How far are we from colonizing off Earth?

[catsclaw227]

Aren't the chances of Yellowstone busting it's nut higher than getting hit by a space rock? Being a super volcano, it could do far more damage than a 50m asteroid hitting.

Apparently it has an alarmingly regular eruption cycle determined to be every 600,000 years, and the last eruption was more than 640,000 years ago, so we're more likely to be wiped out by this than anything extraterrestrial.

Yellowstone also got scary active just after the Haiti quake, with a reported 1620 small quakes between Jan 17, 2010 and Feb 1, 2010, being the second largest swarm of quakes in the Yellowstone caldera ever recorded.

One online chicken-little has this to say about what would happen if it erupts. (note, I don't know where he gets the science from):

Immediately before the eruption, there would be large earthquakes in the Yellowstone region. The ground would swell further with most of Yellowstone being uplifted. One earthquake would finally break the layer of rock that holds the magma in - and all the pressure the Earth can build up in 640,000 years would be unleashed in a cataclysmic event.

Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. Volcanic ash would coat places as far away as Iowa and the Gulf of Mexico. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would have a force 2,500 times that of Mount St. Helens. It would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years, the time of the last super volcano eruption. Within minutes of the eruption tens of thousands would be dead.

The long-term effects would be even more devastating. The thousands of cubic kilometres of ash that would shoot into the atmosphere could block out light from the sun, making global temperatures plummet. This is called a nuclear winter. As during the Sumatra eruption a large percentage of the world's plant life would be killed by the ash and drop in temperature. Also, virtually the entire of the grain harvest of the Great Plains would disappear in hours, as it would be coated in ash. Similar effects around the world would cause massive food shortages. If the temperatures plummet by the 21 degrees they did after the Sumatra eruption the Yellowstone super volcano eruption could truly be an extinction level event.

Sounds scary. But does anyone know how much of this is true and how much is 2012 style fear-mongering and superstition?

I mean, geological technology is getting pretty good, and they say that the ground in the Yellowstone caldera is 74cm higher than in 1923, and scientists from the USGS used InSAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry) to map the changes in the northern rim of the caldera and discovered it had risen about 13cm from 1997 to 2003.

I don't know, but that concerns me more than an asteriod.

 

[jonesy]

Sounds scary. But does anyone know how much of this is true and how much is 2012 style fear-mongering and superstition?

There have been three supereruptions. 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640k years ago. But when it comes to volcanoes that doesn't mean much. You can't really use times of past explosions to calculate times of future explosions. It might blow up tomorrow, or never again.

Like Wikipedia mentions: "University of Utah and National Park Service scientists with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory maintain that they see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at Yellowstone in the foreseeable future. Recurrence intervals of these events are neither regular nor predictable."

If you want to scare yourself here's a BBC dramatization:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAf6OyFth7Y]YouTube - supervolcano part 1 2/6[/ame]

 

[El Mahdi]

...Sounds scary. But does anyone know how much of this is true and how much is 2012 style fear-mongering and superstition?...

I've got it on good authority that this is actually scheduled for 2012...

 

[Banshee16]

Well, they don't have to worry directly about the water itself. But there's climate change associated with that. And, when NYC, London, Hong Kong, and several other major metropolitan/financial centers take the swim, the world economy collapses. And every single port in the world is inundated - so no more petroleum shipments...

It's all interconnected.

Yes, I'm familiar with that. What I was asking was simply about the straight facts of whether particular areas would experience flooding. Like, if an inland city, 3000km from the ocean, but on the side of a river, and hence only 60m above sea level would itself be 20m under water if the sea levels rose by 80m.

Sorry for not making my question more clear.

I definitely understand that such a scenario would have disastrous effects from an environmental and financial standpoint. We'd be crowding a lot of people into a smaller amount of arable terrain, among other things, and plenty of the places in the middle of North America are rather arid and dry, and, from what I understand, don't really have the potable water reserves to support the increased population levels they would have.

However.....I'm also not of the opinion that such a disaster is irrecoverable. The planet is very resilient. And life is very tenacious. Even if, in the (geologically tiny scale) 2 million years following a disaster like that and a collapse of the ecosystem, the planet was not very well adapted for life with homo sapiens and current life forms, the survivors would adapt, and eventually flourish. Of course, tough luck for humans, but that's evolution.

Earth's had disaster's wiping out 50-80% of life on the planet, and the result is often a boom in evolution and diversity after the fact. Of course, if you're a species living right *before* the disaster, it sucks to be you.......but if you're alive *after* the disaster, there's tonnes of opportunity.

Banshee

 

[Janx]

However.....I'm also not of the opinion that such a disaster is irrecoverable. The planet is very resilient. And life is very tenacious. Even if, in the (geologically tiny scale) 2 million years following a disaster like that and a collapse of the ecosystem, the planet was not very well adapted for life with homo sapiens and current life forms, the survivors would adapt, and eventually flourish. Of course, tough luck for humans, but that's evolution.

