Perspective: VolcanoesVolcano Threats Are Hiding in Plain Sight
The series of powerful earthquakes that shook Southern California in July prompted understandable concern about whether the region is prepared for a period of possibly more active seismic shifts. It also generated, however, a viral wave of apocalyptic warnings that a “supervolcano” in Yellowstone National Park, a few states away, was about to erupt and plunge the world into darkness in a colossal explosion of lava and ash. There is a serious volcanic threat in the contiguous U.S., but it isn’t in Wyoming,” Sillow writes. “It lurks hundreds of miles to the west, inside the snow-capped, picture-postcard peaks of Mount Rainier, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood and others. They might look like ordinary mountains, but in fact they are volcanoes—and potentially dangerous ones.
The series of powerful earthquakes that shook Southern California in July prompted understandable concern about whether the region is prepared for a period of possibly more active seismic shifts. It also generated, however, a viral wave of apocalyptic warnings that a “supervolcano” in Yellowstone National Park, a few states away, was about to erupt and plunge the world into darkness in a colossal explosion of lava and ash.
The Yellowstone volcano didn’t erupt, but the internet did, with the number of Google searches for the park’s volcano spiking after the first California earthquake hit. That was followed by such tabloid headlines as “‘The Big One Is Coming’: California earthquakes ignite Yellowstone Supervolcano fears” and “Yellowstone volcano: Will California earthquake trigger ERUPTION?”
Gordon L. Dillow writes in the Wall Street Journal that such claims, which have surfaced periodically in recent years, generally take the form that Yellowstone is “overdue” for a major eruption (it isn’t), that worried park officials are evacuating tourists (they haven’t) and even that herds of bison are frantically fleeing the park after sensing an impending blowup (not so far). “Yellowstone seems to have cornered the market on that sort of thing,” says geophysicist Michael Poland, the scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, a multiagency group that monitors seismic and volcanic activity in the park.
It’s true that Yellowstone sits astride a giant “hot spot” of magma that over the past two million years has produced “supervolcano” eruptions that spewed out hundreds of cubic miles of ash and other materials, the last one around 630,000 years ago. That magma provides the heat that gives us Old Faithful and some 10,000 other hydrothermal features in the park. But for a variety of sound geological reasons, Dr. Poland and other scientists say that the chances of a super-eruption in our lifetimes, or even in the next thousand years, are slim to virtually nil. Even if an eruption did occur, it likely would be a localized lava flow, not a world-threatening super-explosion.
“There is a serious volcanic threat in the contiguous U.S., but it isn’t in Wyoming,” Sillow writes. “It lurks hundreds of miles to the west, inside the snow-capped, picture-postcard peaks of Mount Rainier, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood and others. They might look like ordinary mountains, but in fact they are volcanoes—and potentially dangerous ones.”
