Creepy geological news from Yellowstone...

[robotech_master]

Geologists speculate that Yellowstone Park may soon (and not just in geological terms) be the site of a gigantic volcanic eruption. Possible effects including the deaths of "everything living within a 600 mile radius". Apparently the volcano's ~40,000 years overdue, and there's a lot of suspicious geological activity going on.

Color me creeped out.

Comments

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is pretty damn creepy. But it's also a bit hard to believe.

600 miles? That wipes out the entire state of Wyoming, and a good majority of most of the states that surround it. It's over a million square miles of America - and I don't think we can quite evacuate that much of the country on a 'maybe'.

They say some geologists say that it will be 600 - what do most of the geologists think?

[foomf.livejournal.com]

About three years ago Discovery Channel did a show titled "Supervolcanoes".

If I recall, they said that Yellowstone had an eruption cycle much shorter than 600 million years, and they cited mitochondrial DNA evidence that there were about 10 common 'foremothers' for the human race converging around the time of the last eruption of Yellowstone.
There are also three or four other supervolcanoes that are in the 'almost ready to go off' stage throughout the world.

So. I'd look around for additional information.

The universe is just f---ing with us.

[arconius.livejournal.com]

I'm not a geologist but I know enough about volcanoes to know how nasty the really big ones are. I wonder if this is part of the motivation behind Bush's sudden push to get the space colonization plan going again. Then they could rule from afar while the rest of us blow up. :P

Try not to panic too much, it's just another disaster that could cause a mass extinction in a heartbeat, just like meteor impacts and comets and nukes and all this other stuff that the universe is capable of throwing at us and which there's not a whole lot we can do about except get ourselves onto multiple planets so we can last a little bit longer.

Still, there's always the chance you could be one of the lucky few thousand humans to survive the whole cataclysm, so brush up on your post-civilization hunter-gatherer skills.