of Oxford University think that the the gases that it
Speaker 1: put out circled the entire globe, and that the ash
Speaker 1: covered a span from the Arabian Sea to the east UM,
Speaker 1: across the entire Indian subcontinent and too into the South
Speaker 1: China Sea in the west UM and then uh some
Speaker 1: like three thousand kilometers south into the Indian Ocean. UM.
Speaker 1: And that's just matter that scientists have collected and confirmed
Speaker 1: as being from this eruption so far. So obviously, an
Speaker 1: eruption like that is not just a negative local event,
Speaker 1: Like it's not just that you'd worry about getting caught
Speaker 1: in the falling ash and hot rock, which would suck.
Speaker 1: But no, but now this is I mean, unless you
Speaker 1: consider a local event a continent um. In that case,
Speaker 1: sure to it's local um. But but no, that this
Speaker 1: was this was big and the result of cooling effect
Speaker 1: as everything that's spewed out started reflecting sunlight, caused global
Speaker 1: weather effects and may have in fact influenced the earth
Speaker 1: slip into a particularly cold era of the ice ages. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, I read about a theory that this event
Speaker 1: may have had something to do with human genetic history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: combined with climate data, some genetic data that researchers have
Speaker 1: been looking into from humans around the time, might indicate
Speaker 1: a huge dip in the number of human people who
Speaker 1: were reproducing around the time of Toba's eruption. Uh, Like
Speaker 1: this eruption might have nearly driven us to extinction. Wow. Well,
Speaker 1: that that's scary and crazy and kind of cool and amazing.
Speaker 1: But it's also like not the only time in history
Speaker 1: that volcanic activity would be associated with extinction. Oh, certainly. Well,
Speaker 1: And I also do want to point out that there
Speaker 1: were a lot fewer humans like Homo sapiens running around
Speaker 1: right seventy four thousand years ago then there are, say today,
Speaker 1: we're in a kound of a vulnerable position anyway, yes, uh.
Speaker 1: And in fact, when you talk about volcanic activity being
Speaker 1: associated with mass extinctions, every single mass extinction has been
Speaker 1: correlated with volcanic activity. Not necessarily that the volcanic activity
Speaker 1: directly caused the mass extinction but likely contributed to it,
Speaker 1: didn't help. Yeah, Now, when you're talking about major volcanic activity,
Speaker 1: help is not something that would immediately spring to mind.
Speaker 1: You might be crying it, but that's not what's certainly
Speaker 1: not aiding the planet. As far as flaming salamander, you're
Speaker 1: probably not excited. So well, first we should say, I mean,
Speaker 1: what is a mass extinction. A mass extinction is basically
Speaker 1: a period um when a huge number of species on
Speaker 1: Earth completely die out all around the same time. And
Speaker 1: this doesn't actually mean it's a like all at once,
Speaker 1: like they all died on the same day. This can
Speaker 1: happen over over many, many years, you know, like thousands
Speaker 1: of years or even millions of years on the geologic scale.
Speaker 1: But looking back across geological history you can see these
Speaker 1: happening very very suddenly. There's sort of like spikes in
Speaker 1: die off on a geologic scale. It's sunden for if
Speaker 1: you were living through it, it would it could be
Speaker 1: an entire it could be multiple lifetimes, multiple multiple lifetimes.
Speaker 1: So uh. In other words, we're not going to say,
Speaker 1: like the dinosaurs died out on a Thursday. That's not
Speaker 1: what we mean. When did Yeah, but not all of
Speaker 1: them all on one Thursday. I would argue that Thursdays
Speaker 1: had not been invented yet, so at any rate, raptors lives,
Speaker 1: they might have been very fond of Thursday. They did
Speaker 1: not call them thursdays, they called them boy those were
Speaker 1: the days at any rate. So at the end of
Speaker 1: the Triassic Period, about half of the species living on Earth,
Speaker 1: both on land and in water, went extinct, and scientists
Speaker 1: found that the cause was likely the massive eruptions that
Speaker 1: had produced enough lava to bury the entire United States
Speaker 1: under three feet of it um. If if you had
Speaker 1: added all all the eject up, that's how much it
Speaker 1: would have. You know, you could have covered uh the
Speaker 1: Earth with three or the United States rather with three
Speaker 1: ft of lava uh. And this happened around the time
Speaker 1: that Pangaea, which is the super continent, was breaking apart.
