The Truth About Supervolcanoes

It has a cape on it and during the day it's a mild mannered reporter for a local newspaper. You know, people want to know. I feel like we've gotten this question before. Is a super volcano going to erupt and into the world or at least wipe out a huge percentage of species on Earth? And I can understand that fear because I actually this, uh, this idea sort of entered my mind and infected me with strange fears years ago back when I read a book. I read a

book called The Road by Cormick McCarthy. What a cheerful book that was. It is a very good book, but It is not a cheerful book. It's sort of a I don't want to say too much about it, you know, go read it if you're interested, But it's a story of a journey in a very desolate post apocalyptic landscape. Um. And I was wondering after I read the book, Huh, I wonder what it is that the author had in mind, because he never said what it is that happened that

sort of ruined the earth. Frequently in these post apocalyptic media's media's, yes, that is totally the way that you pluralize that word. Um. You no one ever tells you exactly what happened, or if they do, it gets cheesy. And I think that's why the rest of them don't sure. And so the question is wondering here, like was this supposed to be like a nuclear war or was it supposed to be like an asteroid impact, some kind of a natural, purely earthbound event. Yeah, yeah, I didn't know.

But it describes a scenario where like all the plant life is dead, and it's very cold, and the sky is always gray and dark, and there's ash everywhere, and and I wondered until I read somewhere on the internet, I don't remember where it was now, this was years ago, but I read a blog post with somebody having a theory that said, oh, well, obviously what has happened in this scenario is that it was an eruption of the

yellow Stone supervolcano. And that makes a lot of sense from the as you read the book, if you think of it in those terms, the conditions that are mentioned in the book seemed to go pretty well. Was something like that. Yeah, I think it's a very good possibility. I mean, it's also possible that the author didn't actually have any one particular thing in mind. But and ultimately it doesn't really matter, that's not the point of the story. But it is interesting to think that that could have

been the triggering event. Sure, a caveat. Though it's possible that it is the triggering event in this story, it is extremely unlikely that this will actually happen, certainly within our lifetime. Yeah, we want to be clear that we're going to talk about some stuff that is really scary, I mean tering you know, and it's it's is legitimately

scary stuff. However, we also want to point out that there is no reason to believe that there is any oncoming eruption even within like the century or or several centuries, that the likelihood of such an eruption happening in any any given years one and seven hundred thousand. That was

one of the figures I saw. So, uh, let's start off by saying, we're going to talk about what could happen with a super volcano eruption, but let's also acknowledge there's no indication such a thing is going to happen in time soon. Yes, and I imagine big friendly letters on your screen that just say don't pan. Yes, yes said. It definitely makes me feel better. And now I want some something that is almost but not quite exactly unlike tea.

I mean, raining burning ash and lava everywhere, but don't panic because it's because yeah, like like you said, it's true. I think many, um many people who have explored the possibility of a super volcano eruption, especially specifically the eruption of the yellow Stone super volcano in North America, have sort of pursued it with a kind of like you know, playing up the drama and like, oh, this this looming danger. We we do want to say at the beginning, it's

not very likely yeah, it's it's calm yourself down. It's kind of the similar look at what would happen with the doomsday scenario of an enormous asteroid heading towards Earth. It's one of those things that you know, it's important to know what you're up against in the unlikely event that had happened, because if you play the long game, and we're not talking about your lifetime or the lifetime of the next like five generations, I'm talking over the

span of thousands of years. If you play the long game, it will happen eventually. But the key word there's eventually. And the important thing is to say, all right, well, what can we do with this knowledge? And we will talk about what some serious science researchers are are planning for in in case this happens to happen, um, because we'll have some warning, y'all. But in the meanwhile, let us define what a super volcano is. Right. We're not going to get to what to put in your volcano

kit yet. Okay, yeah, what is a super volcano? Okay? Well, I was curious about this, so I looked it up and it seems to me that one of the ways that scientists measure the magnitude of a volcanic eruption is the volcanic explosivity index or the v I, which sssive the index that's so great it sounds to me like a Tenacious D album. Yeah, the v E I. So it's a numerical score for how bad it done blowed

up that makes sense, ranging from zero to eight. And it's a sign based on a number of criteria, like the volume in cubic kilometers of ejected pyroclastic materials, all the hot stuff that comes out of the volcano in cubic kilometers. Yes, yes, dwell, well, but it's some of these scores. It's like point zero zero one cubic kilometers. That's somewhat more comforting. I suppose a right, how high

