The Long Road

03/30/2003 Archived Entry: "Time to Blow"

When I was younger I used to watch a lot of TLC. I watched one show about how in billions of years the universe would collapse back in on itself in The Big Crunch. The end of everything. I remember being pretty worried about that. End of All Existence type stuff is always unsettling. Luckily, its been recently claimed that the universe will never reverse its inertia. PHEEEW!

So today I was reading about the movie "The Core" and ran into a looming end-of-the-world disaster. Everyone's heard of volcanoes but how many of you have heard of Supervolcanoes? Supervolcanoes aren't mountains like volcanoes, they're crater-like pits of pressurized magma that erupt with the force of a thousand normal volcanoes. Scientists have only become aware of supervolcanoes in the last hundred years.

When a supervolcano erups it results in nuclear winter for the whole world - without the radiation. The sun will be bloted out for years and acid rain will pour from the skies. The last known supervolcano to go off was Tomba in Sumatra about 74 000 years ago. Scientists think that all but about 5 000 humans died then along with most species of plants and animals.

Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano. It's so big that you can only tell it's a crater from outer space. It has been determined that Yellowstone erupts every 600 000 years. The really scary part? The last time it erupted was 640 000 years ago. It's 40 000 years behind, which means it should go off SOON. Give or take a few hundred years.

Try looking some of this up, it's creepy. If you were 40 000 years behind for an eruption, you'd probably take the rest of the world with you too when you finally blew.

Replies: 4 comments

horseshit (or maybe not)
!define horseshit
"horseshit" wn "WordNet (r) 1.7"
n : a ludicrously false statement [syn: (bullshit), (bull), (Irish
bull), (shit), (crap), (bunk), (bunkum), (buncombe), (guff),
(rot), (hogwash), (dogshit)]
End of definition.

Posted by sbdep @ 03/30/2003 02:04 AM EST

stupid stripping of the angle bracket things

Posted by sbdep @ 03/30/2003 02:05 AM EST

Well, I must say I haven't heard of these 'super' volcanoes before. However I can say that the phenomenon of volcanoes erupting and filling the atmosphere with gas and dust, blocking out the sun for a great many years applies to the larger 'normal' volcanoes, too.

Posted by Romer @ 03/30/2003 02:52 AM EST

load of shit

Posted by looloo @ 05/19/2005 09:39 PM EST