April 13, 2017 • 30 mins
Until recently, volcanologists thought supervolcanoes were simply massive volcanoes. But further research has revealed that they are far different - and far more dangerous - than previously imagined.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So
Stuff you Should Know. Super Bowl, okay, supervolcano? Was that?
(00:26):
What was that? Do you know what that was? Oh? Geez,
you and that song. I can't help it. For nine
years you've been Holman the Final Countdown by Europe. Not
every oh, I don't know, every three months or so,
it's the world years. It's the world's most effective earworm.
(00:48):
Do you do that to you? Me? With the final Countdown?
She's like, it doesn't get to her. It bounces right off.
She's like, try your worst. Um, super volcanoes. If you
listen to volcanoes, well we did that one, yeah, or
our Yellowstone or I guess it was Geyser's Nature's Innuendo.
(01:11):
That was a great title. Um. Then some of this
might seem a little bit familiar, but why not to
cover it as its own thing? Well, it is its
own thing. They're starting to figure out. Yeah, Like this
article even says don't even think of it as a
amped up volcano. It says stop stop. They should call
it something else, then they really should. I mean that
(01:32):
you can make a case that, yes, it's calling it
a super volcano. It does make sense in a way, um,
because it is obviously magma pushing up through the earth. Uh.
But that's pretty much where the comparisons end, and that
that's that's a pretty deep comparison between a volcano and
a super volcano. But there's a lot of different stuff
(01:56):
going on. And the more we look into these things that, frankly,
the scarier they become. Yeah, I mean, right out of
the gate. One of the big things that is different
from a volcano is a volcano is usually like a
mountain that you can look at with smoke coming out
of it and point to you can keep an eye
on it. In other words, yeah, and whereas a super
volcano is usually categorized by a big depression in the
(02:19):
earth from a past explosion, like a crater or something. Yeah,
or it might be like nothing, that crater might be
fully filled in by this point, might be a forest,
It could be Um, it could be a hot spot
like a yellow Stone as we'll see, where there are
is a lot of geysers and hot springs. But the
point is is it's a A super volcano is a
(02:41):
massive amount of magma, a chamber, a magma chamber, possibly
a magma reservoir feeding the magma chamber, something even bigger
um and it's it's connected or near a thin spot
in the mantle that it may or may not have
created itself in the Earth's sor this and that. Eventually
(03:03):
something's going like the pressure inside is going to build up,
there's gonna be enough magma and then kaboom. Things are
gonna go south pretty quick. Because these things are so
big and so explosive that they could they can change
the global climate, possibly irreversibly on a human time scale. Yeah,
(03:23):
whenever I read about stuff like this or even your
garden variety natural disaster, it just feels like the Earth
is like, you know, one day, I'm going to kill
all the people. You realize this slowly, like all humans
will be gone. I want to just explode you all. Yeah,
(03:44):
that's so gaya guy. A hypothesis is it kind of
all right? But it's not gonna be anytime soon. In
the case of a super volcano, Well, we hope, I saw,
I saw. It's been calculated that they go off every
Oh no, a hundred thousand or so years. The most
recent one was something like um four thousand, twenty six
(04:04):
thousand years ago. It's not too bad. Yeah, and we
got a little time from New Zealand. Yeah, so we
should say this is spelled t a u p o.
Here in the States, we would typically pronounce that like
taupo maybe, but based on our Maori episode, I would
(04:25):
guess that it's actually pronounced Could you repeat that again?
So let's talk about how big these things can be. Uh,
Sumatra seventy four thousand years ago. That was a super
eruption that some say, and of course we don't know
(04:49):
because it was seventy four thousand years ago. That's all
we can do is kind of make our best guess.
But some people think that that this almost was an
extinction level event in full. It all most wiped out
the entire human race. It could have jumped started a
ten thousand year ice age, leaving behind a crater or
a CAULDERA that was about nineteen by sixty two miles.
(05:13):
That is huge. That's a yeah, that was Mount Toba,
the Toba super eruption, right, Yes, six seventy cubic miles
yea of ejecta. Yeah, and that ten thousand year ice
age thing, that's noteworthy. They think that this whole thing
was bad enough that it reduced humans down to several
thousand people, and that there were plenty more humans before then,
(05:36):
but that the the effects from shooting um gases the ejecta,
but gases that flowed up into the atmosphere and actually
reflect sunlight cooling the earth below it. UM really disrupted
a lot of normal processes here on Earth, cooled it
(05:58):
and made it really tough to survive. Five. That's the
hallmark of super volcanoes. Is there their global effect? Yeah,
like a nuclear winter, basically changing the temperature of the Earth,
maybe not permanently, but long enough to where your s
O l right ten thousand year. I said, you're you're
not gonna be happy during those years. Uh, these days, UM,
(06:20):
North America, South American Asia are the greatest risks and
there's one. Um. Actually it says we're those three places
of the greatest risk. But there's one in Europe in Italy. Yeah,
that supposedly, and this was from Geez. Just like four
months ago, I read an article that said that the
one in Italy, it's in Naples, what's it called the
(06:43):
Compy Flagray or, as we say in the United States,
the Flagrian Fields area, the burning Fields. Yeah, that that
should give you an indication of what we're talking about.
Didn't get that name for nothing, No, but it's right
beneath Naples. Yeah. But apparently that one is based on
(07:03):
computer modeling and physical measurements. Uh. One of the scientists said,
we proposed that magma could be approaching the critical degassing
pressure level at Camp Flegria. Uh. And basically what that
means is it's not gonna happen like next year, but
they have raised the volcano threat level from green to yellow,
(07:24):
which means we need to kind of really start monitoring
and study. Is studying this thing a lot more. The
thing is that they don't know like how to predict
like it could happen next year. They're saying it's probably
not going to but it could because we know so
little about volcanoes and supervolcanoes in particular, that like it
(07:45):
could just happen. Yeah, Like we don't even know for
sure how many there are underneath us, but they say
like six to ten maybe potentially active ones around the
globe right now, and then a total of maybe thirty
to forty that have ever been right. Um, but yeah,
that one. I don't understand why this article overlooked that
(08:06):
one Europe, but it's it's like Europe's toast, basically, it's inevitable.
