Yellowstone Volcanic Explosions

Here’s the scenario in a nutshell; Yellowstone is a supervolcano that is overdue to explode. Such an explosion would devastate life and property for a 600 mile square radius and possibly alter weather patterns in dangerous and dramatic ways (think ‘nuclear winter’ as one possibility). This scenario has spawned a recent television dramatization of a future violent eruption of the supervolcano, educational television programs, and several different speculations about the worst case scenario. The internet abounds with these speculative suggestions; often based on ill-informed conjectures or questionable interpretations of prophesies and psychic visions.
You may think that those of us living anywhere within 600 miles of the Yellowstone area are brave, crazy, stupid, or ignorant of the fact that an explosion is well overdue. A similar opinion holds for some of us in Montana and Wyoming about the people who live in California or nearany beach in Hurricane Alley. The idea of Los Angeles sliding into the ocean during or after a catastrophic earthquake has been around for decades,and yet it hasn’t happened yet. The worst type of explosion possible is a caldera-forming explosion, which is also the least likely to occur at anytime, let alone anytime soon if specific seismographic data is to be taken seriously.

The consensus among the scientists doing the observations in Yellowstone is that a devastating explosion, while always possible, is not likely anytime soon. Many believe that the volcano will not explode again with the kind of violence suggested in the worst-case scenario, or that it is still along way off time-wise. The suggestion that a caldera-forming explosion is overdue is incorrect. Unlike Old Faithful,a large geiser in Yellowstone known for its regularity in going off,the biggest explosion of a supervolcano is not a regular matter. It happens when its ready to happen and is not predictable given the sparse data of the last few times it has occurred. However, if the amount of time in between eruptions is taken as a standard, scientists suggest the next explosion won’t be ‘past due’ until 90,000 years from now. Certainly,it feels relatively close compared to the overall timeframe, but our successors will have to through the entire commonly-accepted historyof mankind nine times before that figure exhausts itself. A caldera-forming explosion has happened three verifiable times in the last several million years. One happened 2.1 million years ago, another 1.3 million years ago, and another .64 million years ago. Any simple number-crunching for recurrence shows that the next event isn’t scheduled for a while.
The two types of explosions that are likely are not the biggest kind, and are relatively minor in their scope. The most like type is hydrothermal, and while violent, not nearly as devastating as a caldera-forming explosion. The second most likely volcanic explosion could be devastating, although not to the extent of a caldera-forming explosion. This would likely produce lava, ash, and other things regularly associated with volcanic explosions. This type too, is not as devastating as a caldera-forming explosion, which is by far the least likely to occur anytime soon. It is also not true that volcanic activity is greater in Yellowstone today than it has been in the past, as some suggest to support the theory of an immanent explosion.

We all understand our curiousity with natural disasters, although few of us would like to be involved in one. Although the Yellowstone Supervolcano is not current a likely one for the near future, it is almost always a possibility. If such an explosion were to happen, the devastation caused would pale any comparisons to other known disasters in the span of human history-possible sinkings of large land-masses like Atlantis excepted. A caldera-forming explosion in Yellowstone is too large and devastating to even worry about. There is little we could do to stave off such an explosion, and even if nobody lived near the supervolcano, its effects would likely cause extreme damage to mankind across the globe. There is currently no technology to deal with the possibility-a volcano cannot be drained like an abscessed tooth. That being the case, it’s better to go back to worrying about alien invasions or asteroids from space. Besides, those disasters make better movies.