Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: karajorma on March 14, 2005, 05:21:44 pm
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For the merkins and other non brits the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/supervolcano/index.shtml) just did a four part series on what it would be like if the Yellowstone supervolcano went off. Two were a drama based on it and each part was followed by the science show on BBC2.
It was actually pretty good I thought. I loved the way that for once the main character wasn't a Cassandra character warning everyone about the impending doom that was coming.
You did have to wonder why the US Geological Survey was almost completely staffed by brits though. :)
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Top stuff! :yes:
And scary as hell :eek2:
Poor America!...:(
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Its on here sometime in April so i'll be recording it on my brother's PC. As long as his hard-drive isn't full of the new southpark episodes.
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The Yellowstone Supervolcano, or God's Toilet Lever.
Couldn't resist. :lol:
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Missed both of 'em. Brother's birthday meal thingy on Sunday night, and kung fu training monday night. Most annoying, as I wanted to see it, and our old video recorder is knackered. :doubt:
I'll see if I can find a torrent or something....
Yellowstone and the Canary Islands collapse will make a nice mess of America (and the rest of the world as well tbh) when they do happen.....
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Hmm. I should keep an eye out for it.
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For those of us who didn't/will probably never see it, what's the predicted outcome? Half of the US turned into a smoldering lava lake?
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IIRC it was 22 million US casualties within the first month and a global winter/drought lasting 5 or so years.
The deaths from the pyroclastic flows would actually be a fairly small proportion of that (less than 100,000). Most people would be killed by the ash (which would fall as far away as New York). Either from it building up on roofs and collapsing them, from mudslides as soon as it rained or from suffocation/health problems caused by breathing it in.
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there's also a supervolcano in Malaysia. It went off sometime during the early ages of man, and it reduced the world population to about 75,000. That's some scary stuff when you think about that we have to worry about such things.
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<<; About time we either make some underground cities/bases (Jaburo!) or expand to the moon and other places, eh?
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Originally posted by InfernoGod
there's also a supervolcano in Malaysia. It went off sometime during the early ages of man, and it reduced the world population to about 75,000. That's some scary stuff when you think about that we have to worry about such things.
Just to set you straight. Toba is in Indonesia, It went up ~74,000 years ago and it reduced the population to 5000-10,000 or so humans on the entire planet.
Personally although Yellowstone is scary I'm not worried about it cause there's litttle we could do about it and the scientists all seem to agree that it's unlikely that an erruption is imminent.
In the show at one point the head geologist said that the chances of an erruption were roughly equivalent to being hit by an asteroid. I worry about that more. Earth gets hit by an asteroid with the power of small nuke every 50 years or so. And it's been 75 years since the last one (Although we have had a couple of very near misses).
That worries me more.
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I remember reading about Yellowstone in a book; apparently the (um, geological terms fail me) appropriate chambers are crystallizing and releasing volatiles, whereas you need to trap them to have an eruption. The other thing is that these eruptions might occur in 'bursts', and then spend a long time dormant, and then in more bursts; so we might be in a long dormant time (I think the records for Yellowstone in particular only are calculated for a relatively short time in geological terms...).
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I took a quick look at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatories homepage (seems they loved the show too BTW :D ) and according to that the hotspot that has filled the magma chamber below Yellowstone is also responsible for 10-15 other supervolcano eruptions in the last 16.5 million years.
So its obvious that they haven't been occuring at 600,000 year intervals for a long time. What we can say of course is that sooner or later there will be another supervolcanic eruption.
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I understood that it was overdue but maybe that was just my take on what they said...
But the ash is the real killer - it would basically move all the way across to the Eastern Seaboard and beyond, depending on the scale of ejection, it could cross the Atlantic and cover a good part of Europe as well. It looks like nothing much - grey snow, but it is highly invasive and abrasive. So if you breath it in, it turns to a form of concrete in your lungs and you choke to death. If it lands on a roof, it can build up enough weight to collapse the building. And also it is fine enough to get into every piece of electronic and mechanical equipment causing catastrophic failure in most cases.