Speaker 1: So this was all due to tectonic forces. And the
Speaker 1: eruptions themselves weren't a single event. It wasn't like there
Speaker 1: was one massive supervolcanic eruption after which there was this
Speaker 1: massive amount of lava. It was a series of eruptions
Speaker 1: that took course over six hundred thousand years. So again
Speaker 1: not one of those you know, singular events. We as
Speaker 1: humans often think about things as like a singular event.
Speaker 1: For one, it makes it a lot easier to understand
Speaker 1: and talk about and uh and to our lives are
Speaker 1: very short compared to geological time scale, but in truth,
Speaker 1: it happened over hundreds of thousands of years. However, that
Speaker 1: was the event that would lead to the opportunity for
Speaker 1: dinosaurs to spring into certain niches and and take over
Speaker 1: and become the dominant life force for quite some time.
Speaker 1: And then the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary, the KT boundary, that's
Speaker 1: when we talk about how all the dinosaurs all went extinct.
Speaker 1: So the biggest popular theory for a very long time
Speaker 1: was that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. There was
Speaker 1: an asteroid impact which caused global climate change and that
Speaker 1: wiped out the dinosaurs, And that's still very much part
Speaker 1: of the prevailing theory. However, there's also a lot of
Speaker 1: support growing support and in a large consensus building for
Speaker 1: the idea that volcanic eruptions had already created the situation
Speaker 1: where the asteroid was kind of the finishing blow. So
Speaker 1: it was and that the asteroid was solely responsible for
Speaker 1: dinosaurs going extinct. It was that conditions were primed for
Speaker 1: that to happen because of the volcanic activity that had
Speaker 1: already taken place largely in India. So, yes, these these
Speaker 1: volcanic eruptions have been correlated with uh with extinctions, but
Speaker 1: correlation and causation are two different things. Obviously, It's a
Speaker 1: lot more complicated than just pointing at a single source
Speaker 1: and saying this is what caused everything to die out.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of us maybe I'm speaking for
Speaker 1: everybody else. When I think of volcanoes, I often think
Speaker 1: of just the immediate view of you know, the idea
Speaker 1: of lava streaming down the side of the mountain, and
Speaker 1: that that, to me, is represents the the immediate danger.
Speaker 1: But as we've discussed, that's just one of the many
Speaker 1: things that you have to worry about volcanic eruption. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and on a global level, it's it's much more likely
Speaker 1: to I mean the same way that a nuclear blast
Speaker 1: will kill a certain number of people in a certain area,
Speaker 1: but the fallout from that us just a lot more
Speaker 1: wide reaching, right exactly. Yeah, it's a very good analogy.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to talk specifically about the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Speaker 1: This was this was I mean, it'll it'll eventually erupt,
Speaker 1: It'll there'll there will eventually be a super eruption. Whether
Speaker 1: that eventually is like any time within the next few
Speaker 1: thousand years, who can say, Um, it's not likely, and
Speaker 1: if it does happen, we will likely have lots of
Speaker 1: warning signs before it happens. But the reason why we
Speaker 1: are we're specifically focusing on this is one we are
Speaker 1: based in the United States, so it's one of those
Speaker 1: things that, um, is easy for us to focus on.
Speaker 1: To the reason why I even suggested we do supervolcanoes
Speaker 1: is there was a mini series like kind of made
Speaker 1: for TV movie thing that came out in the mid
Speaker 1: two thousand's called Supervolcano and it recently got added to
Speaker 1: Netflix and I watched it, and its specifically deals with
Speaker 1: the Yellowstone supervolcano. And it's interesting. I mean all, a
Speaker 1: lot of the research they did for that is essentially correct,
Speaker 1: or at least was correct based upon what was known
Speaker 1: in the mid two thousand's, so it's not like they
Speaker 1: went crazy with the research. I will say that, Um,
Speaker 1: it's a lot like the articles that we've read where
Speaker 1: you get all the horrible things that will happen, and
Speaker 1: then a sentence at the instinct this probably won't happen.
Speaker 1: It felt like it was an entire mini series that
Speaker 1: was made that way. But at any rate, UM the
Speaker 1: super volcano at Yellowstone has had three major eruptions. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's been lots of different smaller eruptions, but three major ones,
Speaker 1: two of which meet the super volcano criteria of the
Speaker 1: two or two hundred and fifty cubic miles of ojecta.