the eruption column reaches into the sky. And then also they're like subjective qualities about the character of the eruption, right, I think it was brassy or exactly, you know, classy eruption. Right's right. So it's kind of similar to the Richter scale. Actually, it's similar to the Richter scale that we use for earthquakes, like the Richter scale at the upper level. Also, the v e I at least it's the scores are logarithmic, meaning that an increase in one number to the next

is actually an increase in an order of magnitude. So from one number to the next could be a dramatic increase in the actual output of the volcano. Right, So I'm gonna give you the examples of those upper levels. So a five on the v I is uh, it corresponds to one cubic kilometer. That's a little bit less than a quarter of a cubic mile. Yeah, of of ejected of what's called ejecta, all this stuff that comes out and then settles down on the ground. These words

are great. Yeah. So the so the nineteen eighty eruption of Mount St. Helen's was a five, and that that was a big eruption. Yeah, that was huge, But it was a five. Okay, wait six? Who here was alive? And that during the nineteen eighty amount St Helen's eruption just me, okay, let's keep going. It wasn't, but I've seen pictures. Yeah, not go on. A six core spunds to ten cubic kilometers. That's about two point four cubic miles. Yeah, A seven corresponds to about a hundred cubic kilometers twenty

four cubic miles. You can see how the math is working out here, and an eight corresponds to a thousand cubic kilometers two miles. Okay, So one way of defining a supervolcano is that it's a volcanic eruption that's greater than an eight on the v e I eight or great so, so a thousand cubic kilometers are more, Yeah, which translates to about two hundred forty sometimes people say about two hundred fifty cubic miles of ejecta, all this hot stuff that comes up out of the volcano and

then settles down on the Earth. Now, people don't people don't always use the v I because it has some limitations, like it can't measure equally across all time scales like way back into the past. Um. And it does measure the release of volcanic gas, which can actually be one of the most important effects of volcanic have a very long lasting climate effect. Yeah. Um, So a less complicated metric is just that level that volume of ejecta we were talking about, So a volume greater than a thousand

cubic kilometers of stuff. But a thousand cubic kilometers I'm having trouble picturing in my head. Give me, give me a concept here. I tried to come up with a couple. Uh, it's a lot, so it doesn't really compare much to like, you know, this mini buckets. It's do you remember the comment six? And then a couple of Russian names. It's the one that the e s a rosette emission and ye okay, so yeah, you remember that comment. And then that was a wonderful emotional time seeing that lander set

down on the comet. It was beautiful. But now imagine because that comment had a volume of twenty one point four cubic kilometers, So the smallest possible supervolcano eruption ejects about forty seven of this commet's worth of pyroclastic material. So that comment forty seven times burning hot raining down on the earth. So we need forties seven probes to lent is. I think I might have taken the analogy. Yeah, another comparison, A thousand cubic kilometers is more than the

volume of Lake Titicaka in Peru. If you want to look up this lake on the internet, look up a picture. It's big. A thousand cubic kilometers is also more than double the volume of Lake Erie in North America, which is four three cubic kilometers. This is, this is huge, and these really big eruptions get bigger than a thousand cubic kilometers. But so we should we should put it in perspective how often these things happen. Large eruptions are

much less common than small eruptions. Eruptions that register low on the v I scale happen all the time. There's one happening right now, They're they're always going on. The middle of the scale gets pretty rare, and the top of the scale is very rare. In fact, there have been exactly zero supervolcano eruptions in recorded human history. Uh, there have been no supervolcano eruptions in the entire Holocene epoch. But there have been supervolcano eruptions since humans have existed.

And one example that I thought would be good to talk about would be the Toba supervolcano eruption about seventy four thousand years ago. Yeah, that happened on the island of Sumatra in present day Indonesia, and it included at least two thousand, eight hundred cubic kilometers of stuff. That's about six hundred and seventy two cubic miles. I did not do the calculation for how many comets that is, but that's a lot of comments. I did a calcula lation of my own in order to put it into

something vaguely understandable and yet not helpful at all. Uh. There are some one point one trillion gallons in a single cubic mile, so the stuff that came out of this volcano equalled about seven hundred and forty trillion gallons. Wow. Sure, it's a bunch um like, like billions of tons of hot ash and rock flowing onto the surrounding area, plus hundreds of cubic kilometers of of ash and gases spewing

