If Yellowstone Blows

It is all about whether the ash gets blasted out of the atmosphere and is no longer affected by the wind currents which would keep most of the ash localized to the northern hemisphere. If the ash goes global I would imagine that we would be eating canned food trying to grow incredibly efficient genetically engineered crops inside for the next 300 years until the ash clears.

If the ash stays mostly in the northern hemisphere then humanity definitely survives and people move south to starve and wage war over resources until Europe and Asia is habitable again.

Reminds me again of the Nevil Shute anti-war polemic, "On the Beach", in which he said that air currents would spread the fall-out from a really big nuclear war north of the equator, southwards and Australia would die.

Science and Australia purty much said "Lolwut."

.*updates WW3 plan*

step 1- bunker to survive first few weeks

step 2- radiation resistant armored car

New- step 3- submarine w/ solar pannels

New- step 4- own austrlian property

step 5 ?????

step 6 profit!

edited 29th Feb '12 6:34:11 AM by Joesolo

Wall of text warning.

People are getting some serious misconceptions about the style of these eruptions themselves in this. Partly due to so called "documentaries" that over dramatize some things and get other things just flat out wrong. I'd like to contribute by adding the most likely sequence of eruption events:

First, these volcanoes don't do one big explosion like Mt. St. Helens did, not even close. The first thing that happens is magma starts to upwell. Large quantities of ANYTHING moving around underground are readily detectable. This is detectable as gigantic earthquake swarms weeks or months or, with luck, several years ahead of time. There may even be some minor eruptions in the years preceding this.

Gas emissions spike, the ground water temperature in Yellowstone spikes, new geyser and hot spring fields form and old ones turn into just large steam vents as the careful balance needed for geysers is lost. The forests die, because the large quantities of gas seeping through the soil kills the roots of plants. Steam explosions begin to be very frequent - these may range in size from the size of a car bomb to several kilotons.

Some of those lakes in Yellowstone? Yeah, they're really steam explosion craters. Normally, a notable one happens every few decades but they're quite rare. Several start happening at once, something is clearly going on but no one knows how big the resulting eruption is going to be. It would most likely be "just" a lot of lava inter-spaced with explosive eruptions that have only a few dozen km^3 total erupted. For the purposes of this, we're obviously not that lucky.

What happens after the pre-eruption phase is several large fissure vents open up, and ramp up until they are emitting maybe a few cubic km/day (each, mind you) for a few weeks or months until the eruption winds itself down. The caldera area slowly sinks down as this happens, likely with frequent and very, very major earthquakes. It may be more violent and chaotic immediately near the vents, but no one is going to be alive long enough there to care. These may all open up at once, or it may happen over several months to years. Quite frankly, we don't know.

The major eruption columns likely breach the mid-stratosphere frequently if not constantly while the minor ones may not at all. Regardless, this will result in a decade or two long volcanic winter. After this main sequence phase ends, large quantities of lavas are erupted. This lava will partially fill the resulting caldera, possibly enough to flow out of it in places (see the long valley complex for an example of this). These lavas are emitted for years to centuries, slowly filling the caldera. This will be inter-spaced with comparatively minor (a few km^3) explosive eruptions.

The significance of this cannot be understated, and it actually makes it much, MUCH worse in the long term. The lavas erupting emits a great quantity of gas which even though it is mainly in the troposphere is present in such large quantities that it's going to stick around for a long time. This would result in a thick, perpetual volcanic haze with occasional ashfall events over a lot of the North American continent and other northern hemisphere locations depending on how the wind felt at that time.

Instead of the impact being over an extremely severe and very bad decade or two, it would be a very severe first few years, followed by a moderate, long century or two with low-to-moderate levels of impact. The world may be able to compensate for the first few years but eventually the wear of such a huge, perpetual catastrophe is going to force the world to adapt - or, not, and everyone dies. That's a distinct possibility, though extremely unlikely.

Overall this is a solid class 1 on the "apocalypse how" scale. A few impacts stand out, and most of these would be more severe in the northern hemisphere then in the southern hemisphere.

1. A large section of North America, roughly from the Cascades east to the Dakotas, and from southern Utah to south-western Canada would be an uninhabitable and likely nearly-lifeless wasteland. This region has fuzzy boundaries, so it fades out instead of being a sharp line. Areas near this will be very, very hostile with nigh-unbreathable air a large amount of the time and little in the way of plant or animal life. Bacteria will fare well, except in the most hostile regions closest to the caldera. It would literally be like mordor, only there's no Frodo with his ring to be thrown into Mt. Doom to save you this time.

