supervolcano Concepts

The Caryatids

by Bruce Sterling · 24 Feb 2009 · 387pp · 105,250 words

had been discussing for a hundred years. The most heavily trafficked tag was the strange coinage “Supervolcano.” Supervolcanoes had been a topic of mild intellectual interest for many years. Recently, people had talked much less about supervolcanoes, and with more pejoratives in their semantics. Web-semantic traffic showed that people were actively shunning

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the subject of supervolcanoes. That scientific news seemed to be rubbing people the wrong way. “So,” said Guillermo at last, “according to our best sources here, there are some

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Family consensus about that issue?” Raph still wasn’t buying it. “The other sources said that ‘Yellowstone’ was a supervolcano. Not ‘Yosemite.’ Yellowstone is way over in Montana.” “You do agree that supervolcanoes exist, though. They’re a scientific fact of life on Earth. That’s what I’m asking.” “They exist

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. If you insist. But the last supervolcano was seventy-four thousand years ago. Not during this business quarter. Not this year. Not even one thousand years. Seventy-four thousand years, Freddy.” Freddy

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looked down and slowly quoted from his notepad. “ ‘The massive eruption of a supervolcano would be a planetary catastrophe. It would create years of freezing temperatures as volcanic dust and ash obscured the warmth of the sun. The sky

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sounds extremely corny to me.” “That’s because this source material is eighty years old. Geologists know a whole lot about supervolcanoes. Nobody else in the world wants to think about supervolcanoes.” Buffy was losing her temper. “But this is so totally unbelievable! The sky already darkened! The black rain already fell

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now! Now we’re supposed to have another crisis, out of nowhere, because California blows up from some supervolcano? What are the odds?” “Well, that question’s pretty easy,” said Freddy. “A supervolcano under the Earth doesn’t care what we humans did to the sky. If it blows up, then it

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just blows up! So the odds of a supervolcano are exactly the same as they always were.” Rishi, who was bright, had gotten all interested. “Well, what exactly are the odds of a

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supervolcano? How often do supervolcanoes erupt, and turn the sky black, completely wrecking the climate, and so forth?” It took Freddy a good while to clumsily bang that one

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change. All those heavy rains lubricate the local fault lines. And we get rising groundwater, too.” “Raph, how come climate change can cause earthquakes, but supervolcanoes don’t cause earthquakes?” “Okay, so you got me there.” Raph shrugged. “I never said I was a scientist.” Freddy contemplated the geological display map

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a pool of sunlight from an overhead window. “So: You see what I want to say? If there’s a world catastrophe caused by a supervolcano, then it means that our human disaster, our own big crime against the sky, was just too small to count. Maybe we did our worst

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—the newly emptied basement was swiftly transmuted into the new Situation Room, or rather, the Montgomery-Montalban Situation Bunker. If California was facing a looming supervolcano, then the revived and vigorous Family-Firm would not wring their hands about that challenge. Their new Situation Bunker was entirely mounted on tremor-proof

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his black angel. Tell John I’m your big, long, global boom. Tell John I’m his giant supervolcano.” “Oh Sonja, poor Sonja. Now I know you’re not yourself. Come on: giant supervolcanoes? We don’t believe in giant volcanoes, do we? That’s talking nonsense.” “Here in Jiuquan, all the

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inside this local planetary ecosystem, busted up as that is, and be fried with my fellow bacteria. EI: And it’s the same with those supervolcanoes? MM: One of ’em is bound to blow, that’s inevitable. It’s just the truth. EI: You recently said that “the structure of space

Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System

by Natalie Starkey · 29 Sep 2021 · 309pp · 97,320 words

is not just confined to Iceland but has the potential to occur at any place where hot volcanoes interact with ice. Supervolcanoes I probably can’t complete this chapter without mentioning supervolcanoes. They get a lot of attention in the press, particularly Yellowstone in the USA. Thanks to the public’s fascination

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with volcanoes like Yellowstone, and its potentially large and destructive future eruptions, the media can often report that a supervolcano is due to have a ‘big one’ soon, when in reality that is never the case. Nevertheless, scientists have found evidence for around 47 supereruptions

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from volcanoes like Yellowstone throughout Earth history, and there are even six active supervolcanoes at the present day. But just recall that ‘active’ doesn’t necessarily mean that they are due to erupt imminently. The reason for the press

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coverage is perhaps understandable, because despite no ‘supervolcanic’ eruptions for over 26,500 years, there is a large potential for huge destruction. Supervolcanoes are sometimes known as mega-calderas because when they happen to have a big eruption, they efficiently empty all the magma stored in their chamber

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an eruption in their history that measures VEI 8 or greater, meaning they erupt over 1,000 cubic kilometres (240 cubic miles) of deposits. While supervolcanoes are marked by their voluminous eruptions, they can also have smaller eruptions as part of their normal activity. These regions, when active, are also marked