Also, there could be a Global Winter from ejected gases settling in the ozone layer and blocking sunlight. Temperatures would drop by 16C and basically, nothing would grow pretty much anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere - this is where you may get deaths in the billions as food runs out everywhere. It would take some time to clear: The after effects (dust causing spectacular sunsets) from Krakatoa lasted five years
By the way, the best guess for the force of this event is 2,500 times that of Mt St Helens, or 1,000 Hiroshima-size nukes every second! It would be pretty spectacular by anyone's standard...
Lava eruptions are quite different it seems. You can out-run them on foot, but the explosive type can actually travel faster than sound! 700mph+ which is a tough break if you live within 100 miles of Yellowstone.
All in all, it was a pretty good drama and seeing all the vents in a huge ring spouting lava, rocks, and dust was impressive too. Good job by the Beeb I think.
:yes:
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They think it might be overdue based on the pattern of previous eruptions; but that doesn't mean the observed pattern is the actual pattern... even a 16.5 million year record isn't all that representative on a planet billions of years old, after all.
I remember reading someone at Yellowstone saying exactly the same thing; in Bill Brysons 'A short history of nearly everything' book, which is really good BTW.
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Yeah, I suppose..
It's one of those 'tomorrow or in 10,000 years' kind of things...
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Hmm, can't help but wish I could live in complete and utter ignorance of all this, wouldn't life be so much better? (Short as it will be).
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Originally posted by Fergus
Hmm, can't help but wish I could live in complete and utter ignorance of all this, wouldn't life be so much better? (Short as it will be).
Just don't bother thinking about it. Nothing you can do, so who cares? We could all be dead tomorrow from an asteroid, a giant rock in the Canary Islands, or even an alien attack. :p Once again, nothing to do about it, so just live life as usual.
Speaking about "not being able to do anything about it," though, is this statement really true? Obviously, this is way out in the realm of science fiction right now, but in 500 years, could we have the technology to stop or greatly mitigate the effects of such an eruption? That's something I never hear about in all of these disaster reports. You'd think at least one scientist out there would be theorizing about methods of releasing a pressure buildup under Yellowstone in very gradual stages; there are already theories about breaking up/diverting planet-killer asteroids, for instance. True, there's no practical use for such theories at present, but I'd still like at least a small part of the scientific community to start thinking about these things, instead of saying, "We're all screwed." :p
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The asteroid strikes I was on about are from asteroids about 10-100m in size. We could do something about them now.
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But that would suck. I want all that to happen, I want to see it :p
Wipping away half of humanity wouldn't be such a bad thing anyway, if you ask me. "evil laugh"
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That would depend on which half.
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Well, the other half, of course :D
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It could be far worse, your planet could be scheduled for demolition.
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In 500 Years Yellowstone prolly wouldn't be such a big problem as humanity will porbably move outside the solar system...Or at least outside just Earth.
If it erupts now, we're screwed.
Strangely, it allmost screams poethic justice.. Humanity has been fighting nature (to be more specific - polluted the enviromenrt, killed animals, etc..) for centuries.
to be dealt such a blow by nature..I kinda think we deserved it. America the most, so I'm glad it's there and not somewhere else.
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Originally posted by vyper
It could be far worse, your planet could be scheduled for demolition.
Who says it isn't? Have you been to the local Planning Dept in Alpha Centauri?
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Originally posted by TrashMan
America the most, so I'm glad it's there and not somewhere else.
Oh yeah, mean old America deserves a supervolcano eruption. "Glad it's there"? Wow, really enlightened of you. :rolleyes:
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you can tell he's smarter than us because he thinks humanity getting anihalated by a supervolcano is a good thing :nod:
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Was it on tv? I don't know why but things like, Cat. 5 Hurricanes, F5 tornados, 500 foot tall Tsunamis, MM.XII Earthquakes and Super Volcanos intrest me.:D
*Looks at name.... Wait I do know why.:)
*counts down time till Tornado and Hurricane season.
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Strangely, it allmost screams poethic justice.. Humanity has been fighting nature (to be more specific - polluted the enviromenrt, killed animals, etc..) for centuries.
to be dealt such a blow by nature..I kinda think we deserved it.