Probably the next month or two, there was one I
think the biggest ever UM happened here in the States
in Colorado, long before anybody called it Colorado. It was
twenty million years ago, and the Fish Canyon Tough Event.
(08:30):
So here's where super volcanoes really kind of come into
um their own, just the massive amount of damage and
stuff they spew out. Right, the Fish Canyon Tough event
shot out twelve d cubic miles. So you know what
a cube is, right, It's like a three dimensional square.
(08:53):
And by Mr Rubick, you can write exactly you can
take a little like an inch by an inch by
an inch and create a little cubic kitch. You can
do that with feet, you can do that with a meter,
and you just keep going bigger and bigger and bigger,
and eventually you're going to get to a cubic mile
or a cubic kilometer. And this Fish Canyon Tough event
(09:16):
spewed out twelve hundred cubic miles or five thousand cubic
kilometers of rock, of dust, of ash, of molten lava
shot it out and that nuts. That's so much stuff
that literally changes the geography of an entire region when
(09:37):
something like that happens, that's crazy. Um all right, I'm
gonna contemplate the Cube and uh, we'll be back right
after this to talk a little bit more about Yellowstone.
(10:13):
Did you ever watch Jim Henson's The Cube? Remember when
we talked about did you ever watch it? Bizarre? Yes,
very weird. We love our friends with the handsome company. Um,
all right, well we're gonna talk about Yellowstone a little bit.
But defining these and when we talked about volcanoes, Defining
volcanoes and what makes a volcano or super volcano is
(10:36):
not an exact science. They don't have strict definitions, but um,
they do try to look at a couple of different
things when they're categorizing these these bad Mama jamas um
Magne said, did I just say that magnitude which is
the volume of the magma or the mass of magma
that's erupted, and then intensity, which is the rate that
(10:59):
that happens. Um, so if you're looking at magnitude intensity um,
Like I said, they don't have it like a number.
They say once it gets over this number. But um,
so I wonder how they do categorize it. They don't.
It's just up in the air, like they just do
not have it set out so that you can say, well,
(11:20):
once it hits this and this, it's it's officially a
super volcano. That's just not laid out like that. As
bad as writers of articles want it to be like that,
it's just not at that point. There's just but there
are factors where it's like, yeah, I would qualify that
as a supervolcano. I'm Joe volcanologist or Jane volcanologists or
(11:42):
versus a volcano um. And they usually do it by comparison, right,
So like as far as intensity goes, that's how fast
magma erupts. Right. Yeah. And Mount Vesuvius back in seventy nine,
see with that very famous eruption that covers Pompeii and Herculaneum. Um.
(12:03):
If you believe that kind of thing, right, I've seen
it with my own eyes. Yeah, Um, Mountain Vesuvius shot
out magma uh and ojecta at a rate of a
hundred thousand cubic meters a second. Wow, that's a lot, right,
that's some fast magma. So super volcanoes erupted it's something
(12:26):
like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of cubic
meters per second. That's a lot too. Yeah, you don't
want to be standing on that road. No, you don't
want to be anywhere near it. So that's typically how
they're figuring out what constitutes a super volcano. They look
at this volcano and they say that's bad, and then
(12:46):
they go, but what about this, and they go, that's
a super volcano. There is another categorization they use, which
is also a great band name, Volcano explosivity index. Yeah.
See the index just kind of throws it off, you know, yeah,
maybe an album title, okay, ejecta not bad, not bad
(13:07):
at all. So this is when they measure ash column
height and the quantity of that ash promise and lava ejected.
So not the volume, but how high it goes. I
don't know why they just can't combine all that into
one big formula Claven scale, but supervolcanoes there, it is
(13:29):
a scale, and the highest of the EI category is
a magnitude eight, which means more than two fifty cubic
miles and a plume more than sixteen miles high. Sixteen miles, dude,
that's amazing. It is it's super It is um. So
you kind of put all this stuff together. They don't
(13:50):
have it in a single index, but if you combine
all the stuff, you start to get an idea of
just how much damage a supervolcano can do. Just how
massive in huge it is so um And again going
back to comparisons, Krakatoa was a very famous volcano that
erupted in eight three, and it created what's regarded as
(14:15):
the loudest sound ever recorded here on Earth. It traveled
around the world four times over five days. And we
know that it did because by three there were um
weather stations that had barometers all over the world and
they would record the shock wave from the sound every
thirty four hours like clockwork. For five days. It just
(14:36):
kept traveling around the world from this explosion, this volcanic explosion.
It was heard by human ears three thousand miles away.
It was one of the most as sounding events that's
ever happened in recorded history. And there's a really cool
article just about the sound it made, called the sound
so loud that it circled the Earth four times on Nautilus.
(14:59):
So go check it out. I think everybody should read
this article. It's really cool article. And didn't it killed
like thirty six thousand people? Yeah, and it just and
that wasn't a very populated area. No, huh, No, Krakato
was um in uh Java, Indonesia. Yeah, I guess Krakato
in the eighties was probably not you know, New York City. No, No,
(15:20):
it wasn't. So yeah, the idea that it killed thirty
six thousand people, Yeah, it wasn't a densely populated area
right around the mountain. It killed a lot of people
spread out like Naples. Yeah, they're talking about I think
like five thousand people live in just that immediate area.
