NASA’s Secret Plan to Save Earth From Super-Volcanoes… Seriously?

August 18th, 2017

Awake Goy

NASAs Secret Plan to Save Earth From Super-Volcanoes Seriously?

By David Middleton

Guest post by David Middleton

I didn’t realize this was “Apocalypse Week”….

Apocalypse Week

Volcano

Geology

Nasas ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano

With an eruption brewing, it may be the only way to prevent the extinction of the human race.

By David Cox

17 August 2017

Lying beneath the tranquil settings of Yellowstone National Park in the US lies an enormous magma chamber. Its responsible for the geysers and hot springs that define the area, but for scientists at Nasa, its also one of the greatest natural threats to human civilisation as we know it: a potential supervolcano.

Following an article we published about supervolcanoes last month, a group of Nasa researchers got in touch to share a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat and what could be done about it.

I was a member of the Nasa Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for Nasa to defend the planet from asteroids and comets, explains Brian Wilcox of Nasas Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology. I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.

[…]

The Beeb

Notes to the Beeb:

It’s NASA, not Nasa.
Civilization has a “z” in it.
Yellowstone is a supervolcano, not a potential supervolcano.

If the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat, does this mean we can stop fretting about Gorebal Warming and the Sixth Mass Extinction? Is NASA really moving on to actual threats to the planet? Well, not threats to the planet… The planet has handled supervolcanoes, asteroids and comets quite well over its 4.5 billion year lifespan.

I’ll rephrase the question: Is NASA actually taking on genuine threats to humanity? Or at least threats to these United States? Let’s return to the article and find out…

READ MORE:

Would a supervolcano wipe us out?

The greatest threats to humanity as we know it

The atomic bomb too big to use

There are around 20 known supervolcanoes on Earth, with major eruptions occurring on average once every 100,000 years. One of the greatest threats an eruption may pose is thought to be starvation, with a prolonged volcanic winter potentially prohibiting civilisation from having enough food for the current population. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that food reserves worldwide would last 74 days.

[…]

That’s “funny.” One of the “solutions” proposed for Gorebal Warming is geoengineering a volcanic winter by pumping sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere. Maybe we just need to ramp up GHG emissions now, so that when Yellowstone does pop off another Ultra-Plinian eruption, Earth will be warm enough to handle a volcanic winter. A more pertinent concern is how we’ll handle having much of our nation covered with volcanic ash…

Figure 1. Modeled tephra fall thickness, Figure 6 from Mastin et al., 2014: “Simulated tephra fall thickness resulting from a month-long Yellowstone eruption of 330 km3 using 2001 wind fields for (a) January, (b) April, (c) July, and (d) October. In (a), the bold red line delineates the extent of the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff Bed (HR); the brown line delineates the extent of Lava Creek B Tuff (LCB) [Sarna-Wojcicki, 2000].”

View the original article NASAs Secret Plan to Save Earth From Super-Volcanoes Seriously? at wattsupwiththat.com

Posted in Analysis & Review.