NASA may accidentally set off the Yellowstone supervolcano in a risky effort to prevent it from blowing

Scientists at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) may have come up with an unconventional plan to save the United States from the supposed explosion of the allegedly newly active volcano at the Yellowstone National Park.

Lying underneath the Yellowstone National Park is a huge magma chamber called a caldera, which is responsible for making geysers and hot springs hot. It erupts every 600,000 years and is home to scenic spots such as 10,000 hot springs, mud pots, and geysers, including the cone geyser called Old Faithful.

NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense former member Brian Wilcox shared a recent report regarding the recently-active caldera, noting, “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. I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteoid or comet threat.”

“When people first considered the idea of defending the Earth from an asteroid impact, they reacted to a similar way to the supervolcano threat. People thought, ‘As puny as we are, how can humans possibly prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth?’”

“Well, it turns out if you engineer something which pushes very slightly for a very long time, you can make the asteroid miss the Earth – so the problem turns out to be easier than people think,” Wilcox said.

This is not the same with supervolcanoes, Wilcox said.

Because Yellowstone currently spills around 60 to 70 percent of its heat into the atmosphere via stream water which oozes into the magma chamber through cracks, the heat and pressure will reach a certain threshold, thereby leading to an inevitable explosion.

However, according to Wilcox, if enough heat was removed, and the supervolcano’s temperature dropped, there might come a day where it would never erupt. This is because a volcano can only be considered sufficiently eruptible when it’s mostly made of molten; when it’s rock hard, it won’t do so. That’s why cooling the magma is a viable option to stave off the Yellowstone supervolcano’s potential explosion.

How much should the temperature drop? Around 35 percent, said Wilcox, which can be considered incredibly risky, as this can only be achieved by getting an increased supply of water into the supervolcano.

“Building a big aqueduct uphill into a mountainous region would be both costly and difficult, and people don’t want their water spent that way,” Wilcox said.

NASA came up with an alternative solution: drill up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) down into the supervolcano and pump down water at high pressure and at a temperature of around 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit), thus day by day reducing the supervolcano’s temperature. The project is estimated to cost around $3.46 billion.

The excess heat can also serve other purposes, like providing power to America’s electrical grid.

“Yellowstone currently leaks around six gigawatts in heat. Through drilling in this way, it could be used to create a geothermal plant, which generates electric power at extremely competitive prices of around $0.10 per kilowatt hour,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox said that the drilling of a supervolcano can in itself cause its explosion, if not done properly. “If you drill into the top of the magma chamber and try and cool it from there, this would be very risky. This could make the cap over the magma chamber more brittle and prone to fracture. And you might trigger the harmful release of harmful volatile gases in the magma at the top of the chamber which would not otherwise be released.”

Supervolcanoes are abnormally large volcanoes whose eruptions can cause gigantic effects on the global climate and the ecosystem. Big supervolcanic eruptions happen every 100,000 years, with the last major one happening in New Zealand 26,500 years ago.

According to a new map released by the U.S. Geological Survey, the ground around the Yellowstone cauldron has suffered from breaks over the span of two years, making the ground sink back down. Other features of the map include a bulls-eye shaped section of uplift at the Norris Geyser Basin, where the ground rose by around three inches; and an elliptical subsidence in the Yellowstone caldera, with the ground dropping by around 1.2 inches.

“The uplift and subsidence is usually interpreted as due to addition or withdrawal of deep magma and related gases and water at depths five to 15 km (three to nine miles) beneath the ground. This cycle of uplift and subsidence is common and seems tied to earthquake swarms; that is, swarms appear to release the pressure that caused the initial uplift, thus allowing the region to return to a period of subsidence.”

Earthquakes have been plaguing the area all throughout the summer. By Wednesday, August 2, it had around 1,562 events, with the largest magnitude of 4.4. It was visited by more than 1,200 earthquakes in just a month. (Related: Yellowstone reaches 878 earthquakes in just two weeks as scientists wonder when the volcano will blow.)

According to experts, there is a one in 700,000 chance that the Yellowstone supervolcano would erupt. If it comes to that though, the eruption would be 1,000 times more powerful than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption in Skamania County, Washington.

Read more stories such as this one at Preparedness.news.

Sources include:

SHTFPlan.com

ZeeNewsIndia.com

IFLScience.com

DailyMail.co.uk

Humanity is one asteroid impact away from being wiped out

 If a natural disaster such as a hurricane or a tornado is coming your way, it will inevitably cause a significant amount of damage, but at least you could have the chance to get out of harms way. But how would you evacuate in the event of a natural disaster from outer space, capable of wiping out entire species in a relatively short amount of time? Is the potential for an asteroid colliding with earth one of our planet’s greatest threats?

“Sooner or later we will get… a minor or major impact,” says Rolf Densing, head of the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Densing explained that even though we may not be alive to see it happen, “the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high.”