Speaker 1: So the first happened two point one million years ago,
Speaker 1: so quite some time ago, the second one point two
Speaker 1: million years ago, and the more recent one six hundred
Speaker 1: forty thousand years ago, so not in recent memory certainly.
Speaker 1: And that first eruption was about six thousand times the
Speaker 1: size of the Mount St. Helen's eruption that we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier UH, and the latest one caused the collapse
Speaker 1: of the eruption area. This is actually fairly common. Where
Speaker 1: a a large volcanic eruption, you typically have a a
Speaker 1: chamber beneath the volcanic area that is containing the molten material,
Speaker 1: and when it empties out, often the weight of both
Speaker 1: the the UH surface above it and the ejecta causes
Speaker 1: a collapse. So the latest eruption caused the collapse of
Speaker 1: of this eruption area, which created a sunken crater called
Speaker 1: a caldera, and it's big. It's fift nd square miles
Speaker 1: in area, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.
Speaker 1: You could fit Rhode Island into the volcanic caldera of
Speaker 1: the Yellowstone Supervolcano. I don't recommend you do it, because
Speaker 1: everyone in Rhode Island would wonder why you pulled them
Speaker 1: off the eastern seaboard. They would be pretty mad. They
Speaker 1: would no longer be called an island unless they're an
Speaker 1: island in the caldera. I mean, they're not technically an
Speaker 1: island anyway, but you'd have even less recent than at
Speaker 1: any rate. Uh So under this park, under the Yelliston
Speaker 1: Park is the magma chamber. Now we've known about the
Speaker 1: initial magma chamber for a really long time, um, and
Speaker 1: it's essentially between three and nine miles beneath the surface.
Speaker 1: It depends upon where you are at any point along
Speaker 1: the area where the magma chamber exists. And it's tough
Speaker 1: to map these things out, you know, we can't really
Speaker 1: dig down to see them. Um. But if you were
Speaker 1: to empty out this chamber, you could fill the one
Speaker 1: thousand cubic mile Grand canyon two point five times with
Speaker 1: the stuff inside it, so two and a half times
Speaker 1: the amount that you would need to completely seal that
Speaker 1: crack uh known as the Grand Canyon. But that's just
Speaker 1: the beginning, because in April two scientists found a second
Speaker 1: magma chamber underneath the first one and well, and this
Speaker 1: actually answered a lot of questions because they were wondering
Speaker 1: how was the magma connecting to the chamber, like where.
Speaker 1: Obviously it's coming from somewhere around in the mantle region
Speaker 1: of Earth, and there's some sort of plume that has
Speaker 1: to connect the mantle to that magma chamber, otherwise you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have it there, right, But they weren't sure how
Speaker 1: that was working. And now they found that there is
Speaker 1: a larger magma chamber underneath the first one, and it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of the way station between the mantle and UH,
Speaker 1: the upper magma chamber. So this one's bigger. It's about
Speaker 1: four point four times larger than the one that's the
Speaker 1: shallow magma chamber, and UH it's somewhere between twelve and
Speaker 1: twenty eight miles beneath the surface again depending upon where
Speaker 1: you're at, and UH it has enough magma to fill
Speaker 1: the Grand Canyon more than eleven times. What I'm picturing
Speaker 1: here is is Thor filling up the Grand Canyon with
Speaker 1: magma and then drinking it down and then shoving it
Speaker 1: off the table, the Grand Canyon right off the table.
Speaker 1: And I got another boy, Thor is a jerk, and uh,
Speaker 1: there's a whole storyline about it actually, So anyway, um, so,
Speaker 1: one thing that scientists do point out, and it is
Speaker 1: important to think on because you know, when I hear
Speaker 1: magma chamber, I think like big gooey chamber filled with
Speaker 1: with lava goo or magma really because lava wants it.
Speaker 1: It is exposed to the atmosphere. But that's not exactly
Speaker 1: what we're looking at. Only about nine of the material
Speaker 1: in the upper magma chamber is actually molten rock, and
Speaker 1: most of it is stored inside of spongy, very hot rock.
Speaker 1: So you've got the spongey hot rock and inside you
Speaker 1: can think of it as having porous cavities to have
Speaker 1: a gooey molten magma center. So yeah, that's great news.