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on our planet are the flood basalts, of which there are no modern examples. We touched on these flows in Chapter 2 in relation to supervolcanoes. And while we tend to think of supereruptions as the explosive type, such as Lake Toba, as we discussed previously, they are actually defined by

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, here, here ash aircraft risk here benefits here, here Mars here, here pyroclastic surges/flows here, here, here ‘raining’ here, here, here scattering light here supervolcanoes here tephra fall here Asosan volcano, Japan here asteroids here, here, here, here, here, here, here asthenosphere here atmospheres Earth here, here, here Mars here

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, here, here, here, here, here, here sulphur here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here sulphur dioxide here, here, here, here, here, here, here supervolcanoes here, here, here surface waves here Surtsey Island, Iceland here, here, here, here Tambora, Indonesia here, here tectonic processes, non-plate here, here, here, here

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker · 13 Feb 2018 · 1,034pp · 241,773 words

slam into the Earth, flattening thousands of square miles and kicking up debris that would black out the sun and drench us with corrosive rain. Supervolcanoes or massive lava flows could choke us with ash, CO2, and sulfuric acid. A black hole could wander into the solar system and pull the

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before they send us the way of the dinosaurs.16 NASA has also figured out a way to pump water at high pressure into a supervolcano and extract the heat for geothermal energy, cooling the magma enough that it would never blow its top.17 Our ancestors were powerless to stop

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zero. But each step down can lower the risk, until it is in the range of the other threats to our species’ immortality, like asteroids, supervolcanoes, or an Artificial Intelligence that turns us into paper clips. CHAPTER 20 THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century

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, why did he design an Earth on which geological and meteorological catastrophes devastate regions inhabited by innocent people? What is the divine purpose of the supervolcanoes that have ravaged our species in the past and may extinguish it in the future, or the evolution of the Sun into a red giant

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Mass Extinction,” Nature, Sept. 24, 2003. 15. Denkenberger & Pearce 2015. 16. Rosen 2016. 17. D. Cox, “NASA’s Ambitious Plan to Save Earth from a Supervolcano,” BBC Future, Aug. 17, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-plan-to-save-earth-from-a

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-supervolcano. 18. Deutsch 2011, p. 207. 19. “More dangerous than nukes”: Tweeted in Aug. 2014, quoted in A. Elkus, “Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence,” Slate, Oct.

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Compstat program, 380 rule of law and reductions in, 43, 168–70, 174 See also criminal punishment; hate crimes; homicide; rampage shootings; terrorism volcanoes and supervolcanoes, 152, 187–8, 295 Voltaire, 13, 39, 84, 162, 223 von Mises, Ludwig, 13 Wagner, Richard, 398 Wagner’s Law, 109–110 Wallace, Alfred Russel

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know

by Richard Watson · 5 Nov 2013 · 219pp · 63,495 words

young, you will be less familiar. However, what we all have in common is that within living memory nobody has experienced what happens when a supervolcano explodes. Hopefully, nobody will know for at least a few thousand years. We’d cope, of course, but one sometimes wonders what the fallout would

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or so. When was the last really big Yellowstone eruption? About 600,000 years ago! Dire results So what might happen if Yellowstone, or another supervolcano, exploded during our lifetime? Nobody knows, of course, but the implications could be truly devastating. “…They slept on the abyss without a surge—The waves

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havoc locally and potentially globally too (remember that tiny volcano in Iceland that brought international air travel to a grinding halt in 2010? Well a supervolcano might be ten, one hundred or even a thousand times worse). However, the biggest consequence would almost certainly be climate change. Concentrations of dust, sulfur

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it’s to do with shifts in magnetic fields. The same commentator gives odds of 10:1 against a supervolcano erupting on the same date. That’s not it either. That’s just supervolcanoes. Other potentially devastating superevents might include a major eruption that triggers an earthquake, which triggers a series of

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ago and involved the dinosaurs, many experts believe that this was either caused by the impact of one or more asteroids or one or more supervolcanoes (see Chapter 44). A sting in the tale Bees could also be in serious trouble, although the reasons for this remain far from clear. What

A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson · 5 May 2003 · 654pp · 204,260 words

the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far beyond the scale of anything known to humans. Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth

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is a matter of heated (as it were) debate. The continental nature of the crust makes a huge difference to its eruptions. Where the other supervolcanoes tend to bubble away steadily and in a comparatively benign fashion, Yellowstone blows explosively. It doesn't happen often, but when it does you want

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Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas. And that's not even to consider the climatic consequences. The last supervolcano eruption on Earth was at Toba, in northern Sumatra, seventy-four thousand years ago. No one knows quite how big it was other than that

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be swelling again. The geologists realized that only one thing could cause this—a restless magma chamber. Yellowstone wasn't the site of an ancient supervolcano; it was the site of an active one. It was also at about this time that they were able to work out that the cycle