into the atmosphere. Um. It was so violent that the mountain containing the volcano collapsed, uh, leaving what's now Lake Toba, which is the largest volcanic lake in the world, with a surface area of some one thousand, one hundred thirty square kilometers or four d forty square miles in a depth of about five or uh feet. That's just fifty square miles less than the area of Los Angeles for comparison,

that's the lake leftover, Yes, that's the crater. Researchers out of Oxford University think that the the gases that it put out circled the entire globe, and that the ash covered a span from the Arabian Sea to the east UM, across the entire Indian subcontinent and too into the South China Sea in the west UM and then uh some like three thousand kilometers south into the Indian Ocean. UM. And that's just matter that scientists have collected and confirmed

as being from this eruption so far. So obviously, an eruption like that is not just a negative local event, Like it's not just that you'd worry about getting caught in the falling ash and hot rock, which would suck. But no, but now this is I mean, unless you consider a local event a continent um. In that case,

sure to it's local um. But but no, that this was this was big and the result of cooling effect as everything that's spewed out started reflecting sunlight, caused global weather effects and may have in fact influenced the earth slip into a particularly cold era of the ice ages. Yeah. In fact, I read about a theory that this event

may have had something to do with human genetic history. Yeah, combined with climate data, some genetic data that researchers have been looking into from humans around the time, might indicate a huge dip in the number of human people who were reproducing around the time of Toba's eruption. Uh, Like this eruption might have nearly driven us to extinction. Wow. Well, that that's scary and crazy and kind of cool and amazing. But it's also like not the only time in history

that volcanic activity would be associated with extinction. Oh, certainly. Well, And I also do want to point out that there were a lot fewer humans like Homo sapiens running around right seventy four thousand years ago then there are, say today, we're in a kound of a vulnerable position anyway, yes, uh. And in fact, when you talk about volcanic activity being associated with mass extinctions, every single mass extinction has been

correlated with volcanic activity. Not necessarily that the volcanic activity directly caused the mass extinction but likely contributed to it, didn't help. Yeah, Now, when you're talking about major volcanic activity, help is not something that would immediately spring to mind. You might be crying it, but that's not what's certainly not aiding the planet. As far as flaming salamander, you're probably not excited. So well, first we should say, I mean,

what is a mass extinction. A mass extinction is basically a period um when a huge number of species on Earth completely die out all around the same time. And this doesn't actually mean it's a like all at once, like they all died on the same day. This can happen over over many, many years, you know, like thousands of years or even millions of years on the geologic scale. But looking back across geological history you can see these happening very very suddenly. There's sort of like spikes in

die off on a geologic scale. It's sunden for if you were living through it, it would it could be an entire it could be multiple lifetimes, multiple multiple lifetimes. So uh. In other words, we're not going to say, like the dinosaurs died out on a Thursday. That's not what we mean. When did Yeah, but not all of them all on one Thursday. I would argue that Thursdays had not been invented yet, so at any rate, raptors lives,

they might have been very fond of Thursday. They did not call them thursdays, they called them boy those were the days at any rate. So at the end of the Triassic Period, about half of the species living on Earth, both on land and in water, went extinct, and scientists found that the cause was likely the massive eruptions that had produced enough lava to bury the entire United States under three feet of it um. If if you had added all all the eject up, that's how much it

would have. You know, you could have covered uh the Earth with three or the United States rather with three ft of lava uh. And this happened around the time that Pangaea, which is the super continent, was breaking apart. So this was all due to tectonic forces. And the eruptions themselves weren't a single event. It wasn't like there was one massive supervolcanic eruption after which there was this massive amount of lava. It was a series of eruptions

that took course over six hundred thousand years. So again not one of those you know, singular events. We as humans often think about things as like a singular event. For one, it makes it a lot easier to understand and talk about and uh and to our lives are very short compared to geological time scale, but in truth,

it happened over hundreds of thousands of years. However, that was the event that would lead to the opportunity for dinosaurs to spring into certain niches and and take over and become the dominant life force for quite some time. And then the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary, the KT boundary, that's when we talk about how all the dinosaurs all went extinct. So the biggest popular theory for a very long time

