Almost all scientists agree with this. One question is controversial: when will the Yellowstone supervolcano erupt?
Passions are heating up in the United States. Conspiracy theorists argue that the government is withholding information about the impending eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which could simply wipe America off the face of the planet. The authorities say there is nothing to fear yet. But there are facts that they cannot hide.
Back in the summer of 2017, scientists from NASA, the University of Cambridge, and the Australian Monash University announced that the supervolcano was on the verge of explosion. In March, an article was published that a team of researchers had discovered in Yellowstone Park a giant reservoir lying at a depth of only a few kilometers with magma ready to splash out. And finally, at the end of April, the world's largest geyser Steamboat ("Steamboat") came to life, splashing a stream of boiling water to a height of more than 100 meters. The April surge is the third in the past six weeks. Local residents are sure that the supervolcano shows that his patience is at the limit.
The giant in the land of the midgets
The term "supervolcano" refers to a special group of volcanoes. They were discovered in the 1970s. Then paleontologists realized: rhinos, camels, and turtles that inhabited North America 10 million years ago did not just die, but suffocated from volcanic gases and ash. Later, the culprit of the extinction itself was found - the Yellowstone supervolcano (Idaho, USA). A volcano that was mistaken for a picturesque valley and was assigned the category of a national park. Yellowstone became the first supervolcano found on earth.
An ordinary volcano differs from a supervolcano in about the same way as a pistol is from a cannon. The supervolcano is not a mountain, but a giant depression called a caldera that replaces a crater. It does not erupt, but explodes, and the explosion is more powerful than ordinary eruptions by many thousand times. In strength and consequences, it is equal to the impact of a large asteroid. Fortunately, there are far fewer supervolcanoes on earth than ordinary volcanoes, and they explode much less often.
The last was the eruption of the Taupo supervolcano in New Zealand 26.5 thousand years ago. An even more grandiose cataclysm occurred 48 thousand years before Taupo, when Toba rushed to Sumatra. The ash thrown into the atmosphere created a night on the planet that lasted six months. Scientists claim that this eruption in the evolutionary terms threw the earth back 2 million years ago. Winter has begun on the planet. The average temperature dropped by 11 degrees, killing five out of every six creatures inhabiting the earth.
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Year x - 2074?
But Toba is not the largest of the supervolcanoes. Yellowstone (translated from English - "yellow stone") exceeds it in all respects three times. The caldera of this supervolcano has an area of 3825 sq. km, these are almost two Moscow within the new borders. The magma reservoir is located very close to the earth's surface, at a depth of 8 kilometers.
Scientists from the US Geological Society have established that the activity of the Yellowstone supervolcano is cyclical: it has already erupted 2 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago and 630 thousand years ago. It is easy to calculate that with such a periodicity, the time of the next explosion has already come.
British geologist, head of the Center for the Study of Natural Disasters, Bill McGuire said that, according to his calculations, Yellowstone should explode in 2074. Some believe that this may happen much earlier. Volcanologists working in the park recently prepared a report for the US Congress, which was immediately classified. Americans living near the park claim that the authorities constantly underestimate the magnitude of earthquakes that are frequent in these places, and some of them are generally hidden. Over the past year, several thousand tremors have been officially registered in Yellowstone. Although the local population, conducting surveillance on their own, claims that there were 10 times more of them. The fourth major crack has cut through the caldera, and now, on satellite images, its surface resembles broken glass.
World catastrophe
The scenarios according to which the events will develop have already been calculated. A few days before the explosion, the earth's crust will rise several meters, the soil will heat up to 60 - 70 degrees. The explosion will throw out streams of hot magma to a height of more than 50 km and will be accompanied by a powerful earthquake, which will be felt in all parts of the planet. In the first minutes, almost all living things within a radius of more than 1200 km will be destroyed. The streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles will be filled with one and a half meter snowdrifts of volcanic slag. The entire US West Coast will become a dead zone.
The earthquake will provoke the eruption of several dozen ordinary volcanoes in all parts of the world. The eruptions of oceanic volcanoes will create tsunamis that wash away Pacific and Atlantic coastal cities.
Acid rains will start pouring in a day, which will destroy most of the vegetation. The ozone hole over the mainland will grow to unimaginable sizes, and everyone who has not been destroyed by ash and acid will fall victim to solar radiation. Nordic countries (such as Finland or Sweden) will simply cease to exist. A cold snap and earthquakes will disable most of the pipelines, power lines, railways and highways.
India and China will be the hardest hit. Here, up to 1.5 billion people will die of hunger in the first months. In total, more than 2 billion will die as a result of the cataclysm. The least affected will be the seismically stable Siberia and the European part of Russia located in the interior of the continent. The duration of the winter will be 4 years. Over the course of a century, humanity has been degrading and will begin life in a new way. If he survives at all …
EXPERT OPINION
The forces of man and nature are too unequal
We asked Pavel Plechov, professor of the Geological Faculty of Moscow State University, a few questions.
- Can we at least roughly guess when the Yellowstone supervolcano will explode?
- There are three types of forecasts - long-term, medium-term and short-term. For the Yellowstone point, it is obvious that someday there will be more than one catastrophic eruption. There have been many of them over the past 16 million years. This is a long-term forecast. There will be no eruption in the next three months. This is a short term forecast. The whole discussion is now about the mid-term forecast. There is an opinion that the eruption can occur in the next thousand years, but there is an opinion that it is necessary to wait 1 - 2 million years until the next eruption. Both have their own arguments. I think that the next eruption in the Yellowstone area will be in the next tens or hundreds of years, but it will not be catastrophic.
- Can we somehow prevent the impending disaster?
- Attempts to prevent or mitigate a catastrophic eruption can backfire. The forces of nature and man are too unequal in such processes.
- How true are the scenarios of the consequences of the explosion of the supervolcano?
- The worst thing that can happen during the eruption of even a small supervolcano is sudden temperature fluctuations. Cooling even by half a degree on a planetary scale leads to a very sharp redistribution of air masses. These are hurricanes, catastrophic precipitation and so on. Even now, global warming is causing surprisingly severe droughts in Australia, followed by tornadoes and hurricanes. The eruption of the Tambor volcano occurred in 1815, and 1816 was described in literature as a year without summer. It seems that a drop in temperature by a fraction of a degree is not much, but then there were snowfalls in summer, total crop failures, floods.
One of the supervolcanoes - in Kamchatka
Nearly 20 supervolcanoes have now been precisely located. Among them are several European monsters. The largest is located near Naples, the second is on the Greek island of Kos. In 2007, Russian volcanologists found an ancient supervolcano in Kamchatka, 50 km from Petropavlovsk. They named him Karymshina. Its caldera is about 35 km long. Scientists do not predict the release of Karymshina's ash into the atmosphere.
KONSTANTIN DUNAEVSKY