It would be just devastating. That would not be good man.
Um Alright, So we talked about it's it's kind of
(15:42):
tough two predicting these things, kind of tough to pin
down where they are and to study them. And Yellowstone,
which we've kind of danced around a little bit, not literally, Uh,
Yellowstone and particular is a big deal because um of
(16:03):
just how big this thing could be Uh, they're talking
thirty by forty five miles underground, stretching from northern Nevada
through southern Idaho to northwest Wyoming. Um, it's basically a
system three fifty miles long and about eighteen million years old.
(16:24):
That's just man, it's just bubbling underground. That's the trail
of volcanic activity that's taken place, which ends at Yellowstone, right.
And the one that's actually the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone is
like thirty miles by forty five miles, which is huge.
The one in in Europe at the Burning Fields is
(16:44):
about seven seven miles wide, which is enormous in and
of itself, but you know, thirty to forty five that's
way bigger. I'm afraid to stay. Um. And it's made
up of a magma chamber beneath the surface, few miles
beneath the surface. And they thought that that was the
extent of super volcano. Apparently they did a survey in
(17:06):
two thousand and fifteen they figured out that this chamber
has about cubic miles worth of magma in it. There's
also a reservoir beneath that magma chamber, and that that
reservoir has eleven thousand, two hundred cubic miles all this
magma poised right beneath yellow Stone, and the pressure is
(17:28):
just building and building and building. And that's the other
thing about super volcanoes. They seem to erupt, not slowly
where lava just spills out like and say like Hawaii
at Kilauea, where it's very famously just this pretty steady flow.
But it's not explosive. These things blow up, and when
they do, they can bury areas around them in hundreds
(17:50):
and hundreds of meters of of ash that solidifies and
turns into the new crust of the earth, that turns
us all into statues. It does. So that was my
own eyes too. All right, well, let's take our final
break and we'll talk a little bit more about what
lies beneath Yellowstone Park right after this. Alright, So Yellowstone
(18:34):
has had um, I mean, it's had events in the past.
That's why they know there's going to be one in
the future. About two point one million years ago, the
Huckleberry Ridge event um name, I don't think they called
it that two point one million years ago, but that
I had a five cubic mile blast and it created
(18:56):
a crater about the size of four um Manhattan's and
I assume they mean everybody knows exactly what manhattans. Sure,
just put four New York City's side by side on
top of each other. However you want to arrange them, Yeah,
maybe in a little spin spinning pin wheel, mush them
together in a ball like use soap bars remnants, you know. Yeah. Uh,
(19:21):
one point three million years ago they had one at
Masa Falls and that was only about sixty seven cubic
miles of ejecta. That was tiny, but they still consider
that a super volcano because no one seems to care
that it has no definition. Right. What else? Uh, six
hundred forty thousand years ago at Lava Creek, that one
spit out two hundred and forty cubic miles about a
(19:43):
thousand cubic kilometers and apparently it's ash pillar hit a
hundred thousand feet. That's pretty awesome, right, Yeah. So yeah,
they're looking at these things and they're saying, um, this
is probably a pretty decent map of what's going to
happen at Yellows Owned eventually. Yeah. We have an article
on our site too called what if the Yellowstone supervolcano
(20:04):
were erupted, and they said it could kill as many
as ninety thousand people immediately and put a ten foot
layer of molten ash as far as a thousand miles
around the park. Ten Yeah, that would cover your one
story house. Yeah, for a thousand miles. And um they
said that nuclear winter would probably almost be a certainty,
(20:28):
probably be a certainty almost probably. Uh. It would basically
blot out the sun and cool the earth, um, which
would kill our crops. It would be really really bad.
But they said, do you remember do you remember um
in two thousand and fourteen fifteen when that Icelandic volcano
(20:50):
went off, to the effect that it had, was it two?
The effect that it had on air travel in Europe. Yeah,
and it was just air travel and everybody he kept
waiting for it to clear up in it for weeks,
like flights were getting delayed, canceled, rerouted, like Europe was
just off the map as far as plane travel was going.
(21:11):
There's just plane travel. And that was a pretty small volcano.
It was in no way, shape or form a super volcano.
So just just that one aspect of transportation being affected,
let alone the fact that this could like kick off
an ice age. There's just so many, so many factors
that could come into play that could get us in
(21:32):
this way, get us in that way, get us. It
could affect our crops through sunlight and through temperature. It
could make as super cold, make our toes fall off.
There's just so many different ways it could. It could
affect us. Um that we just the average person is
not walking around thinking about this, and they should be
well true, but um not to be alarmist. They the
U S Geological Survey said that the probability that UM
(21:56):
that Yellowstone will blow its top is point zero ro
zero zero each year. Yeah, so one in seven hundred thousand,
which is on par of any given individual UM being
struck by lightning. So that makes me feel better. There's
still plenty of lightning out there. Yeah, and you never
know what's gonna happen. So apparently this the hot spot
(22:20):
causes the earth above it to dome once in a while,
and it feels like it showing off right. Yeah. I
bet the park rangers of the LA Zone when they
see that are like, man, is this it. There was
a two thousand three temperature increase just a few inches
below the soil and some spots that was hitting like
two hundred degrees fahrenheit, boiling the sap in trees nearby.
(22:42):
It was getting hot and then apparently it's already cool
down again. And what's probably going on in these processes
there's a process called incubation right where they're just sitting there.
Because the reservoir and the chamber are they have finite space.
So the more magma that builds up in it, the
higher the pressure builds. And if that pressure starts to
(23:04):
build and all of a sudden escapes a little bit,
that magma is gonna shoot up. And as that magma
shoots up, it starts to form air bubbles. Because the
change in elevation we're talking is traveling miles very quickly upward,
so bubbles start to form. As those bubbles breakup, they explode.