was that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. There was an asteroid impact which caused global climate change and that wiped out the dinosaurs, And that's still very much part of the prevailing theory. However, there's also a lot of support growing support and in a large consensus building for the idea that volcanic eruptions had already created the situation where the asteroid was kind of the finishing blow. So it was and that the asteroid was solely responsible for

dinosaurs going extinct. It was that conditions were primed for that to happen because of the volcanic activity that had already taken place largely in India. So, yes, these these volcanic eruptions have been correlated with uh with extinctions, but correlation and causation are two different things. Obviously, It's a lot more complicated than just pointing at a single source and saying this is what caused everything to die out. I think a lot of us maybe I'm speaking for

everybody else. When I think of volcanoes, I often think of just the immediate view of you know, the idea of lava streaming down the side of the mountain, and that that, to me, is represents the the immediate danger. But as we've discussed, that's just one of the many

things that you have to worry about volcanic eruption. Yeah, and on a global level, it's it's much more likely to I mean the same way that a nuclear blast will kill a certain number of people in a certain area, but the fallout from that us just a lot more wide reaching, right exactly. Yeah, it's a very good analogy. So we wanted to talk specifically about the Yellowstone supervolcano. This was this was I mean, it'll it'll eventually erupt,

It'll there'll there will eventually be a super eruption. Whether that eventually is like any time within the next few thousand years, who can say, Um, it's not likely, and if it does happen, we will likely have lots of warning signs before it happens. But the reason why we are we're specifically focusing on this is one we are based in the United States, so it's one of those things that, um, is easy for us to focus on.

To the reason why I even suggested we do supervolcanoes is there was a mini series like kind of made for TV movie thing that came out in the mid two thousand's called Supervolcano and it recently got added to Netflix and I watched it, and its specifically deals with the Yellowstone supervolcano. And it's interesting. I mean all, a lot of the research they did for that is essentially correct, or at least was correct based upon what was known in the mid two thousand's, so it's not like they

went crazy with the research. I will say that, Um, it's a lot like the articles that we've read where you get all the horrible things that will happen, and then a sentence at the instinct this probably won't happen. It felt like it was an entire mini series that was made that way. But at any rate, UM the

super volcano at Yellowstone has had three major eruptions. I mean, there's been lots of different smaller eruptions, but three major ones, two of which meet the super volcano criteria of the two or two hundred and fifty cubic miles of ojecta. So the first happened two point one million years ago, so quite some time ago, the second one point two million years ago, and the more recent one six hundred forty thousand years ago, so not in recent memory certainly.

And that first eruption was about six thousand times the size of the Mount St. Helen's eruption that we talked about earlier UH, and the latest one caused the collapse of the eruption area. This is actually fairly common. Where a a large volcanic eruption, you typically have a a chamber beneath the volcanic area that is containing the molten material, and when it empties out, often the weight of both the the UH surface above it and the ejecta causes

a collapse. So the latest eruption caused the collapse of of this eruption area, which created a sunken crater called a caldera, and it's big. It's fift nd square miles in area, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island. You could fit Rhode Island into the volcanic caldera of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. I don't recommend you do it, because everyone in Rhode Island would wonder why you pulled them

off the eastern seaboard. They would be pretty mad. They would no longer be called an island unless they're an island in the caldera. I mean, they're not technically an island anyway, but you'd have even less recent than at any rate. Uh So under this park, under the Yelliston Park is the magma chamber. Now we've known about the initial magma chamber for a really long time, um, and it's essentially between three and nine miles beneath the surface. It depends upon where you are at any point along

the area where the magma chamber exists. And it's tough to map these things out, you know, we can't really dig down to see them. Um. But if you were to empty out this chamber, you could fill the one thousand cubic mile Grand canyon two point five times with the stuff inside it, so two and a half times the amount that you would need to completely seal that

crack uh known as the Grand Canyon. But that's just the beginning, because in April two scientists found a second magma chamber underneath the first one and well, and this actually answered a lot of questions because they were wondering how was the magma connecting to the chamber, like where.

Obviously it's coming from somewhere around in the mantle region of Earth, and there's some sort of plume that has to connect the mantle to that magma chamber, otherwise you wouldn't have it there, right, But they weren't sure how that was working. And now they found that there is a larger magma chamber underneath the first one, and it's it's kind of the way station between the mantle and UH,

the upper magma chamber. So this one's bigger. It's about four point four times larger than the one that's the shallow magma chamber, and UH it's somewhere between twelve and twenty eight miles beneath the surface again depending upon where you're at, and UH it has enough magma to fill the Grand Canyon more than eleven times. What I'm picturing here is is Thor filling up the Grand Canyon with magma and then drinking it down and then shoving it off the table, the Grand Canyon right off the table.

