Originally Posted By: Russ
Just received an email that indicates the Yellowstone Caldera is getting ready to pop. Since this would be an extinction level event, seems it would be hard to contain the info but it is what it is. Anyone else heard anything or is this just someone pushing this catastrophic possibility yet again.
The email linked to: Supervolcano activity in Yellowstone/

My friend thinks that because we're in SOCAL we should survive the Yellowstone Super-volcano cooking off. We may survive the initial blast, but what do our local earthquake faults do in reaction. I don't know, but medium to long term global winter comes to mind. Global warming? How about a prolonged cooling... Thoughts? Comments? Beating a dead horse?


I'd take that source with a boat load of salt. If the whole calderra went up, yes it would be very very serious with worldwide effects but E.L.E. is borderline mass hysteria! The volcano blew up before and guess what, much less of a die off than 65M years ago when Mexico was pummelled by a meteor. Secondly, the whole calderra doesn't alway blow. There have been many documented mini-blows and lava flows that are a lot more common than the big one. The number of small quakes is an indicator of activity. They had a flurry of small quakes in the caldera a few years ago and then quiet since then. You can go to the website and check into the monitoring activities yourself. If the underlying lava pool did burst you would see higher quake activity and a growing measuable lift to the caldera. The only relevant thing that has happened since that burst of activity a few years ago is that they have mapped the volume of the lava bubble more accurately and it appears to be much larger than first calculated.

Everything else - is just tabloid fodder.