Earth's had disaster's wiping out 50-80% of life on the planet, and the result is often a boom in evolution and diversity after the fact. Of course, if you're a species living right *before* the disaster, it sucks to be you.......but if you're alive *after* the disaster, there's tonnes of opportunity.

Banshee

why would you assume that we humans wouldn't survive an environmental change where other animals would?

Humans are responsible for changing the environment on local scales that cause species to die out. That's how fragile other species are.

Humans are found living in cold climates where it gets -40 degrees F or colder (I know, I lived in such a place), and in places it gets to be 110 F or worse, like Iraq.

Frankly, we're better suited for change than most other lifeforms on this planet. We got brains to relocate, build shelter or adapt.

Unless the planet becomes truly incompatible to life, I suspect there will be humans surviving an environmental disaster.

That doesn't mean folks won't die, just that there will still be plenty of survivors.

 

[jonesy]

Humans are found living in cold climates where it gets -40 degrees F or colder (I know, I lived in such a place).

You've lived in Finland? We hit -37,1 last winter. It was pretty chilly.

 

[El Mahdi]

...I definitely understand that such a scenario would have disastrous effects from an environmental and financial standpoint. We'd be crowding a lot of people into a smaller amount of arable terrain, among other things, and plenty of the places in the middle of North America are rather arid and dry, and, from what I understand, don't really have the potable water reserves to support the increased population levels they would have...

Maybe disastrous, maybe not. It's truly impossible to model what the exact impact would be. Of course it's easy to model rising sea-level. Fairly simple for the short term, you just look at elevation. Though over the long term it's a bit more difficult (long term meaning thousands of years) as land masses will actually rise in elevation due to loss of glaciers and ice caps weighing them down.

But the big kicker is that we can only conjecture as to how a rising sea level will affect weather patterns. It could be quite possible that places considered arid now, could see significant increases in precipitation. Imagine the possibility of the Sahara Desert returned back to it's former savanah-like environment. We just can't accurately model it well enough. Of course there are those out there who say they can model it, and of those number of people there's an almost equal number of differing opinions and conclusions.

 

[Umbran]

However.....I'm also not of the opinion that such a disaster is irrecoverable.

Yes, life is resilient. That's nice, but it cold comfort if your own species buys the farm.

 

[Banshee16]

why would you assume that we humans wouldn't survive an environmental change where other animals would?

Humans are responsible for changing the environment on local scales that cause species to die out. That's how fragile other species are.

Humans are found living in cold climates where it gets -40 degrees F or colder (I know, I lived in such a place), and in places it gets to be 110 F or worse, like Iraq.

Frankly, we're better suited for change than most other lifeforms on this planet. We got brains to relocate, build shelter or adapt.

Unless the planet becomes truly incompatible to life, I suspect there will be humans surviving an environmental disaster.

That doesn't mean folks won't die, just that there will still be plenty of survivors.

I'd never predict that such an event would kill every human. I think however, that civilization as we know it would change significantly....and populations might be severely curtailed. But even if 99% of humans were killed, that still leaves 70 million....more than enough to continue the species. Enough to continue modern civilization? Maybe not....at least in the short term.

But I will point out that despite our brains, we're still living organisms, who on some level, obey the same physical and biological laws as other life forms. We need access to clean water, we need food, though we can survive without it. When supplies run out or become scarce, civil society can and does break down. We saw during the Ice Storm, supposedly in the aftermath of Katrina, etc. Now, imagine the chaos caused by displacing tens of millions of people into areas that weren't built up to support them.

I could be wrong, but I think the problem is more on the level of......if changes like this cause problems that disrupt our food supply even on a relatively short-term level, like one or two years, imagine how many people could suffer or die during that time. It's not inconceivable. Plants can adapt and grow back.....but look how long it takes. I remember near my cottage, they clear cut part of the forest.....15 years ago. Basically down to ferns. It's been allowed to grow back, but it has to go through the natural cycle. Now, there are poplars, some conifers coming back etc....but it's still nowhere near where it was, and it's going to be another fifty years before it recovers to that point.

I don't think anyone can predict what would happen....but I think it's arrogant of humans to assume that just because we're human, we will. I think our brains and the sheer number of us on the planet give us better than even chances, but who knows?

Banshee





Banshee

 

[jonesy]

....but I think it's arrogant of humans to assume that just because we're human, we will. I think our brains and the sheer number of us on the planet give us better than even chances, but who knows?

I once saw someone with a great sarcastic t-shirt.

On the front it said "What Would The Dinosaurs Have Done?".

On the back was a meteor hitting Earth.