Energy

The magma chamber is no more than a few miles down . Small
pipes could send water down and get superheated steam back to drive
turbines eg yellowstone . With millions of these pipes the USA could
tell OPEC to go to hell and stop the volcanoes erupting .

Supervolcanoes
First shown: BBC2 9:30pm Thursday 3rd February 2000
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 hostinghostinghostingociate 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 thousand 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.

Transcript

Supervolcano
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A supervolcano refers to a volcano that produces the largest and most
voluminous kinds of eruptions on earth. The actual explosivity of
these eruptions varies, but the sheer volume of extruded magma is
immense enough to radically alter the landscape and severely impact
global climate for years, with a cataclysmic effect on life. The term
was originally coined by the producers of a BBC popular science
programme in 2002 to refer to these types of eruptions. It is not a
technical term used in volcanology. Though there is no well-defined
minimum size for a "supervolcano", there are at least two types of
volcanic eruption that have been identified as supervolcanoes.

Volcanic Explosivity Index-8 eruptions (VEI-8 for short) are
mega-colossal events that extrude at least 1000 km³ of magma and
pyroclastic material. Such an eruption erases virtually all life in a
radius of hundreds of kilometers from the site, and entire continental
regions further out can be buried meters deep in ash. VEI-8 eruptions
are so great as not to form mountains, but instead circular calderas,
resulting from the downward collapse of land at the eruption site to
fill emptied space in the magma chamber beneath. The caldera can
remain for millions of years after all volcanic activity at the site
has died. VEI-8 volcanic events have included eruptions at:

Mount Aniakchak, Alaska, United States
Aso, Kyushu, Japan
Campi Flegrei, Campania, Italy
Kikai Caldera, Ryukyu Islands, Japan
Long Valley Caldera, California, United States
Mount Mazama, Oregon, United States (now Crater Lake)
Lake Taupo, North Island, New Zealand
Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia
Valle Grande, New Mexico, United States
Mount Warning, New South Wales, Australia
Yellowstone Caldera, Wyoming, United States
Basaltic floods are unexplosive volcanic eruptions that extrude
enormous quanhostinghostinghostingies of basaltic lava flat and deep over large areas,
even covering entire sections of continent. Though not explosive, the
gases and dust released by such an eruption impact global climate as
much as a VEI-8, hence a supervolcano. Prehistoric basaltic floods
have been suspected as causes or contributors to mhostinghostinghosting extinctions in
the past, including the ultra-mhostinghostinghostingive Permian extinction, which killed
the majority of all then-living species, and the more famous but
smaller Cretaceous extinction that extinguished most of the dinosaurs.
Basaltic flood events have included eruptions at:

Brazilian Highlands, Brazil
Columbia River Plateau, United States
Deccan Traps, India
Siberian Traps, Russian Federation

Eight km is nothing . We can get down to it now

Geologists say there is a real risk that sooner or later a
supervolcano will erupt with devastating force, sending temperatures
plunging on a hemispheric or even global scale.

A report by the BBC Two programme Horizon on one supervolcano, at
Yellowstone national park in the US, says it is overdue for an
eruption.

Yellowstone has gone off roughly once every 600,000 years. Its last
eruption was 640,000 years ago.

Professor Bill McGuire, of the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre
at University College, London, told BBC News Online: "We're getting
ready for another eruption, unless the system has blown itself out.

"But the ground surface deformation and other signs measured by
satellite suggest it's still active, and on the move."

Molten rock

Typically, supervolcanoes are not mountains but depressions, huge
collapsed craters called calderas, which are hard to detect.

The Yellowstone caldera is 70 kilometres long and 30 km wide. Eight km
beneath the Earth's surface lies a huge magma chamber, containing vast
amounts of molten rock.

As pressure rises in the chamber, the surface is also rising and there
is a measurable increase in heat. But vulcanologists do not know when
Yellowstone will blow.

When a supervolcano goes off, it is an order of magnitude greater than
a normal eruption. It produces energy equivalent to an impact with a
comet or an asteroid.

"You can try diverting an asteroid. But there is nothing at all you
can do about a supervolcano.

"The eruption throws cubic kilometres of rock, ash, dust, sulphur
dioxide and so on into the upper atmosphere, where they reflect
incoming solar radiation, forcing down temperatures on the Earth's
surface. It's just like a nuclear winter.

habshi wrote:
>
> The magma chamber is no more than a few miles down . Small
> pipes could send water down and get superheated steam back to drive
> turbines eg yellowstone . With millions of these pipes the USA could
> tell OPEC to go to hell and stop the volcanoes erupting .

Idiot wog. Thermal conductivity, recovery, corrosion, infrastructure.

($hostinghostingK/installed bore)("millions of bores") = $hostinghosting billions of dollars.

Why don't you hook all your gaseous Hindu hostinghostinghostingholes up to recover
methane and power India? Better yet, anaerobically ferment all the
lentils and allow the meat to starve - that awards you enhanced
resource plus lowered demand.

--
Uncle Al

(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)

"Uncle Al" <> wrote in message
news:
> habshi wrote:
> >
> > The magma chamber is no more than a few miles down . Small
> > pipes could send water down and get superheated steam back to drive
> > turbines eg yellowstone . With millions of these pipes the USA could
> > tell OPEC to go to hell and stop the volcanoes erupting .
>
> Idiot wog. Thermal conductivity, recovery, corrosion, infrastructure.
>
> ($hostinghostingK/installed bore)("millions of bores") = $hostinghosting billions of dollars.
>
> Why don't you hook all your gaseous Hindu hostinghostinghostingholes up to recover
> methane and power India? Better yet, anaerobically ferment all the
> lentils and allow the meat to starve - that awards you enhanced
> resource plus lowered demand.
>

it's reported that average american puts out 13 liters of gas (NTP) in a
day. how much do the hindus produce?

> --
> Uncle Al
>
> (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
>