And I got another boy, Thor is a jerk, and uh, there's a whole storyline about it actually, So anyway, um, so, one thing that scientists do point out, and it is important to think on because you know, when I hear magma chamber, I think like big gooey chamber filled with with lava goo or magma really because lava wants it. It is exposed to the atmosphere. But that's not exactly

what we're looking at. Only about nine of the material in the upper magma chamber is actually molten rock, and most of it is stored inside of spongy, very hot rock. So you've got the spongey hot rock and inside you can think of it as having porous cavities to have a gooey molten magma center. So yeah, that's great news. That's only nine Only nine percent of it is actually the molten rock, is what I'm saying. And the lower chamber has an even lower percentage of molten rock. Two

of the material in that is multen rock. It sounds like a chocolate lava cake, but but actual lava. Yeah, Magma service. Instead of all completely molten rock, there's some giant chunks of rock that contain molten stuff. We'll fly at your at your face and bust open and if it makes you feel better, at Lauren, you probably wouldn't be live long enough to notice that. Tell me about magma funnels, all right, So so magma funnels this, This

is the this is the plume. I was talking about the way that the way this magma gets funneled up from the mantle or perhaps even lower down. So this is where we start getting into a lot of estimations. I mean, we were already talking about estimations of three to nine miles below the service or twelve to twenty eight miles below the service, And a lot of this is coming to us from seismic information that's been picked up over time, and we can learn a lot through

seismic data. We've talked about how sound travels at different speeds through different media, and by measuring that those differences, that's how we can figure out a lot of what is the composition underneath Yellows Ozone Park. So the Yellowstone hot spot plume is what connects the magma in the UH in the lower chamber to the mantle UH and then the lower chamber is attached to the upper chamber UM.

And remember the lower ones the bigger one. So the hot spot plume is probably around forty miles beneath the surface and extends downward to a depth of about four d forty miles in the Earth's mantle, although some estimates suggest that perhaps it goes all the way down to the Earth's core, so one thousand, eight hundred miles UM.

But it depends upon which model you're looking at. So one of the implications of this larger magma chamber that was discovered in April is that it could potentially feed magma into the upper chamber in the event of a

large scale eruption. So, in other words, imagine that you have a major eruption where that upper magma chamber, which can fill the Grand Canyon two and a half times over, erupt then gets refilled by the lower chamber, erupts again, then gets refilled by the lower because the lower chambers four point four times the size of the upper chamber. So you can essentially multiply that number by four and

say that that like super worst case scenario. And keep in mind, these eruptions can take place over the course of a very long time, like months. We're not talking about again, we're not talking about a single explosive event. An eruption can take place over a very long amount of time. Now, is it possible yes? Is it likely? No? So I wanted to mention that again, it is not likely to happen. But just for fun, let's talk about what a super volcanic eruption would look like. This fun.

I am using the word fun ironically. Uh So. The BBC reported that in the event of a super eruption, of people living within a thousand kilometers of the blast area could die from the eruptions straightaway. I just looked up on Google Maps. If we're within a thousand kilometers, we are well outside of a thousand kilometers of yea, so no problem. Yeah, because we're we're in Atlanta. That's really far away from Yelliston National Park. Uh yeah, no,

we are well outside of a thousand kilometers. But not to gloat or anything. Yeah, yeah, And and and a note here about this particular estimation. Uh Tobas seems to have been uninhabited by humans and other species of the Homo genus at the time of the eruption, So we don't have any kind of archaeological record of how a super volcanic eruption would directly affect even a proto civilization, right, so this is yeah, this is this is a guess. And then again it's it's BBC researchers who came up

with this number. And they I'm sure they consulted with lots of geology, right, but this has not come from the U S Geological Survey, which is the group that's in charge jo of actually looking into this here in the United States. Say, what do they have to say about this? Well, so they talked more about the ash dispersal, Like they don't spend a whole lot of time talking about the stuff that would happen in the immediately immediate

blast zone. But you know, they actually said that they ran computer models to see where ash would disperse around Yellowstone in the event of a super volcano eruption. And the reason they said they did it was they got tired of telling people we don't know, like, like, what would happen if the super volcano erupted? We don't know. Like after a while they said, we should probably find out. Yeah,

