We Are NOT Talking About Jellystone

Yellowstone is one of the most popular National Parks in the United States, drawing millions of visitors every year.  Those visitors marvel at the geysers, hot springs, and the fantastically colored mineral pools in the park.  Few of those visitors realize what powers those geysers, springs, and pools.  Fewer still have any inkling of the ticking time bomb below the surface of the beautiful wonderland that is Yellowstone.

Yellowstone National Park sits on top of caldera, a depression left by a supereruption.  The Yellowstone caldera is more than 50 kilometers by 70 kilometers.  This is one huge mother of a volcano; its largest eruption whose geological traces we can read covered about half of the continental United States with a bed of volcanic ash.

While it has no scientific definition, supervolcano is a very descriptive term.  There have been numerous eruptions in the same class as those produced by Yellowstone, and all of them make Tambora look like a wet firecracker.  It did not take me long to find information describing one volcano of this class that ejected 5,000 cubic kilometers of material.  Even the smaller of the supervolcanoes can trigger long-term climate changes, and start a cascade of environmental events that lead to extinction of species.

Is it likely we will experience one of these eruptions?  No.

Neither are we likely to get smacked by an asteroid next week.

I will stop bringing up various ways we could get snuffed out or blasted back to a Stone Age existence.  There are many avenues to disaster, some less likely than others.  Some are the result of happenings as random as the Universe throwing rocks in our general direction.  Some are ways we might cook up do the dastardly deed to ourselves.

Let us just say it has been shown that there are numerous ways we could face extremely dire circumstances, and that the chances of those things happening are greater than zero.  All of that leads to one very important question.  This is the question I have been approaching all along.  (Sorry it took so long but if you want to do it better, write your own.)  Here is the question:

What are we going to do about it?