Speaker 1: That's only nine Only nine percent of it is actually
Speaker 1: the molten rock, is what I'm saying. And the lower
Speaker 1: chamber has an even lower percentage of molten rock. Two
Speaker 1: of the material in that is multen rock. It sounds
Speaker 1: like a chocolate lava cake, but but actual lava. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Magma service. Instead of all completely molten rock, there's some
Speaker 1: giant chunks of rock that contain molten stuff. We'll fly
Speaker 1: at your at your face and bust open and if
Speaker 1: it makes you feel better, at Lauren, you probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: be live long enough to notice that. Tell me about
Speaker 1: magma funnels, all right, So so magma funnels this, This
Speaker 1: is the this is the plume. I was talking about
Speaker 1: the way that the way this magma gets funneled up
Speaker 1: from the mantle or perhaps even lower down. So this
Speaker 1: is where we start getting into a lot of estimations.
Speaker 1: I mean, we were already talking about estimations of three
Speaker 1: to nine miles below the service or twelve to twenty
Speaker 1: eight miles below the service, And a lot of this
Speaker 1: is coming to us from seismic information that's been picked
Speaker 1: up over time, and we can learn a lot through
Speaker 1: seismic data. We've talked about how sound travels at different
Speaker 1: speeds through different media, and by measuring that those differences,
Speaker 1: that's how we can figure out a lot of what
Speaker 1: is the composition underneath Yellows Ozone Park. So the Yellowstone
Speaker 1: hot spot plume is what connects the magma in the
Speaker 1: UH in the lower chamber to the mantle UH and
Speaker 1: then the lower chamber is attached to the upper chamber UM.
Speaker 1: And remember the lower ones the bigger one. So the
Speaker 1: hot spot plume is probably around forty miles beneath the
Speaker 1: surface and extends downward to a depth of about four
Speaker 1: d forty miles in the Earth's mantle, although some estimates
Speaker 1: suggest that perhaps it goes all the way down to
Speaker 1: the Earth's core, so one thousand, eight hundred miles UM.
Speaker 1: But it depends upon which model you're looking at. So
Speaker 1: one of the implications of this larger magma chamber that
Speaker 1: was discovered in April is that it could potentially feed
Speaker 1: magma into the upper chamber in the event of a
Speaker 1: large scale eruption. So, in other words, imagine that you
Speaker 1: have a major eruption where that upper magma chamber, which
Speaker 1: can fill the Grand Canyon two and a half times over,
Speaker 1: erupt then gets refilled by the lower chamber, erupts again,
Speaker 1: then gets refilled by the lower because the lower chambers
Speaker 1: four point four times the size of the upper chamber.
Speaker 1: So you can essentially multiply that number by four and
Speaker 1: say that that like super worst case scenario. And keep
Speaker 1: in mind, these eruptions can take place over the course
Speaker 1: of a very long time, like months. We're not talking
Speaker 1: about again, we're not talking about a single explosive event.
Speaker 1: An eruption can take place over a very long amount
Speaker 1: of time. Now, is it possible yes? Is it likely? No?
Speaker 1: So I wanted to mention that again, it is not
Speaker 1: likely to happen. But just for fun, let's talk about
Speaker 1: what a super volcanic eruption would look like. This fun.
Speaker 1: I am using the word fun ironically. Uh So. The
Speaker 1: BBC reported that in the event of a super eruption,
Speaker 1: of people living within a thousand kilometers of the blast
Speaker 1: area could die from the eruptions straightaway. I just looked
Speaker 1: up on Google Maps. If we're within a thousand kilometers,
Speaker 1: we are well outside of a thousand kilometers of yea,
Speaker 1: so no problem. Yeah, because we're we're in Atlanta. That's
Speaker 1: really far away from Yelliston National Park. Uh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: we are well outside of a thousand kilometers. But not
Speaker 1: to gloat or anything. Yeah, yeah, And and and a
Speaker 1: note here about this particular estimation. Uh Tobas seems to
Speaker 1: have been uninhabited by humans and other species of the
Speaker 1: Homo genus at the time of the eruption, So we
Speaker 1: don't have any kind of archaeological record of how a
Speaker 1: super volcanic eruption would directly affect even a proto civilization, right,
Speaker 1: so this is yeah, this is this is a guess.