It's very much like champagne, and it shoots out and
(23:25):
it allows more magnet to follow behind it and follows
the same process. So there's huge explosion and it can
actually be hastened by earthquakes, or it can also be
um delayed by earthquakes. Yeah, um, so there's a lot
of different factors involved. But during this period where the
(23:46):
pressure is building and building and building. It's the incubation period.
And the reason it changes from say one year to
the next is if it's not getting as much magma,
then some of that magma higher up has the chance
to kind of cool and solidify and fall back down
and pressures relieved. But we have no way of tracking that.
We can just be like, oh my god, the ground
(24:08):
is bowing up. That's that's about where we're at right now.
But don't they generally think that dormancy is like the
longer it sits, the worst it's going to be when
it eventually does go off. That's what I read. Interesting.
Do you have anything else? Yeah, apparently one other thing.
Um if you were around a volcano then went off,
and I would guess any volcano, it would be like
(24:28):
breathing tiny glass needles thanks to all of the um
silicates that were ejected into the air. And I have
even one more other thing. There was a an volcano
that went off in eighteen fifteen, Tambora. I believe, I'm
not sure exactly where that was, but the Tambora earth
(24:50):
or volcano is credited with the creation of Frankenstein. Yeah,
it was the the year without a summer, and in
the northern and Northern Europe the summer was super super cool.
Elsewhere there was basically no summer. It was no the
whole the whole time. Um. But because of that, Mary
(25:13):
Shelley and uh Byron Right and her husband Percy by
Shelly Um all were stuck inside for during a summer vacation.
And that was when she came up with Frankenstein because
they had a scary story contest. There was a movie
about that. Yeah, but that that contest may never have happened,
and Frankenstein may never have been created had it not
(25:36):
been for that volcano going off. Yeah, that was a
freaky movie. I can't remember the name of it, The
Lost Summer. It wasn't that, man have been more than one.
I just remember the whole time. There was a lot
of drugs and Mary Shelley was like, Percy, why can't
you be more like Lord Byron And he's it because
I'm Percy. Who is in it? I'm just kidding? No, man,
(25:57):
was it called Gothic? I don't know. I seem to
remember that it was kind of a Why do I
think Julian Sands was in it? This sounds like a
Julian Sands. Movie's all very much in the very nineteenth
century drugs. It's in the back of my head. We'll
find out buried deep. Uh. If you want to know
more about volcanoes and Frankenstein and all that stuff, type
(26:20):
those words in the search bar how stuff works dot Com.
Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this uh cool uncle from Katie. Hey, guys,
is about free speech. In ninety ninety, my uncle, Dennis
Barry was a director of Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnata, Ohio.
(26:41):
The museum brought in the Robert Maplethorpe UH Robert and
Maplethorp art exhibit titled The Perfect Moment, which resulted in
an uproar as seven of the photographs for seeing as
pornographic from some conservative folks. My uncle defended the artwork
this freedom of speech, and was subsequently arrested, charged with obscenity,
and went to trial, the first time in history that
(27:02):
a museum was actually taking the trial with criminal charges
over the contents of an exhibition. UH. He spent a
few nights in jail, received death threats, and was harassed
all over town, but he stuck to his firm beliefs
that artists had the right to express themselves freely in
American furthermore, deserved to have their work exhibited. During the trial,
art experts were brought in to help the jury decide
(27:23):
if they were pornographic in nature. They can you see
Matt like being, like I say, is a bull whip
in a man's rectum art? I never saw that show
as he Southern? No, that was falk Horn Leghorn. Yeah,
he was definitely Southern. Ultimately, the jury concluded that Maplethorpe's
work was in fact art and that my uncle, um
(27:44):
Northern Museum was not guilty of obscenity charges. Very cool.
Do you remember that? I remember that case? Oh really? Yeah? Man,
when maple Thorpe like, oh yeah, it was a huge deal.
Maybe it's because I was Toledo at the time, so
they made a big deal out of it. But it
was pretty big, she said. To this day, it's still
(28:05):
the most famous trial of freedom of speech in the
art world. Uh. And as an artist myself, I'm pretty
darn proud of my uncle's actions. Way back when he
admits himself that the events and effects of that trial
never really go away. He's still recognized for his actions.
The museums and galleries across the country have been able
to show challenging artwork that perhaps would have been cast
aside had my uncle and as awesome First Amendment lawyer H.
(28:27):
Lewis Serkin uh And not won that trial. Ultimately, the
result of the trial left the positive legacy for Contemporary
Arts Center, and my uncle went on to become the
founding director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
where he had to defend offensive song lyrics as art
in order to get them displayed in the museum. That
is such a great email. I love that email. He's
(28:49):
a pretty interesting guy to say the least. And that
is from Katie Barry and Katie Boy. Tell your uncle
Dennis that we have a lot of respect for him
for real, like not fake respect like but usually don't laugh, no,
like seriously, it's a it's a great story. Heads off
to your uncle. You know one thing, um, I'm sad
(29:09):
about that we didn't mention in the First Amendment episode
was that whole two Live Crew episode. You remember that
they all went to like I think they was a
Supreme Court over their lyrics. Didn't they Yeah, it was
a big deal. Everybody expected him to just lay down
and roll over. Nope, too, Life Crew, don't roll over
for nobody. Uh. You know we're going to do one
(29:31):
on the PMRC at some point, so we'll probably cover
it in that. Okay, good. Uh. If you want to
get in touch with us, you can tweet to us.