2. The above means the United States would cease to be the world's breadbasket, would likely no longer be a superpower (but calling it either way would be a dumb guess) and would probably loose a third of its population to starvation/disease/all hell breaking loose (literally) in the first few years of this until things start working again, and then settle around some stable level that I have not the faintest idea of. Probably 100-200 million, mostly on the east coast and eastern gulf coast. Agriculture with especially tough plants that can handle low-PH rain may be possible in the far-southeastern united states, but the US will need to import large amounts of food.

3. Food everywhere just got very scarce and valuable. At the best, it means no more throwing away those leftover table scraps, you'll need to save them if you want to eat tomorrow. Clean water also becomes valuable, because volcanic ash and the chemicals within it are extremely hard to filter out of water. Drinking water laced with volcanic ash can kill you. This scarcity can (and probably will) start wars, possibly major wars. Conservation becomes out of the question as those resources are needed just for survival. On the other hand, efficiency becomes the new trend to make the most out of the now much scarcer and harder to acquire resources. Nations or regions who do not adopt this collapse or starve, and probably both at once. Adapt or die becomes the norm.

4. Global trade becomes substantially more difficult, and may effectively collapse for a year or two until the collective psyche of the world starts to recover from "volcanic shell shock" and starts to adapt effectively. Things that we normally take for granted and use wastefully - like oil - become expensive and relatively hard to get. This effect, and the results of it, diminish as time goes on.

5. Environmentalists are seen as a relic of an era long gone. This lasts several generations, and fundamentally reshapes global society in ways we cannot realistically predict. Areas that are not so fortunate simply starve to death. Possibly billions of people die from starvation, disease and wars over the precious remaining resources. Nuclear power is in, because of its high efficiency. Personal vehicles are out, with the exception of maybe electric cars, due to the extreme cost of oil. Airplanes and air power become a lot less reliable and more dangerous - just a little ash can destroy a jet engine. Propeller airplane engines become more popular due to their greater durability.

Really well said, would that mean Ukraine would become the world's breadbasket then?

So...I live in Virginia. How utterly screwed would I be?

Maybe.

If the country stayed stable it quite possibly could. I can see it happening, but they're going to have a very short growing season due to the global drop in temperatures. The extreme of the temperature drop is hard to call, because while some of the gasses and the ash filter sunlight and block it out, others act as greenhouse gasses and keep what warmth does get in near the surface.

If you don't factor that in and just looked at the amount of dust and sunlight-filtering gasses and droplets in the air, then yeah, you'd get a global 20C temp drop and an ice age. But that's not how it works. There would likely be a drop of as much as 10C for a year or two, and then it would level off at 2-5C below normal. But I'm not a climatologist, nor do I have advanced computer models at my disposal for this, so I can't really say. What I can say is there would be a large and noticeable temperature drop, but if global warming is in full swing by then the temperature may already be 10c above where it should be so this may not actually be bad on its own.

A few other possibilities for farming are Egypt irrigating large sections of desert for farmland using the Nile and the (fossil!) aquifers there. Some parts of Africa may generate large amounts of food as well, but what we'll likely see there is slash-and-burn farming tactics similar to what is seen in the amazon.

On the note of Africa... without Western interference due to them worrying about their own problems Africa may rapidly stabilize over perhaps a decade. Africa will likely industrialize very quickly without cheap American and Chinese goods flooding the market and drowning competition. There will likely be massive wars and famines as it does so, but that will be normal for the world then (and lets be honest, right now that's normal for Africa anyways). The map of Africa will not look the same as it does now. This may or may not happen under the guiding hand of china, but china may not be in a positon to do this. I'll get to that in a moment.

China itself suffers massive food shortages, starvation, likely riots and possibly a multi-way civil war. If the government can keep itself stable, which I seriously doubt, china will become a major superpower.

As for the united states, there's no need for the fleets to flee to Australia as was mentioned earlier in this thread. The country is still there, if severely crippled, and military power will become more important than ever to protect what resources they do have left - because EVERYONE will want them. This would likely lead to a global arms race, likely also involving nuclear weapons, but I won't speculate on who the major players would be.

Another notable effect is a notable increase in severe storms, partly due to a drop in temperature for the upper troposphere relative to the surface temp, even as the stratosphere warms. But again, I'm no climatologist, so this is mainly a guess.

Define "screwed".

There would be severe and lasting impacts, obviously. Everything would be a lot more expensive, especially food. If you have the money to afford the vastly higher prices (possibly as much as 10x what food costs now), you're fine. If not, well, you won't have to worry about being overweight.

The main ashfall event will reach you with several inches, possibly a foot, of ash. This requires shoveling off roofs, cars, ext. or the heavy weight of the ash will crush them. If this happens during rain, or rain falls during it, it will be like shoveling wet concrete, and a similar consistency too.

