Have I ever mentioned the massive supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park? If it erupts it would cover the entire United States in a poisonous cloud of ash making it impossible to breath, and probably cause the global extinction of all higher life forms on earth.

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0934771320071109?pageNumber=1

This (see above article) is a troubling sign. No one has ever been present to see what a supervolcano looks like right before the eruption, so claiming there would be a lot of warning from seismic activity beforehand as the University of Utah does may not be that accurate, and also they claim that the caldera's eruption cycle is unpredictable and the three previous eruptions do not constitute a pattern, although one must agree that it is somewhat obvious that there is a lot of pressure building up under Yellowstone right now and that it has been more than 60,000 years since the last eruption.

So Carpe Diem! One can't take life for granted.

Dangit, Will, you're detracting from REAL problems, like the Hollywood writer's strike causing people to have to watch re-runs!

Did you see the super volcano docu-drama that was aired about a year ago - basically about this scenario. It was a really poorly done movie, but was based on a smattering of scientific fact.

Not quite. Air pollution floats daily from China to San Fransico, and similarly the air in America is usually circulated by zonal winds, which is why Arizona does not recieve moisture from the east and instead has desertification due to it's western mountain ranges orthographically blocking all of the water vapor from the Pacific ocean. The science models are not really taking these effects into account very well, and even if America somehow shifted it's dispersal pattern Des Moines would still be at the perimeter of the toxin cloud. (see slide 11)

Also there is the problem that of the 11200 billion cubic yards of volcanic ash
released all of it will be deadly. Breathing in superheated carbon and sulpher is the same as inhaling tiny glass shards, they rupture the oxygen sacs in your lungs and you die from even a little exposure, so even if it wasn't "impossible" to breath in a lung-full of air now and then, near the cloud you wouldn't be celebrating this fact so much as lying on the ground drowning in your own blood. (sorry Tiffany )

Secondly "'Volcanologists with the U.S. Geological Survey believe that supervolcanoes are likely to give decades — even centuries — of warning signs before they erupt"

based on what the have experienced with normal volcanoes, which are shaped differently, caused by different reasons, and have occured in very different places than the supervolcanos. What the scientists are banking on is that when the magma begins eating its way through the top layers of Utah groundsoil that it is going to do so slowly, and pretty much like a cork getting blown off like a normal volcano instead of a bubble popping or a egg hatching. There is at least one study showing that the crust may be compromising unexpectedly now "Uplift in this relatively confined area may have opened new underground passages for steam and superheated water, causing the unusual geyser activity. " so their models may be completely incorrect, as they were with Mt. St. Helens and Popacatapetl. The history of Volcanology isn't exactly a collection of wonderful success stories

WE ARE DOOMED!!!!!!! (at some point in the next fifty years probably)

I have heard about this... I actually had to try to comfort a 5th grader telling him it was NOT the apocolypse, and he was not going to die after he heard about this volcano.

I'm drunk
Those two bottles of wine between us were great

Water, yes

I have the hic'em'ups

don't forget killer asteroids. NASA just came under attack again for doing nothing to detect them or planning to stop them

Sorry, I should save this for anothe rpost

see...this is what happens when you get a laptop...and get drunk...

Fantasia was right! lol

So, you're saying that Holly killed the dinosaurs?

This may sound weird, but you must be used to that from me by now. If we are all going to die in some sorta cataclysm, I have always hoped that some super massive natural disaster would destroy everything so I wouldn't feel guilty about us doing it. Even though I'd be dead. When I first heard about the volcano under yellowstone I got excited, but after a few years people started discounting it being ready to pop at any moment like I originally heard. So now, I guess it's a matter of acedemics vs the unknown determinism, but If we are really all going to die I'd rather it be something like that. Massive collision would be my first choice, with the point of impact on something ironic.

Hahaha, actually I was thinking something more along the lines of



But, whatever floats your boat. :-D

No more Pope jokes!

Wow, there's a whole domain devoted to pope jokes...

Did you hear what happened when the Pope went to Mt. Olive? Yeah, Popeye beat the Hell out of him!

popejoke.com

p.s. That is like one of the worst web sites ever. It's almost as bad as the dsm register site.