We're at s Y s K Podcast where at josh
um Clark. You can hang out on Facebook dot com
slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Facebook dot com slash
Stuff you Should Know. Send us an email to Stuff
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
(29:53):
joined us at home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So
Stuff you Should Know. Super Bowl, okay, supervolcano? Was that?
(00:26):
What was that? Do you know what that was? Oh? Geez,
you and that song. I can't help it. For nine
years you've been Holman the Final Countdown by Europe. Not
every oh, I don't know, every three months or so,
it's the world years. It's the world's most effective earworm.
(00:48):
Do you do that to you? Me? With the final Countdown?
She's like, it doesn't get to her. It bounces right off.
She's like, try your worst. Um, super volcanoes. If you
listen to volcanoes, well we did that one, yeah, or
our Yellowstone or I guess it was Geyser's Nature's Innuendo.
(01:11):
That was a great title. Um. Then some of this
might seem a little bit familiar, but why not to
cover it as its own thing? Well, it is its
own thing. They're starting to figure out. Yeah, Like this
article even says don't even think of it as a
amped up volcano. It says stop stop. They should call
it something else, then they really should. I mean that
(01:32):
you can make a case that, yes, it's calling it
a super volcano. It does make sense in a way, um,
because it is obviously magma pushing up through the earth. Uh.
But that's pretty much where the comparisons end, and that
that's that's a pretty deep comparison between a volcano and
a super volcano. But there's a lot of different stuff
(01:56):
going on. And the more we look into these things that, frankly,
the scarier they become. Yeah, I mean, right out of
the gate. One of the big things that is different
from a volcano is a volcano is usually like a
mountain that you can look at with smoke coming out
of it and point to you can keep an eye
on it. In other words, yeah, and whereas a super
volcano is usually categorized by a big depression in the
(02:19):
earth from a past explosion, like a crater or something. Yeah,
or it might be like nothing, that crater might be
fully filled in by this point, might be a forest,
It could be Um, it could be a hot spot
like a yellow Stone as we'll see, where there are
is a lot of geysers and hot springs. But the
point is is it's a A super volcano is a
(02:41):
massive amount of magma, a chamber, a magma chamber, possibly
a magma reservoir feeding the magma chamber, something even bigger
um and it's it's connected or near a thin spot
in the mantle that it may or may not have
created itself in the Earth's sor this and that. Eventually
(03:03):
something's going like the pressure inside is going to build up,
there's gonna be enough magma and then kaboom. Things are
gonna go south pretty quick. Because these things are so
big and so explosive that they could they can change
the global climate, possibly irreversibly on a human time scale. Yeah,
(03:23):
whenever I read about stuff like this or even your
garden variety natural disaster, it just feels like the Earth
is like, you know, one day, I'm going to kill
all the people. You realize this slowly, like all humans
will be gone. I want to just explode you all. Yeah,
(03:44):
that's so gaya guy. A hypothesis is it kind of
all right? But it's not gonna be anytime soon. In
the case of a super volcano, Well, we hope, I saw,
I saw. It's been calculated that they go off every
Oh no, a hundred thousand or so years. The most
recent one was something like um four thousand, twenty six
(04:04):
thousand years ago. It's not too bad. Yeah, and we
got a little time from New Zealand. Yeah, so we
should say this is spelled t a u p o.
Here in the States, we would typically pronounce that like
taupo maybe, but based on our Maori episode, I would
(04:25):
guess that it's actually pronounced Could you repeat that again?
So let's talk about how big these things can be. Uh,
Sumatra seventy four thousand years ago. That was a super
eruption that some say, and of course we don't know
(04:49):
because it was seventy four thousand years ago. That's all
we can do is kind of make our best guess.
But some people think that that this almost was an
extinction level event in full. It all most wiped out
the entire human race. It could have jumped started a
ten thousand year ice age, leaving behind a crater or
a CAULDERA that was about nineteen by sixty two miles.
(05:13):
That is huge. That's a yeah, that was Mount Toba,
the Toba super eruption, right, Yes, six seventy cubic miles
yea of ejecta. Yeah, and that ten thousand year ice
age thing, that's noteworthy. They think that this whole thing
was bad enough that it reduced humans down to several
thousand people, and that there were plenty more humans before then,
(05:36):
but that the the effects from shooting um gases the ejecta,
but gases that flowed up into the atmosphere and actually
reflect sunlight cooling the earth below it. UM really disrupted
a lot of normal processes here on Earth, cooled it
(05:58):
and made it really tough to survive. Five. That's the
hallmark of super volcanoes. Is there their global effect? Yeah,
like a nuclear winter, basically changing the temperature of the Earth,
maybe not permanently, but long enough to where your s
O l right ten thousand year. I said, you're you're
not gonna be happy during those years. Uh, these days, UM,
(06:20):
North America, South American Asia are the greatest risks and
there's one. Um. Actually it says we're those three places
of the greatest risk. But there's one in Europe in Italy. Yeah,
that supposedly, and this was from Geez. Just like four
months ago, I read an article that said that the
one in Italy, it's in Naples, what's it called the
(06:43):
Compy Flagray or, as we say in the United States,
the Flagrian Fields area, the burning Fields. Yeah, that that
should give you an indication of what we're talking about.
Didn't get that name for nothing, No, but it's right
beneath Naples. Yeah. But apparently that one is based on
(07:03):
computer modeling and physical measurements. Uh. One of the scientists said,
we proposed that magma could be approaching the critical degassing
pressure level at Camp Flegria. Uh. And basically what that
means is it's not gonna happen like next year, but
they have raised the volcano threat level from green to yellow,
(07:24):
which means we need to kind of really start monitoring
and study. Is studying this thing a lot more. The
thing is that they don't know like how to predict
like it could happen next year. They're saying it's probably
not going to but it could because we know so
little about volcanoes and supervolcanoes in particular, that like it
(07:45):
could just happen. Yeah, Like we don't even know for
sure how many there are underneath us, but they say
like six to ten maybe potentially active ones around the
globe right now, and then a total of maybe thirty
to forty that have ever been right. Um, but yeah,
that one. I don't understand why this article overlooked that
(08:06):
one Europe, but it's it's like Europe's toast, basically, it's inevitable.