Speaker 1: And then again it's it's BBC researchers who came up
Speaker 1: with this number. And they I'm sure they consulted with
Speaker 1: lots of geology, right, but this has not come from
Speaker 1: the U S Geological Survey, which is the group that's
Speaker 1: in charge jo of actually looking into this here in
Speaker 1: the United States. Say, what do they have to say
Speaker 1: about this? Well, so they talked more about the ash dispersal,
Speaker 1: Like they don't spend a whole lot of time talking
Speaker 1: about the stuff that would happen in the immediately immediate
Speaker 1: blast zone. But you know, they actually said that they
Speaker 1: ran computer models to see where ash would disperse around
Speaker 1: Yellowstone in the event of a super volcano eruption. And
Speaker 1: the reason they said they did it was they got
Speaker 1: tired of telling people we don't know, like, like, what
Speaker 1: would happen if the super volcano erupted? We don't know.
Speaker 1: Like after a while they said, we should probably find out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll do a couple of models. Will look Yeah. I
Speaker 1: can't imagine what it must be like to work there
Speaker 1: and get these kind of calls from various forms of
Speaker 1: the media, asking because I mean, it is a sensationalized
Speaker 1: story in many ways. And you could say, well, it's
Speaker 1: import because it has the potential to impact the entire world,
Speaker 1: and and it will happen at some point, so therefore,
Speaker 1: isn't it news worthy? The geologists are meanwhile, like I
Speaker 1: need a drink. So in two thousand and fourteen, they
Speaker 1: ran a computer model to look at this, and they
Speaker 1: looked at different versions of the model, like one where
Speaker 1: an eruption would last for maybe a day or two,
Speaker 1: and one where it would last for a week, and
Speaker 1: one where it would last for an entire month, And
Speaker 1: they laid out a map of where the ash would disperse.
Speaker 1: And the good news is their models found that the
Speaker 1: ash accumulation would actually be quote far less end quote
Speaker 1: than that predicted by numerous doomsday scenarios, but still enough
Speaker 1: to kill just about everybody in the United States eventually. Um. So,
Speaker 1: they found that ash from super eruptions gets distributed in
Speaker 1: a different way than ash from normal eruptions, and that's
Speaker 1: because the super eruption creates a number Brella cloud capable
Speaker 1: of pushing ash more than a thousand kilometers up wind,
Speaker 1: so against the wind. Um. So, typically in a volcanic eruption,
Speaker 1: you would see the ash dispersal look like a fan
Speaker 1: extending from the volcano down wind. That's what it would
Speaker 1: normally look like. But with the super volcanoes, it looks
Speaker 1: more like a bull's eye, with the volcano in the center,
Speaker 1: a little bit of an off center bull's eye. It's
Speaker 1: still going to have more dispersal down wind than up wind,
Speaker 1: but the volcano will still be closer to the center
Speaker 1: than at one end of the map. UH. And they
Speaker 1: said that a layer of ash ten centimeters thick or
Speaker 1: more could cover the area within five hundred miles of
Speaker 1: the eruption. UH And even in more distant regions, like
Speaker 1: say New York City, you would still get a dusting
Speaker 1: of volcanic ash. And this is serious stuff, guys. The
Speaker 1: ash is not like the ash you would find in
Speaker 1: your fireplace. Volcanic ash has tiny rocks in it um,
Speaker 1: and these tiny rocks can do a huge amount of damn.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about some of the stuff that could happen. Alright,
Speaker 1: So the eruption would would contain dangerous particles and gases
Speaker 1: like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrochloric acid, and hydrofluoric acid.
Speaker 1: These are not great things for us to come into
Speaker 1: contact with. You don't really want to breathe them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you breathe in the particles, then you can have
Speaker 1: a lot of symptoms that are very similar to that
Speaker 1: of the common cold. If it's a short term exposure,
Speaker 1: so we're talking coughing, sneezing, you know, running nose um,
Speaker 1: possibly developing ato bronchitis. If you have long term exposure,
Speaker 1: it can get it much worse. You can actually get
Speaker 1: damaged to your lungs. It can tear up the tissue
Speaker 1: in your lungs um. Also, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who talk about how if ash gets UH can
Speaker 1: combined with say uh fluid, it could essentially turn your
Speaker 1: lungs into concrete, which is very lovely to think about.