we'll do a couple of models. Will look Yeah. I can't imagine what it must be like to work there and get these kind of calls from various forms of the media, asking because I mean, it is a sensationalized story in many ways. And you could say, well, it's import because it has the potential to impact the entire world, and and it will happen at some point, so therefore, isn't it news worthy? The geologists are meanwhile, like I

need a drink. So in two thousand and fourteen, they ran a computer model to look at this, and they looked at different versions of the model, like one where an eruption would last for maybe a day or two, and one where it would last for a week, and one where it would last for an entire month, And they laid out a map of where the ash would disperse.

And the good news is their models found that the ash accumulation would actually be quote far less end quote than that predicted by numerous doomsday scenarios, but still enough to kill just about everybody in the United States eventually. Um. So, they found that ash from super eruptions gets distributed in a different way than ash from normal eruptions, and that's because the super eruption creates a number Brella cloud capable of pushing ash more than a thousand kilometers up wind,

so against the wind. Um. So, typically in a volcanic eruption, you would see the ash dispersal look like a fan extending from the volcano down wind. That's what it would normally look like. But with the super volcanoes, it looks more like a bull's eye, with the volcano in the center, a little bit of an off center bull's eye. It's still going to have more dispersal down wind than up wind, but the volcano will still be closer to the center

than at one end of the map. UH. And they said that a layer of ash ten centimeters thick or more could cover the area within five hundred miles of the eruption. UH And even in more distant regions, like say New York City, you would still get a dusting of volcanic ash. And this is serious stuff, guys. The ash is not like the ash you would find in your fireplace. Volcanic ash has tiny rocks in it um, and these tiny rocks can do a huge amount of damn.

So let's talk about some of the stuff that could happen. Alright, So the eruption would would contain dangerous particles and gases like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrochloric acid, and hydrofluoric acid. These are not great things for us to come into contact with. You don't really want to breathe them. Yeah, if you breathe in the particles, then you can have a lot of symptoms that are very similar to that

of the common cold. If it's a short term exposure, so we're talking coughing, sneezing, you know, running nose um, possibly developing ato bronchitis. If you have long term exposure, it can get it much worse. You can actually get damaged to your lungs. It can tear up the tissue in your lungs um. Also, there are a lot of people who talk about how if ash gets UH can combined with say uh fluid, it could essentially turn your lungs into concrete, which is very lovely to think about.

But it also can get in your eyes. It can cause your eyes to itch. You can also cause corneal abrasions, so damaging your eyes. Um, you would obviously if you were in an area where volcanic ash was falling, you would want a gas mask and goggles. I mean, you would want to be able to have some sort of filter um to filter out these particles and something protecting your eyes in this this sort of environment. Uh. It also can contaminate water supplies. Accumulation can lead to structural damage.

This stuff weighs more than say snow would and ten centimeters doesn't sound like a lot, but it's enough to collapse certain buildings roofs, so that's a big issue. Also, um, it can short out electrical transformers and plunge entire areas into blackout status, So that would be a real problem. And again, because we're talking about ash dispersing in a five hundred mile area around the supervolcano. At ten centimeters or so, that's enough to affect a huge amount of

the United States. Even on outlying areas like where we live, we it still get some ash and maybe enough for it to cause some serious problems if nothing else, contaminating water supplies and making it difficult to grow crops or raise livestock. Uh So, lots of effects there throughout the

entire United States. Even if we were somehow lucky with the weather patterns to avoid most of the ash, you still have the issue of entire areas of the country that we're dedicated to food production would be unable to do that for an indeterminate amount of time. Oh sure. And then again that the cooling effect of having those gases in the air would affect not just the United States, but potentially the whole world. Yeah, we're talking global impact

with this kind of level of eruption. So that cooling effect could be as according to the BBC, up to ten degrees And since it is the BBC, I'm guessing they're talking celsius because it's the BBC. Why would they speak in fahrenheit. Um. So, that kind of decrease could have that global food production, including things like stopping them monsoon season, which we could lead to vast areas of of of food just not growing and lead to starvation. So we're talking about uh, global devastation. I mean in

different ways. Like obviously the areas around the volcano would be physically devastated, and then other areas would be affected in a more long term fashion. Now, granted, this climate change would be temporary, particularly in the in the grand scheme of things, but we're talking still a period of like a decade and ten years. While short on a geological scale, that's a long time to go without being able to grow food effectively. So it could lead to

really big problems. And that leads us again to the question should we worry about this? And really the answer is not really. The odds of it have actually happening are so low that they're other things that we need to worry about. First. Um, it does mean that, you know, being aware of it tells us that eventually it will happen, so we have to have some sort of plan in place. But it's not like we have a sin submergency of guys, we need to figure out our supervolcano plan like tomorrow.