Probably the next month or two, there was one I
think the biggest ever UM happened here in the States
in Colorado, long before anybody called it Colorado. It was
twenty million years ago, and the Fish Canyon Tough Event.
(08:30):
So here's where super volcanoes really kind of come into
um their own, just the massive amount of damage and
stuff they spew out. Right, the Fish Canyon Tough event
shot out twelve d cubic miles. So you know what
a cube is, right, It's like a three dimensional square.
(08:53):
And by Mr Rubick, you can write exactly you can
take a little like an inch by an inch by
an inch and create a little cubic kitch. You can
do that with feet, you can do that with a meter,
and you just keep going bigger and bigger and bigger,
and eventually you're going to get to a cubic mile
or a cubic kilometer. And this Fish Canyon Tough event
(09:16):
spewed out twelve hundred cubic miles or five thousand cubic
kilometers of rock, of dust, of ash, of molten lava
shot it out and that nuts. That's so much stuff
that literally changes the geography of an entire region when
(09:37):
something like that happens, that's crazy. Um all right, I'm
gonna contemplate the Cube and uh, we'll be back right
after this to talk a little bit more about Yellowstone.
(10:13):
Did you ever watch Jim Henson's The Cube? Remember when
we talked about did you ever watch it? Bizarre? Yes,
very weird. We love our friends with the handsome company. Um,
all right, well we're gonna talk about Yellowstone a little bit.
But defining these and when we talked about volcanoes, Defining
volcanoes and what makes a volcano or super volcano is
(10:36):
not an exact science. They don't have strict definitions, but um,
they do try to look at a couple of different
things when they're categorizing these these bad Mama jamas um
Magne said, did I just say that magnitude which is
the volume of the magma or the mass of magma
that's erupted, and then intensity, which is the rate that
(10:59):
that happens. Um, so if you're looking at magnitude intensity um,
Like I said, they don't have it like a number.
They say once it gets over this number. But um,
so I wonder how they do categorize it. They don't.
It's just up in the air, like they just do
not have it set out so that you can say, well,
(11:20):
once it hits this and this, it's it's officially a
super volcano. That's just not laid out like that. As
bad as writers of articles want it to be like that,
it's just not at that point. There's just but there
are factors where it's like, yeah, I would qualify that
as a supervolcano. I'm Joe volcanologist or Jane volcanologists or
(11:42):
versus a volcano um. And they usually do it by comparison, right,
So like as far as intensity goes, that's how fast
magma erupts. Right. Yeah. And Mount Vesuvius back in seventy nine,
see with that very famous eruption that covers Pompeii and Herculaneum. Um.
(12:03):
If you believe that kind of thing, right, I've seen
it with my own eyes. Yeah, Um, Mountain Vesuvius shot
out magma uh and ojecta at a rate of a
hundred thousand cubic meters a second. Wow, that's a lot, right,
that's some fast magma. So super volcanoes erupted it's something
(12:26):
like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of cubic
meters per second. That's a lot too. Yeah, you don't
want to be standing on that road. No, you don't
want to be anywhere near it. So that's typically how
they're figuring out what constitutes a super volcano. They look
at this volcano and they say that's bad, and then
(12:46):
they go, but what about this, and they go, that's
a super volcano. There is another categorization they use, which
is also a great band name, Volcano explosivity index. Yeah.
See the index just kind of throws it off, you know, yeah,
maybe an album title, okay, ejecta not bad, not bad
(13:07):
at all. So this is when they measure ash column
height and the quantity of that ash promise and lava ejected.
So not the volume, but how high it goes. I
don't know why they just can't combine all that into
one big formula Claven scale, but supervolcanoes there, it is
(13:29):
a scale, and the highest of the EI category is
a magnitude eight, which means more than two fifty cubic
miles and a plume more than sixteen miles high. Sixteen miles, dude,
that's amazing. It is it's super It is um. So
you kind of put all this stuff together. They don't
(13:50):
have it in a single index, but if you combine
all the stuff, you start to get an idea of
just how much damage a supervolcano can do. Just how
massive in huge it is so um And again going
back to comparisons, Krakatoa was a very famous volcano that
erupted in eight three, and it created what's regarded as
(14:15):
the loudest sound ever recorded here on Earth. It traveled
around the world four times over five days. And we
know that it did because by three there were um
weather stations that had barometers all over the world and
they would record the shock wave from the sound every
thirty four hours like clockwork. For five days. It just
(14:36):
kept traveling around the world from this explosion, this volcanic explosion.
It was heard by human ears three thousand miles away.
It was one of the most as sounding events that's
ever happened in recorded history. And there's a really cool
article just about the sound it made, called the sound
so loud that it circled the Earth four times on Nautilus.
(14:59):
So go check it out. I think everybody should read
this article. It's really cool article. And didn't it killed
like thirty six thousand people? Yeah, and it just and
that wasn't a very populated area. No, huh, No, Krakato
was um in uh Java, Indonesia. Yeah, I guess Krakato
in the eighties was probably not you know, New York City. No, No,
(15:20):
it wasn't. So yeah, the idea that it killed thirty
six thousand people, Yeah, it wasn't a densely populated area
right around the mountain. It killed a lot of people
spread out like Naples. Yeah, they're talking about I think
like five thousand people live in just that immediate area.
It would be just devastating. That would not be good man.