We are nature. We originated in this universe; everything we do is enescapably part of nature. If we destroy this planet, nature destroyed it, and I get the feeling that nature doesn't really give a **** if one of its planets gets taken over by one species.
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Originally posted by TrashMan
Strangely, it allmost screams poethic justice.. Humanity has been fighting nature (to be more specific - polluted the enviromenrt, killed animals, etc..) for centuries.
to be dealt such a blow by nature..I kinda think we deserved it. America the most, so I'm glad it's there and not somewhere else.
To be fair, we've poluted nature for only about one century and a half., and been killing animals over reproduction rates for a bit more than two centuries
And as for the "I'm glad it's there and not somewhere else", don't dream, there's others in other parts of the world :p
WOuld be funky if one actually blew up and started some planet-scale chain reaction :p
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Originally posted by WeatherOp
Was it on tv? I don't know why but things like, Cat. 5 Hurricanes, F5 tornados, 500 foot tall Tsunamis, MM.XII Earthquakes and Super Volcanos intrest me.:D
It was on British TV. Discovery channel gets it in April though :)
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Originally posted by Ford Prefect
We are nature. We originated in this universe; everything we do is enescapably part of nature. If we destroy this planet, nature destroyed it, and I get the feeling that nature doesn't really give a **** if one of its planets gets taken over by one species.
No, we are a PART of the nature...A rather misguided part.
So just like ahuman is part of humanity and can destroy humanity, so is humanity a part of nature and can destroy it...even if he destroyes himself in the process...
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I think you're missing my point. If we are part of nature, it's impossible for us to be "misguided", because anything and everything we do is permitted by nature.
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That is justification for breaking the planet? We only have one you know, there are no back-ups...
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what? you think were going to strip the oxygen out of the air or something, we might make it less pleasent, but short of the discussion in the other thread about colapseing the planet into a miniture black hole, there is no way were going to destroy all life on earth, or "break" it.
were just doing what come natural to us like every other liveing thing on the planet. just for some reason a few people in the last few decades have decided thats a reason to hate our selves over. animals go extinct all the time, oftine becase a new animal comes about and alters the environment, those animals incapable of adapting to the new environment die out, that's evolution, that's nature.
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I think it's quite possible that we could destroy all life on earth by accident, or Nature could do it to us..
What I was trying to point out was that not everything we do is 'natural' Like nuclear weapons for example, it's pretty unlikely that Nature would create them, so blowing up half the planet in a nuclear war would not be classed as evolution or a natural event.
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Originally posted by Clave
Like nuclear weapons for example, it's pretty unlikely that Nature would create them, so blowing up half the planet in a nuclear war would not be classed as evolution or a natural event.
Well it's not a natural nuclear weapon but you might want to look at this (http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml)
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Originally posted by Ford Prefect
I think you're missing my point. If we are part of nature, it's impossible for us to be "misguided", because anything and everything we do is permitted by nature.
Your point is - If we're part of nature everything we do is then natural?
Totaly flawed. You can just say that since a man is part of humanity, everything ANY man does is humane (like for instance, - concetration camps, mass executions and various crimes against humanity)
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"Humane" is not an objective term; whatever a human does is not necessarily humane, but it is by definition human. There's also another important distinction. Humans are sentient, nature as a whole is not. What an individual human does will cause an emotional reaction from those around him/her. But what we as a species do with our surroundings isn't going to cause nature any distress because it's not a conscious being.
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yeah nature doesn't ever dable in nuclear energy... I think I'm going to go outside now, its a nice suny day.
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Sun? What is this sun you speak of? *looks out window and hisses, boarding it up*
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Man can't kill nature, but man can kill man.
(and that, incidentally, is the whole point of environmentalism - trying not to **** up the planet to a degree which we as a species can no longer live within it... even if we nuked it now, there'd still be some form of life surviving, maybe re-evolving over the next xx millions years)
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maybe it started off as that, but now it's just an excuse for people to hate.
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Nope that's what some of it still is.
It's just that there's no cause so right that you'll won't find an idiot following it.
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I can accept 'some of it'.
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It's funny how people think you can keep taking stuff away from a finite resource and it will never run out..