Speaker 1: But it also can get in your eyes. It can
Speaker 1: cause your eyes to itch. You can also cause corneal abrasions,
Speaker 1: so damaging your eyes. Um, you would obviously if you
Speaker 1: were in an area where volcanic ash was falling, you
Speaker 1: would want a gas mask and goggles. I mean, you
Speaker 1: would want to be able to have some sort of
Speaker 1: filter um to filter out these particles and something protecting
Speaker 1: your eyes in this this sort of environment. Uh. It
Speaker 1: also can contaminate water supplies. Accumulation can lead to structural damage.
Speaker 1: This stuff weighs more than say snow would and ten
Speaker 1: centimeters doesn't sound like a lot, but it's enough to
Speaker 1: collapse certain buildings roofs, so that's a big issue. Also, um,
Speaker 1: it can short out electrical transformers and plunge entire areas
Speaker 1: into blackout status, So that would be a real problem.
Speaker 1: And again, because we're talking about ash dispersing in a
Speaker 1: five hundred mile area around the supervolcano. At ten centimeters
Speaker 1: or so, that's enough to affect a huge amount of
Speaker 1: the United States. Even on outlying areas like where we live,
Speaker 1: we it still get some ash and maybe enough for
Speaker 1: it to cause some serious problems if nothing else, contaminating
Speaker 1: water supplies and making it difficult to grow crops or
Speaker 1: raise livestock. Uh So, lots of effects there throughout the
Speaker 1: entire United States. Even if we were somehow lucky with
Speaker 1: the weather patterns to avoid most of the ash, you
Speaker 1: still have the issue of entire areas of the country
Speaker 1: that we're dedicated to food production would be unable to
Speaker 1: do that for an indeterminate amount of time. Oh sure.
Speaker 1: And then again that the cooling effect of having those
Speaker 1: gases in the air would affect not just the United States,
Speaker 1: but potentially the whole world. Yeah, we're talking global impact
Speaker 1: with this kind of level of eruption. So that cooling
Speaker 1: effect could be as according to the BBC, up to
Speaker 1: ten degrees And since it is the BBC, I'm guessing
Speaker 1: they're talking celsius because it's the BBC. Why would they
Speaker 1: speak in fahrenheit. Um. So, that kind of decrease could
Speaker 1: have that global food production, including things like stopping them
Speaker 1: monsoon season, which we could lead to vast areas of
Speaker 1: of of food just not growing and lead to starvation.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about uh, global devastation. I mean in
Speaker 1: different ways. Like obviously the areas around the volcano would
Speaker 1: be physically devastated, and then other areas would be affected
Speaker 1: in a more long term fashion. Now, granted, this climate
Speaker 1: change would be temporary, particularly in the in the grand
Speaker 1: scheme of things, but we're talking still a period of
Speaker 1: like a decade and ten years. While short on a
Speaker 1: geological scale, that's a long time to go without being
Speaker 1: able to grow food effectively. So it could lead to
Speaker 1: really big problems. And that leads us again to the
Speaker 1: question should we worry about this? And really the answer
Speaker 1: is not really. The odds of it have actually happening
Speaker 1: are so low that they're other things that we need
Speaker 1: to worry about. First. Um, it does mean that, you know,
Speaker 1: being aware of it tells us that eventually it will happen,
Speaker 1: so we have to have some sort of plan in place.
Speaker 1: But it's not like we have a sin submergency of guys,
Speaker 1: we need to figure out our supervolcano plan like tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Like, like we said at the top of
Speaker 1: the show, the odds of something like this happening in
Speaker 1: any given year are only one in seven hundred thousand
Speaker 1: and and I know that that even to some people
Speaker 1: might say, well, wow, that's still like those odds. I
Speaker 1: don't like those at all, But that's probably because as
Speaker 1: human beings were really bad at conceptualizing these kind of odds, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it. We're notoriously terrible about it, to
Speaker 1: the point where why people go to casinos. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's why. It's why people, you know, ignore statistics about
Speaker 1: how likely they are to get in a car accident
Speaker 1: versus an airplane accident. You know, it's it's we're bad
Speaker 1: at it because it's difficult for us to think in
Speaker 1: those terms. And when I say we, I mean me too.