Um Alright, So we talked about it's it's kind of
(15:42):
tough two predicting these things, kind of tough to pin
down where they are and to study them. And Yellowstone,
which we've kind of danced around a little bit, not literally, Uh,
Yellowstone and particular is a big deal because um of
(16:03):
just how big this thing could be Uh, they're talking
thirty by forty five miles underground, stretching from northern Nevada
through southern Idaho to northwest Wyoming. Um, it's basically a
system three fifty miles long and about eighteen million years old.
(16:24):
That's just man, it's just bubbling underground. That's the trail
of volcanic activity that's taken place, which ends at Yellowstone, right.
And the one that's actually the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone is
like thirty miles by forty five miles, which is huge.
The one in in Europe at the Burning Fields is
(16:44):
about seven seven miles wide, which is enormous in and
of itself, but you know, thirty to forty five that's
way bigger. I'm afraid to stay. Um. And it's made
up of a magma chamber beneath the surface, few miles
beneath the surface. And they thought that that was the
extent of super volcano. Apparently they did a survey in
(17:06):
two thousand and fifteen they figured out that this chamber
has about cubic miles worth of magma in it. There's
also a reservoir beneath that magma chamber, and that that
reservoir has eleven thousand, two hundred cubic miles all this
magma poised right beneath yellow Stone, and the pressure is
(17:28):
just building and building and building. And that's the other
thing about super volcanoes. They seem to erupt, not slowly
where lava just spills out like and say like Hawaii
at Kilauea, where it's very famously just this pretty steady flow.
But it's not explosive. These things blow up, and when
they do, they can bury areas around them in hundreds
(17:50):
and hundreds of meters of of ash that solidifies and
turns into the new crust of the earth, that turns
us all into statues. It does. So that was my
own eyes too. All right, well, let's take our final
break and we'll talk a little bit more about what
lies beneath Yellowstone Park right after this. Alright, So Yellowstone
(18:34):
has had um, I mean, it's had events in the past.
That's why they know there's going to be one in
the future. About two point one million years ago, the
Huckleberry Ridge event um name, I don't think they called
it that two point one million years ago, but that
I had a five cubic mile blast and it created
(18:56):
a crater about the size of four um Manhattan's and
I assume they mean everybody knows exactly what manhattans. Sure,
just put four New York City's side by side on
top of each other. However you want to arrange them, Yeah,
maybe in a little spin spinning pin wheel, mush them
together in a ball like use soap bars remnants, you know. Yeah. Uh,
(19:21):
one point three million years ago they had one at
Masa Falls and that was only about sixty seven cubic
miles of ejecta. That was tiny, but they still consider
that a super volcano because no one seems to care
that it has no definition. Right. What else? Uh, six
hundred forty thousand years ago at Lava Creek, that one
spit out two hundred and forty cubic miles about a
(19:43):
thousand cubic kilometers and apparently it's ash pillar hit a
hundred thousand feet. That's pretty awesome, right, Yeah. So yeah,
they're looking at these things and they're saying, um, this
is probably a pretty decent map of what's going to
happen at Yellows Owned eventually. Yeah. We have an article
on our site too called what if the Yellowstone supervolcano
(20:04):
were erupted, and they said it could kill as many
as ninety thousand people immediately and put a ten foot
layer of molten ash as far as a thousand miles
around the park. Ten Yeah, that would cover your one
story house. Yeah, for a thousand miles. And um they
said that nuclear winter would probably almost be a certainty,
(20:28):
probably be a certainty almost probably. Uh. It would basically
blot out the sun and cool the earth, um, which
would kill our crops. It would be really really bad.
But they said, do you remember do you remember um
in two thousand and fourteen fifteen when that Icelandic volcano
(20:50):
went off, to the effect that it had, was it two?
The effect that it had on air travel in Europe. Yeah,
and it was just air travel and everybody he kept
waiting for it to clear up in it for weeks,
like flights were getting delayed, canceled, rerouted, like Europe was
just off the map as far as plane travel was going.
(21:11):
There's just plane travel. And that was a pretty small volcano.
It was in no way, shape or form a super volcano.
So just just that one aspect of transportation being affected,
let alone the fact that this could like kick off
an ice age. There's just so many, so many factors
that could come into play that could get us in
(21:32):
this way, get us in that way, get us. It
could affect our crops through sunlight and through temperature. It
could make as super cold, make our toes fall off.
There's just so many different ways it could. It could
affect us. Um that we just the average person is
not walking around thinking about this, and they should be
well true, but um not to be alarmist. They the
U S Geological Survey said that the probability that UM
(21:56):
that Yellowstone will blow its top is point zero ro
zero zero each year. Yeah, so one in seven hundred thousand,
which is on par of any given individual UM being
struck by lightning. So that makes me feel better. There's
still plenty of lightning out there. Yeah, and you never
know what's gonna happen. So apparently this the hot spot
(22:20):
causes the earth above it to dome once in a while,
and it feels like it showing off right. Yeah. I
bet the park rangers of the LA Zone when they
see that are like, man, is this it. There was
a two thousand three temperature increase just a few inches
below the soil and some spots that was hitting like
two hundred degrees fahrenheit, boiling the sap in trees nearby.
(22:42):
It was getting hot and then apparently it's already cool
down again. And what's probably going on in these processes
there's a process called incubation right where they're just sitting there.
Because the reservoir and the chamber are they have finite space.
So the more magma that builds up in it, the
higher the pressure builds. And if that pressure starts to
(23:04):
build and all of a sudden escapes a little bit,
that magma is gonna shoot up. And as that magma
shoots up, it starts to form air bubbles. Because the
change in elevation we're talking is traveling miles very quickly upward,
so bubbles start to form. As those bubbles breakup, they explode.