Yeah yeah. Like, like we said at the top of the show, the odds of something like this happening in any given year are only one in seven hundred thousand and and I know that that even to some people might say, well, wow, that's still like those odds. I don't like those at all, But that's probably because as human beings were really bad at conceptualizing these kind of odds, right, I mean, it's it. We're notoriously terrible about it, to the point where why people go to casinos. Yeah, it's

it's why. It's why people, you know, ignore statistics about how likely they are to get in a car accident versus an airplane accident. You know, it's it's we're bad at it because it's difficult for us to think in those terms. And when I say we, I mean me too. I'm the same way. I I fall into the same traps as everybody else. Anything interesting sounds more dangerous to essentially Yeah, well, I mean the most interesting man the world is pop probably the most dangerous one too. I

mean I haven't asked him. I'm scared. But uh, yeah, so that there are definitely reasons why we need to think about it, and we need to plan for things, and really we just need to make a better world in general, and for multiple reasons. But one of them is because it would help us in the in the

case of a supervolcanic eruption. Uh. In fact, the folks that Yellowstone say that it's far more likely that we'll see small eruptions ones that would not not even raise a blip on on anything beyond the regional scale, And even for regional it might just mean that certain parts of the park are closed off due to lava flow, and that this will probably happen over the course of several hundred years where it starts to you know, it relieves bits of pressure, and that the pressure does not

continuously build up to super eruption levels. If that were to happen, it would be preceded by earthquakes, likely for weeks or maybe even months before any kind of other event, So we would have lots of warning signs before there was ever any kind of super volcanic eruption. Uh. And once those warning sides happened, then it would become really important for us to decide what happens next. Because I mean, even if you if you discount the global impact, which

really shouldn't do. But even if if as Americans, we say, look, we're just really concerned about what's going to happen to us right now. We'll have to worry about the rest of the world later, this would be obviously a huge blow to national security, right, I mean, the United States would effectively not be the US anymore in the wake of something like this, if it were to have the uh,

the far reaching consequences that we've talked about. So if we were to see those kind of early warning signs, we would have some very serious conversations very very quickly. But again, the likelihood of it happening is so low that you know, it's I feel pretty comfortable saying it's not going to happen within my lifetime, or at least the odds are astronomical that it would happen within my lifetime. So that's your problem. Guys, who's who's old guy? Now?

Keep on joking about old I am. I'm going to be dead before I have to worry about this. So you're the one who makes all the jokes about that. Yeah, I mean I've done it, like to come on, see you see how it's all coming out. Now. See it's a defense mechanism. People. If I make the jokes that it heads them off of the pass. How often do you dream of us being thrown into a volcano by us? I mean the younger generations. Do day dreams count because

it would make the number higher? Um, all right, So it also depends on how long I'm waiting for my tacos. There's a lot of imaginary throwing people into volcanoes when I'm waiting in line for tacos, all right, So yeah, I mean, come on, it's that's hanger right there. It can't be. It can't be held responsible for my day dreams. But this was actually really interesting to look into. It was one of those things I learned a lot looking into this, and and after having seen that that mini

series where I was like, well, that's absolutely terrifying. How how realistic is this and looking into it and thinking, all right, it's not realistic in the sense of it's not likely to happen, but the actual depiction of events

was pretty interesting and I think fairly accurate. I mean, obviously we didn't even cover how the particulates in the atmosphere would mean that we would see no no flights, like all flights would be grounded across all of North America and probably other areas around North America, but definitely

all of North America. No flights would be going in around So I mean, you know, it's it's pretty pretty phenomenal when you think about it, but again, not likely to happen if you want to hear about other things that aren't likely to happen. You should write us and tell us, or you just have an idea for a future episode. There's something that you've always wanted to learn more about, and we wonder why it's going to be like in the future. Send us a message. We love

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