Asteroid sizes range from just a few millimeters to over 6 miles in length, which astrophysicists believe is the size of the space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago. What’s worse is that if one of these gigantic asteroids were to enter Earth’s atmosphere again, there’s really nothing we would be able to do to stop it.

“We are not ready to defend ourselves” in the event that an asteroid begins falling towards our planet, said Densing. “We have no active planetary defense measures.”

We know that the largest types of asteroids – the kind that are capable of wiping out all life on our planet – strike Earth about once every 100 million years. But even though we have a general idea of the impact frequency of these behemoth space rocks, there are still many things we don’t know. How big will it be exactly? Will it wipe out all of humanity, or will there be survivors? And by the time a giant asteroid does begin falling towards Earth, will we have the technology to intercept it or destroy it?

Over the past several years, NASA has been working on a program called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which locates objects in space, like asteroids, and issues warnings when an impact with Earth is possible (RELATED: NASA only has a 10 percent chance of detecting asteroids before they hit Earth.) Likewise, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency is in the process of acquiring $450 million to send an advanced telescope into space in order to track giant space rocks that could potentially collide with our planet.

But studying and tracking asteroids near Earth is only half of the battle, because all of the data in the world wouldn’t be able to stop one of these rocky behemoths from slamming into our world. We would still be faced with the task of either pushing the asteroid out of the way or blowing it to pieces.

Jason P. Dworkin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland says that the action taken to intercept an asteroid depends on certain factors, like how much time we have and the asteroid’s shape. “If it was up to me, I would send a rocket with some titanium dioxide on it and paint it white, and have that Yarkovksy effect accelerate, and move it away from the Earth,” Dworkin explained. He adds, “If you have something like 50 years, that could deflect it enough, and it might be a whole lot simpler than sending up nuclear weapons.”

Given the numerous threats that we are already trying to deal with today, it’s understandable that the potential of an asteroid hitting Earth is not something that is often discussed. However, it is important that we not only continue to track asteroids floating around in outer space, but also that we continue to develop new technology that one day could be used to save the human race.

Sources include:

Phys.org

NBCnews.com

A single asteroid hit in the Atlantic ocean could generate a Fukushima-sized tsunami wave causing nuclear meltdowns in 13 nuclear facilities along the East Coast

 It seems like today the United States has more foreign threats than we can count. Not only are tensions with Russia on the rise, but America is also being simultaneously threatened by Syria and North Korea. On top of it all, the Islamic State is on the move, carrying out horrific acts of violence, not only overseas but also on our own soil. Indeed, if the President and his team of foreign policy experts make even one mistake, it could potentially result in serious damage to our country.

Still, Americans can find solace in the fact that all of these are threats we can control. If we don’t want to be attacked by the Russians, for example, there are certain things that our leaders can do to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, though, there are also certain things that we have no control over whatsoever; things that have the ability to inflict massive damage and lead to the deaths of millions of people.

One thing that most Americans never stop to consider is the threat of an asteroid hurling through the atmosphere and colliding with planet Earth. Even though most space rocks that collide with Earth are nowhere near big enough to cause any real damage, there is still the possibility that one day, a massive asteroid will come into contact with our world and send us all back to the stone ages. (RELATED: NASA only has a 10% chance of detecting asteroids before they strike Earth.)

Given the fact that 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water, it is more than likely that an asteroid would strike the ocean as opposed to a continent.

Several years ago, scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz developed a computer simulation detailing what would happen if a large asteroid were to strike the Atlantic Ocean. According to their model, such an impact would send waves as high as 400 feet crashing into the East Coast of the United States, resulting in mass destruction and millions of deaths. Much of this destruction would be caused by a series of nuclear meltdowns at facilities based in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

The simulation was based on a real asteroid that is expected to collide with Earth eight centuries from now. On March 16, 2880, the asteroid known as 1950 DA is expected to swing extremely close to earth’s atmosphere – so close, in fact, that is could slam into our planet at speeds of up to 38,000 miles per hour. Given the fact that 1950 DA is two-thirds of a mile in diameter, it is easy to see how such a space rock would be capable of causing so much damage. Even though, statistically speaking, the odds of an asteroid this size hitting earth are relatively small, that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened before. For instance, it is widely assumed that the so-called K/T impact was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Steven Ward, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCSC, said, “From a geologic perspective, events like this have happened many times in the past. Asteroids the size of 1950 DA have probably struck earth about 600 times since the age of the dinosaurs.”

While the idea of an asteroid smashing into earth and potentially wiping out life as we know it isn’t exactly a happy thought, it is something that we must think about. As UCSC Earth Sciences professor Erik Asphaug puts it, “It’s like knowing the exact time when Mount Shasta will erupt. The way to deal with any natural hazard is to improve our knowledge base, so we can turn the kind of human fear that gets played on in the movies into something that we have a handle on.”

Sources include:

USCUSA.org

News.UCSC.eduFacebook