It's very much like champagne, and it shoots out and
(23:25):
it allows more magnet to follow behind it and follows
the same process. So there's huge explosion and it can
actually be hastened by earthquakes, or it can also be
um delayed by earthquakes. Yeah, um, so there's a lot
of different factors involved. But during this period where the
(23:46):
pressure is building and building and building. It's the incubation period.
And the reason it changes from say one year to
the next is if it's not getting as much magma,
then some of that magma higher up has the chance
to kind of cool and solidify and fall back down
and pressures relieved. But we have no way of tracking that.
We can just be like, oh my god, the ground
(24:08):
is bowing up. That's that's about where we're at right now.
But don't they generally think that dormancy is like the
longer it sits, the worst it's going to be when
it eventually does go off. That's what I read. Interesting.
Do you have anything else? Yeah, apparently one other thing.
Um if you were around a volcano then went off,
and I would guess any volcano, it would be like
(24:28):
breathing tiny glass needles thanks to all of the um
silicates that were ejected into the air. And I have
even one more other thing. There was a an volcano
that went off in eighteen fifteen, Tambora. I believe, I'm
not sure exactly where that was, but the Tambora earth
(24:50):
or volcano is credited with the creation of Frankenstein. Yeah,
it was the the year without a summer, and in
the northern and Northern Europe the summer was super super cool.
Elsewhere there was basically no summer. It was no the
whole the whole time. Um. But because of that, Mary
(25:13):
Shelley and uh Byron Right and her husband Percy by
Shelly Um all were stuck inside for during a summer vacation.
And that was when she came up with Frankenstein because
they had a scary story contest. There was a movie
about that. Yeah, but that that contest may never have happened,
and Frankenstein may never have been created had it not
(25:36):
been for that volcano going off. Yeah, that was a
freaky movie. I can't remember the name of it, The
Lost Summer. It wasn't that, man have been more than one.
I just remember the whole time. There was a lot
of drugs and Mary Shelley was like, Percy, why can't
you be more like Lord Byron And he's it because
I'm Percy. Who is in it? I'm just kidding? No, man,
(25:57):
was it called Gothic? I don't know. I seem to
remember that it was kind of a Why do I
think Julian Sands was in it? This sounds like a
Julian Sands. Movie's all very much in the very nineteenth
century drugs. It's in the back of my head. We'll
find out buried deep. Uh. If you want to know
more about volcanoes and Frankenstein and all that stuff, type
(26:20):
those words in the search bar how stuff works dot Com.
Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this uh cool uncle from Katie. Hey, guys,
is about free speech. In ninety ninety, my uncle, Dennis
Barry was a director of Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnata, Ohio.
(26:41):
The museum brought in the Robert Maplethorpe UH Robert and
Maplethorp art exhibit titled The Perfect Moment, which resulted in
an uproar as seven of the photographs for seeing as
pornographic from some conservative folks. My uncle defended the artwork
this freedom of speech, and was subsequently arrested, charged with obscenity,
and went to trial, the first time in history that
(27:02):
a museum was actually taking the trial with criminal charges
over the contents of an exhibition. UH. He spent a
few nights in jail, received death threats, and was harassed
all over town, but he stuck to his firm beliefs
that artists had the right to express themselves freely in
American furthermore, deserved to have their work exhibited. During the trial,
art experts were brought in to help the jury decide
(27:23):
if they were pornographic in nature. They can you see
Matt like being, like I say, is a bull whip
in a man's rectum art? I never saw that show
as he Southern? No, that was falk Horn Leghorn. Yeah,
he was definitely Southern. Ultimately, the jury concluded that Maplethorpe's
work was in fact art and that my uncle, um
(27:44):
Northern Museum was not guilty of obscenity charges. Very cool.
Do you remember that? I remember that case? Oh really? Yeah? Man,
when maple Thorpe like, oh yeah, it was a huge deal.
Maybe it's because I was Toledo at the time, so
they made a big deal out of it. But it
was pretty big, she said. To this day, it's still
(28:05):
the most famous trial of freedom of speech in the
art world. Uh. And as an artist myself, I'm pretty
darn proud of my uncle's actions. Way back when he
admits himself that the events and effects of that trial
never really go away. He's still recognized for his actions.
The museums and galleries across the country have been able
to show challenging artwork that perhaps would have been cast
aside had my uncle and as awesome First Amendment lawyer H.
(28:27):
Lewis Serkin uh And not won that trial. Ultimately, the
result of the trial left the positive legacy for Contemporary
Arts Center, and my uncle went on to become the
founding director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
where he had to defend offensive song lyrics as art
in order to get them displayed in the museum. That
is such a great email. I love that email. He's
(28:49):
a pretty interesting guy to say the least. And that
is from Katie Barry and Katie Boy. Tell your uncle
Dennis that we have a lot of respect for him
for real, like not fake respect like but usually don't laugh, no,
like seriously, it's a it's a great story. Heads off
to your uncle. You know one thing, um, I'm sad
(29:09):
about that we didn't mention in the First Amendment episode
was that whole two Live Crew episode. You remember that
they all went to like I think they was a
Supreme Court over their lyrics. Didn't they Yeah, it was
a big deal. Everybody expected him to just lay down
and roll over. Nope, too, Life Crew, don't roll over
for nobody. Uh. You know we're going to do one
(29:31):
on the PMRC at some point, so we'll probably cover
it in that. Okay, good. Uh. If you want to
get in touch with us, you can tweet to us.
We're at s Y s K Podcast where at josh
um Clark. You can hang out on Facebook dot com
slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Facebook dot com slash
Stuff you Should Know. Send us an email to Stuff
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
(29:53):
joined us at home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. M
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