Mount Doom, The Yellowstone Supervolcano

[norml]

MOUNT DOOM Dec 2 2004 http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14936414&method=full&siteid=89488&headline=mount-doom-name_page.html


BBC LAUNCH BUMPER WINTER SCHEDULE Volcano kills a billion in £3m docu-drama

By Frances Traynor



A CHILLING 'real-life' tale about a volcano which could kill a billion people is the explosive highlight of BBC1's winter TV schedule.

Viewers are also being offered a new series of Doctor Who and repackaged repeats of The Two Ronnies.

But the biggest weapon in the Beeb's armoury is Supervolcano, a £3million blockbuster that warns of a gigantic eruption in America's Yellowstone Park.

The two-part drama- documentary says that if - or when - the huge Yellowstone volcano explodes, a giant cloud of burning ash will kill 100,000Americans in minutes.

And it claims the world climate will be hit so badly that a billion people will die.

Beeb bosses deny scaremongering and insist the show is based on real data.

tBBC1 executive director Michael Mosley said: 'It is almost certain he Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt again. It is just a question of when.

'It tends to blow every 600,000 years and it last erupted 640,000 years ago.

'We took data on previous eruptions to several agencies in the US, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They helped us to predict mortality rates.

'The eruption would cause massive climate change. The rains would fail in the southern hemisphere and there would be starvation and economic chaos across the world.

'The US authorities had never really thought about the effects of a supervolcano. They were very interested in our data and have taken it on board.' BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey insisted: 'Super- volcano is not a disaster movie. It's more scientific than that.

snip

Hidden deep beneath the Earth's surface lie one of the most destructive and yet least-understood natural phenomena in the world - supervolcanoes. Only a handful exist in the world but when one erupts it will be unlike any volcano we have ever witnessed. The explosion will be heard around the world. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.
Normal volcanoes are formed by a column of magma - molten rock - rising from deep within the Earth, erupting on the surface, and hardening in layers down the sides. This forms the familiar cone shaped mountain we associate with volcanoes. Supervolcanoes, however, begin life when magma rises from the mantle to create a boiling reservoir in the Earth's crust. This chamber increases to an enormous size, building up colossal pressure until it finally erupts.

The last supervolcano to erupt was Toba 74,000 years ago in Sumatra. Ten thousands times bigger than Mt St Helens, it created a global catastrophe dramatically affecting life on Earth. Scientists know that another one is due - they just don't know when…. or where.

It is little known that lying underneath one of America's areas of outstanding natural beauty - Yellowstone Park - is one of the largest supervolcanoes in the world. Scientists have revealed that it has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago…so the next is overdue.

And the sleeping giant is breathing: volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres this century. Is this just the harmless movement of lava, flowing from one part of the reservoir to another? Or does it presage something much more sinister, a pressurised build-up of molten lava?

Scientists have very few answers, but they do know that the impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend. Huge areas of the USA would be destroyed, the US economy would probably collapse, and thousands might die.

And it would devastate the planet. Climatologists now know that Toba blasted so much ash and sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere that it blocked out the sun, causing the Earth's temperature to plummet. Some geneticists now believe that this had a catastrophic effect on human life, possibly reducing the population on Earth to just a few thousand people. Mankind was pushed to the edge of extinction… and it could happen again.



Here's some more links. http://www.volcanolive.com/supervolcano.html http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/Gases/toba.html http://www.solcomhouse.com/yellowstone.htm http://www.earthside.com/yellowstone.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/08/0828_wireyellowstone.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano http://www.yellowstonenationalpark.com/calderas.htm