The Yellowstone cycle of dumb begins anew.
1. Minor uplift and or earthquake
2. Someone on the internet notices
3. Hysteria, conspiracy, and ridiculousness
4. Scientists facepalm, rend their hair, wreck their edges, and sob.
So there are two things that have happened. One, a persistent swarm of tectonic quakes within Yellowstone National Park (these happen all the time). Two, a sizeable earthquake happened in Montana yesterday morning and it was widely felt across several US states and Canadian provinces.
The hysteria usually takes a few days to build (although, thanks a fucking lot, Newsweek!) so I thought I’d get out in front this time (like others are), and probably not as ranty as the last time I wrote about this.
So, the quake.
Montana isn’t exactly known for earthquakes, but it is indeed earthquake country, as is the entire Intermountain West. Rare, as yesterday’s rattler was, does not mean impossible. Helena, MT got wrecked by a couple in 1935, for example.
The quake also was not the result of the volcano that is Yellowstone either. Nor will it trigger it—its epicenter was over 200 miles away from Yellowstone and far, far larger earthquakes have occurred near the park itself. We’re still here.
So, the volcano
Guess what? It’s not going to erupt.
If you didn’t know that Yellowstone is a volcano, a big giant ass volcano, surprise! It is. Here’s what I wrote about it in 2014:
YES. IT IS A VOLCANO. AND A REALLY BIG ONE. That’s true. How’d a big-ass volcano get into Montana and Wyoming? Well, technically, it didn’t. Wyoming and Montana came to it.
Yellowstone sits on top of a hotspot. As North America has slowly moved generally westward relative to other tectonic plates, the hotspot has dragged itself under the North American continent. It’s left a clear path too, the Snake River Plain is evidence it was there. This process took millions of years, and as North America continues its trek westward, the hot spot will appear to move generally eastward relative to it. It’s actually not really moving. Hotspots are (relatively) stationary plumes that erupt upward from the mantle. I say relatively because, well, they might also be in motion relative to other hotspots.
It’s also had some spectacular eruptions over the last million or so years. Three, to be exact, that covered North America with ash. Because there’s a timing between the three, there’s lots of people who think, well, Yellowstone is “overdue,” and there’s lots of other people who have made a cottage industry at fooling these people with fake news.
Like, if someone sends you a picture of buffalo running out of the park (this is happening now and did in 2014) and you believe it shows they’re self-evacuating? Guess what you just fell for? Fake fucking news.
If someone tells you that the USGS hides earthquakes so that the public “doesn’t panic” over Yellowstone and you believe them (in 2014, it was because Obama, I can just as easily see this happening because Trump, or because “Trump hasn’t fired the burrowed-in Obama trolls"), guess what breh, you fell for fake news.
If you saw it on YouTube from a dude who says he can predict earthquakes (he can’t, no one can, and this will likely remain impossible), guess what, you fell for fake news. Oh and that dude says NEXRAD radar sends tornadoes into cities (it doesn’t) so….if you believe anything he says, you’re falling for fake news.
But why isn’t it going to erupt? Since the last time I ranted about this in 2014, some new science has come out. Most of Yellowstone’s giant magma chamber, which is bigger than expected, is not even molten enough to be eruptible.
Now, before people get all uppity about that, this is what you might expect if you consider how much North America has moved since the last large eruption (~640,000 years ago). The Yellowstone hotspot is stationary and North America is moving across it, burning a path known as a hotspot track. As time goes by, the focus of magmatism at Yellowstone should be moving to the northwest.
Overall, Farrell and others (2014) think that the total volume of the Yellowstone magmatic system is ~200-600 cubic kilometers of melt (the range reflects the uncertainties in their models), which is much more melt than previous estimates. That sounds like a lot ... and it is. This volume is smaller that two of the three largest Yellowstone eruptions, but within range of the 1.3 million-year-old Mesa Falls Tuff that erupted ~280 cubic kilometers of rhyolite ash and volcanic debris.
However, there is a big catch. Farrell and others (2014) estimate that this melt is stored in a mush that is only 5-15% molten – that is to say, 85-95% of the reservoir is solid. This makes all that magma extremely difficult to mobilize to eruption, as mushes will likely behave like a solid until ~40% melt. This new estimate is also much lower than the previous estimate that was ~32% melt. This means that Yellowstone is far below the bar for an eruption based on new models of buoyancy-driven eruptions.
In short, it’s an interesting geologic formation, and it might go poot-poot sometime, and never ever swim in the hot springs because you’ll die and then your body will melt away, but it won’t end civilization.
There’s also really no such thing as overdue at least in the way laypeople understand, and it’d be nice to quit hearing it, since the earth does not work on a clock.
I also have to note and ask—what is this need for the US to host a giant supervolcano that could end civilization? For one thing, there’s more than one supervolcano within the US’s borders (Long Valley in CA? La Garita in Colorado?) But this supervolcano , as more science comes out, looks like it’s probably about done. North America will, over the next million or so years, drag itself westward so that the hotspot ends up under some pretty solid crust and ain’t nothing punching out from under that. That said, the Discovery Channel movie “Supervolcano” is actually not bad and its science is decent for a movie of that genre. You can find it on Netflix last I checked.
This is a weird case of American exceptionalism, I think. There are far scarier super volcanoes. Like Uturunku in the Bolivian Andes, where an area some 43 square miles in diameter is inflating like a balloon according to satellite measurements. Tropical volcanoes like Uturunku can far more easily affect the climates of both the northern and southern hemisphere.
Taupo on the north island of New Zealand is another scary supervolcano. You’ll have seen the landscape before if you saw any of the Lord of the Rings movies. Its last eruption in 180CE turned the skies red planet-wide. Oh, and Auckland is BUILT on a volcano. Sumatra’s spine is nothing but volcanoes, some of which we know nothing about. Ioto (Iwo Jima) apparently has risen so much that the original beach where US military forces landed in World War 2 is now 17 meters above current sea-level. And more. Click here.
And while the science behind the alleged human bottleneck that occurred after Mt. Toba in Sumatra is now considered iffy (some popsci is, well, “fake news"!) an eruption of that scale can indeed be a really bad thing for civilization. Oh and Toba still has potential.
In short, Yellowstone ain’t it. Quit worrying about it, and don’t believe the hype.