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Death,” first broadcast May 6, 2001. 3 “a bang that reverberated around the world . . .” Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 152. 4 “The last supervolcano eruption on Earth . . .” McGuire, p. 104. 5 “for the next twenty thousand years . . .” McGuire, p. 107. 6 “you're standing on the largest active volcano

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World

by Michal Zalewski · 11 Jan 2022 · 337pp · 96,666 words

friends and relatives, provide the most grounded and tractable way to bootstrap a personal response-and-recovery plan. Even the most rigorous strategy preoccupied with supervolcanoes and cosmic weather is, at the end of the day, just a work of speculative fiction. In contrast, a plan that draws lessons from the

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space focus on events that are quite possible on cosmic timescales, but exceedingly unlikely within the span of our lives; in this category, asteroids and supervolcanoes are of particular note. And a handful of prophecies—such as the fears of malicious artificial intelligence—are simply unknowable, devoid of any quantifiable risk

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in the Permian extinction event that wiped out 70 percent of vertebrate life about 250 million years ago,12 and one of the still-active supervolcanoes—the Yellowstone Caldera—is believed to be capable of covering much of the United States in 10 feet of ash.13 Similarly, the impact of

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million years carries less than a 0.01 percent chance of striking within the lifetime of any person born today. In that sense, although a supervolcano or a cosmic collision may be some of the most profound existential threats to reckon with, they’re also relatively distant concerns—and they escape

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” (Perhach), 49–50 street violence, 112–113 student loans, 50 stun guns, 205, 207 submersible pumps, 148 subscription services, 51 suffocation, 104 suicides, 196–197 supervolcanoes, 34 supply issues, 137 Svenson, Ola, 96 swine flu, 26 System Fusion, 188 system of prices, 59 T Taser pistols, 207 tech upgrades, 52 technician

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words

the very least, we should be able to convey orders of magnitude. A nuclear war is a lot more likely to kill humanity than a supervolcano, for instance. “Whether we’re talking like a one-in-a-million [chance], or whether we’re talking like one-in-ten on certain topics

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, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Kindle ed. (New York: Hachette Books, 2020), 30. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT than a supervolcano: Joel Day, “Experts Explain How Humanity Is Most Likely to Be Wiped Out,” Express.co.uk, August 13, 2023, express.co.uk/news/world/1801233

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/supervolcanoes-climate-change-nuclear-war-end-of-humanity-spt. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT play money dollars: Although Mana can be donated to charity, at

Western USA

by Lonely Planet

-year-old rocks whose layered geologic secrets are revealed within a mile-high stack (Click here) Yellowstone Massive geysers, rainbow-colored thermal pools and a supervolcano base – this 3472-sq-mile national park puts on a dazzling show (Click here) Chiricahua National Monument A rugged wonderland of rock chiseled by rain

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, Idaho, Montana & Wyoming Did You Know? Pitch your tent in Yellowstone National Park and you’ll be sleeping atop one of the world’s largest supervolcanoes. It’s active every 640,000 years: an eruption is due soon – give or take 10,000 years. Resources »Denver Post (www.denverpost.com) The

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world’s geysers, the country’s largest high-altitude lake and a plethora of blue-ribbon rivers and waterfalls, all sitting pretty atop a giant supervolcano, and you’ll quickly realize you’ve stumbled across one of Mother Nature’s most fabulous creations. When John Colter became the first white man

Beyond: Our Future in Space

by Chris Impey · 12 Apr 2015 · 370pp · 97,138 words

our numbers may have dwindled to as low as two thousand. Some geneticists hypothesize that this bottleneck was caused by the explosion of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia and resulting major environmental change.22 Regardless of the cause, our genetic makeup hints at the fact that we were once in a

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is not that it has a significant probability of destroying humanity. Rather, it must be able to plausibly destroy any advanced civilization. Asteroid strikes and supervolcanoes don’t qualify because they’re random events that some civilizations will survive and others won’t experience because their planet and solar system are

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flight, 68–69, 72, 186, 220, 222–23 thymine, 6 Timbisha tribe, 118–19 Titan, 53, 125, 177, 182, 278 Tito, Dennis, 75, 170 Toba supervolcano, 202 toilets, in space travel, 116–17 Tokyo Broadcasting System, 75 tortoises, in space research, 49 Tower of Babel, 148 “Tranquility” (toilet), 117 transhumanism, 207

Global Catastrophic Risks

by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic · 2 Jul 2008

thank S. Ambrose, S. Self, R. Stothers, and G. Zielinski for the information provided. Suggestions for further reading Bindeman, I.N. (2006). The Secrets of Supervolcanoes. Scientific American Magazine (June 2006). A well-written popular introduction in the rapidly expanding field of super-volcanism. Mason, B.G., Pyle, D.M., and

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that volcanic forcing from Karakatau and Tambora in the nineteenth century are likely to have been larger. Even bigger are supervolcanoes, the most extreme class of volcanic events seen on Earth. Supervolcanoes eject over a 1000 km3 of material into the atmosphere (compared with around 25 km 3 for Pinatubo). They are