Speaker 1: I'm the same way. I I fall into the same
Speaker 1: traps as everybody else. Anything interesting sounds more dangerous to
Speaker 1: essentially Yeah, well, I mean the most interesting man the
Speaker 1: world is pop probably the most dangerous one too. I
Speaker 1: mean I haven't asked him. I'm scared. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that there are definitely reasons why we need to
Speaker 1: think about it, and we need to plan for things,
Speaker 1: and really we just need to make a better world
Speaker 1: in general, and for multiple reasons. But one of them
Speaker 1: is because it would help us in the in the
Speaker 1: case of a supervolcanic eruption. Uh. In fact, the folks
Speaker 1: that Yellowstone say that it's far more likely that we'll
Speaker 1: see small eruptions ones that would not not even raise
Speaker 1: a blip on on anything beyond the regional scale, And
Speaker 1: even for regional it might just mean that certain parts
Speaker 1: of the park are closed off due to lava flow,
Speaker 1: and that this will probably happen over the course of
Speaker 1: several hundred years where it starts to you know, it
Speaker 1: relieves bits of pressure, and that the pressure does not
Speaker 1: continuously build up to super eruption levels. If that were
Speaker 1: to happen, it would be preceded by earthquakes, likely for
Speaker 1: weeks or maybe even months before any kind of other event,
Speaker 1: So we would have lots of warning signs before there
Speaker 1: was ever any kind of super volcanic eruption. Uh. And
Speaker 1: once those warning sides happened, then it would become really
Speaker 1: important for us to decide what happens next. Because I mean,
Speaker 1: even if you if you discount the global impact, which
Speaker 1: really shouldn't do. But even if if as Americans, we say, look,
Speaker 1: we're just really concerned about what's going to happen to
Speaker 1: us right now. We'll have to worry about the rest
Speaker 1: of the world later, this would be obviously a huge
Speaker 1: blow to national security, right, I mean, the United States
Speaker 1: would effectively not be the US anymore in the wake
Speaker 1: of something like this, if it were to have the uh,
Speaker 1: the far reaching consequences that we've talked about. So if
Speaker 1: we were to see those kind of early warning signs,
Speaker 1: we would have some very serious conversations very very quickly.
Speaker 1: But again, the likelihood of it happening is so low
Speaker 1: that you know, it's I feel pretty comfortable saying it's
Speaker 1: not going to happen within my lifetime, or at least
Speaker 1: the odds are astronomical that it would happen within my lifetime.
Speaker 1: So that's your problem. Guys, who's who's old guy? Now?
Speaker 1: Keep on joking about old I am. I'm going to
Speaker 1: be dead before I have to worry about this. So
Speaker 1: you're the one who makes all the jokes about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I've done it, like to come on, see
Speaker 1: you see how it's all coming out. Now. See it's
Speaker 1: a defense mechanism. People. If I make the jokes that
Speaker 1: it heads them off of the pass. How often do
Speaker 1: you dream of us being thrown into a volcano by us?
Speaker 1: I mean the younger generations. Do day dreams count because
Speaker 1: it would make the number higher? Um, all right, So
Speaker 1: it also depends on how long I'm waiting for my tacos.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of imaginary throwing people into volcanoes when
Speaker 1: I'm waiting in line for tacos, all right, So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, it's that's hanger right there. It
Speaker 1: can't be. It can't be held responsible for my day dreams.
Speaker 1: But this was actually really interesting to look into. It
Speaker 1: was one of those things I learned a lot looking
Speaker 1: into this, and and after having seen that that mini
Speaker 1: series where I was like, well, that's absolutely terrifying. How
Speaker 1: how realistic is this and looking into it and thinking,
Speaker 1: all right, it's not realistic in the sense of it's
Speaker 1: not likely to happen, but the actual depiction of events
Speaker 1: was pretty interesting and I think fairly accurate. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously we didn't even cover how the particulates in the
Speaker 1: atmosphere would mean that we would see no no flights,
Speaker 1: like all flights would be grounded across all of North
Speaker 1: America and probably other areas around North America, but definitely
Speaker 1: all of North America. No flights would be going in
Speaker 1: around So I mean, you know, it's it's pretty pretty
Speaker 1: phenomenal when you think about it, but again, not likely
Speaker 1: to happen if you want to hear about other things
Speaker 1: that aren't likely to happen. You should write us and
Speaker 1: tell us, or you just have an idea for a
Speaker 1: future episode. There's something that you've always wanted to learn
Speaker 1: more about, and we wonder why it's going to be
Speaker 1: like in the future. Send us a message. We love
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