After a major ashfall the next few times it rains, massive flooding will result as this ash accumulates in river bottoms and gives the water nowhere to go besides where it shouldn't be. These floods may never recede in places - the river channels may be too jammed up, and new river channels would need to form. The rivers would probably not be where they were before, unless they're constrained by a valley or between mountains or some other very large, natural terrain obstacle.

Between ashfall events, you'll have beautiful orange sunrises and sunsets, and some creepy blood-red ones too. To describe it, it the sunsets would look as if the planet was screaming. There would be a perpetual haze, almost like smog but it may have a sulpher smell to it. It may not always be at ground level and will vary greatly in intensity, but it will nearly always be there. For decades, at least.

edited 4th Mar '12 1:01:28 PM by Vehudur

What about the threat of acid rain? Then again I live in Western PA and we used to have that more severely when the heavy industry was still here.

Another wall of text warning. Also, probably inaccurate scratch-paper math warning.

To summarize: The closer you get to the area of the caldera, the more mordor-like it gets, but western PA is still very much survivable.

Yes, acid rain would happen, but even then it's not "Oh god my skin is melting off!" but it will make soil and runoff acidic enough to kill a large number of plant types. It may, at worst, irritate your skin in extreme cases where it hasn't rained for a long time and thus the rain is washing out a lot more then it normally would. At best, the acid rain alone would be far more severe then it was at its worst due to industry. With industry, you'd be talking a few dozen tons of sulfuric acid in the atmosphere as fine particles in a given year from one factory. From a large number, such as a whole region, it may be a few thousand tons per year but that's really extreme. From a large volcanic eruption like this, you're talking up to a billion tons of the stuff (although that would be really high for this size of eruption, to be honest).

In general, you'd see completely different plant types for other reasons as well - big trees are easily broken by heavy ash, and it easily smothers fragile plants. Hardy plants, like a lot of grasses and some shrubs may do well but maybe not. Regardless, you're looking at significantly less variety in your plant life. The "missing" species may not be extinct, but they'll be a lot less common if they're around at all.

Small mammals will do fine, such as grey squirrels. Larger animals and the things that eat them such as deer will have a hard time finding enough food to survive. For the first few years or so as animal populations crash (including, probably, humans) scavengers will do very well and then suffer their own crash. In the end, expect 25% of species in North America (ignoring bacteria) to die off.

But you, probably, will have bigger problems where you are. The ashfall will bring transportation infrastructure to a halt, and things like bridges will collapse due to the weight of significant wet ashfall of several inches or more if they're not kept clear. IF you get a lot of ash, you'll still have to deal with the flooding issue, but the farther east you are the less likely it is you'll see heavy amounts of ash. Unfortunately, it only takes a few inches of wet ash to collapse the roof of a well built home.

Although the likelihood of getting more than a few inches of ashfall that far east is very small - a 400 cubic mile eruption (1,667.2 km^3) is a the mid range (though hardly the average) for an expected eruption from yellowstone** and would be able to bury the entire united states in 7 inches of ash, roughly. If it was all ash - but it's not. Some areas will see little to no ash, while areas closer will be more likely to see large amounts of ash. But one important thing to remember is not the entire eruption is ash - there are very very large amounts of lava too, possibly several hundred km^3.

To make matters worse, ash wet by rainfall is a good electrical conductor and shorts out transformers (then they burn and/or explode) and ash clogs engines. It takes very little ash to do this. This means food will be really unreliable for days to many weeks at a time in an area far from where you will be able to reliably grow crops.

• The upper end of an expected eruption size is about 3,000 km^3 or, 720 cubic miles. But nature throws curveballs, and calling a size for the eruption ahead of time would be foolish. I also don't know where ash would fall exactly, besides a general "east, with a lot of spillage in all directions" because it really really depends on time of year and synoptic-scale weather patterns in the upper troposphere during the eruption period.

However, this has made a big inaccuracy in my posts. For the general effects I'm stating I'm using this upper limit meaning probably a 99.9% chance it wouldn't be this bad. That's not to say it would be good, though - at best it would be a low end class 1 apocalypse how with several hundred million deaths. At worst, a solid middle class 1 with multiple billions of deaths globally.

But in using that scale, I'd like to make something clear: It's got a few things wrong for this subject. The death tolls and disruption would solidly place it in that range, but we wouldn't be loosing technology. On the contrary, new inventions and innovations would likely spring up (and be required) to make this "post-eruption life" easier.

I live in north Texas so how would I fare?

There's a lot of potential we don't know as evidence has emerged fairly recently that humankind didn't react necessarily to the events the way some scientists speculated.

At the base of one super volcano, for example, we've found evidence of post-volcano life pretty much dating back right next to it.

Random Factoid: The volcano goes off in my third Agent G book and is what leads to the destruction of the United States and its reimagining as a megacorp owned 3rd world country.

We should be so lucky in RL.