Supervolcano Politics

A monster freak of nature, 40,000 years past due on its 600,000-year cycle, is about to bury the continental US. There's no negotiating with this monster. When it happens, it will destroy the US as we know it -- unless we somehow manage to get prepared for it.

"Of course, there's a fourth ring of doom -- zero preparedness. Katrina times a hundred million. It's the whole point here. We must hold our elites responsible for knowing that Yellowstone 4 is inevitable. Makes no difference whether it happens next week, three years from now, or twenty years from now. Zero preparation means a death toll in the tens of millions before any significant counter-measures can be taken. And, in an informed choice, zero preparation is exactly what Monkeybrain's government has chosen."

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I've been on a rambling sabbatical. From Christmas Week to the Ides of March, it was free-range politics -- politics without borders. It was about where we've been, what the hell are we doing, newly-discovered ambushes, and where to from here?

The sabbatical soft-centered on Lawrence Joseph's Gaia-oriented 2007 book, Apocalypse 2012. As entertaining a writer as Joseph is, I could learn to hate that book. From first reading, it's been like an evil ghoul in the night, most days.

One of the book's ghoulish faces is my dread that the hi-jacking of our government and the killing of our Constitution was done because the superrich class-race elites had the book's natural disaster information back when. Yellowstone's supervolcano would've kicked their money-grubbing motives into racing trim.

War profiteering is the superrich's ultimate, high-volume money-maker. With the pending destruction of the US national economy by the monster freak of nature lurking at Yellowstone, buying or coercing SCOTUS to create the 3-branch Bush-Cheney fascist despotism would have been cheap at twice the price -- whatever the price was.

If Yellowstone and its many related monsters were even part of the motives for hi-jacking our governments, then the financial and governerning elites have been murderers from the start -- premeditating murderers. And politics as usual is right out the window -- starting right now.

The Yellowstone Caldera (supervolcano) is a two-week, radiation and sulfuric acid loaded explosion ready to happen. Think huge thermonuclear explosion lasting for two weeks or more.

The Yellowstone magma chamber is about 125 miles deep. Its maw at the surface is about 70 km by 30 km -- about 44 by 19 miles. Per the USGS, there were 113 earthquakes in Yellowstone during February 2007. The caldera's surface has risen by 14 centimeters over the past 31 months.

Tectonic plates move at 1 millimeter per century. The magma chamber at Yellowstone lifted its lid by 140 millimeters in 31 months. I've seen the data a hundred times in black and white. It electrocutes me every time. Aaarrrrgggg. 14 centimeters uplift? Less than three years?

The cooking caldera could cook off just any time now. And scientists have no earthly idea how quickly a supervolcano goes from cooking to cooking off. Nonesuch has happened for 74,000 years. The geologic record is mute on warning time.

Will we have a St. Helens warning period? Yellowstone 4 -- there've been three previous Yellowstone supereruptions -- has so much more explosive gas in its magma than St. Helens did that its likely to give us no warning at all.

First venting to the atmosphere -- kaboom -- two weeks or more. Think pin-prick of an over-inflated balloon. There's no way to relieve the pressure building up inside the monster. Drilling to tap off the pressure equals pin-prick.

Scientists think that Yellowstone's magma chamber is still capped with 3.6 to 6 miles of earthen rock. But they don't really know. Or, if they do, they're not releasing the real-time data to the public. And, of course, the magma chamber is constantly heating and melting away the overhanging rock, working its way to the surface. Another ghoulish evil face in the dark.

Admittedly, the two-week-explosion measure is an estimation of Yellowstone 3, which happened 640,000 years ago. It was Yellowstone's medium supereruption. It blew out about 240 cubic miles of molten rock. About 960 times more than St. Helens' one-quarter cubic mile of molten rock in 1980.

Scientists estimate that Yellowstone 3's blast-kill radius was about 1000 KM -- 600 miles. Moonscape. Little or no life remaining above ground inside the radius.

We should hope that Yellowstone 4 is Yellowstone 3 or smaller.

Yellowstone 1 blew out 600 cubic miles of molten rock -- about 2400 times more than St. Helens in 1980. I can't go there often. And the stays are brief. Yellowstone 3 is hard enough to get my mind around.

It doesn't help that the Al Qaeda message that went along with the Madrid bombings (11 March 2004) mentioned the "black wind of death" that will blow over America. If Yellowstone 4 is a medium rip, its volcanic/nuclear winter will run six to ten years. And there seems to be many ways that an Al Qaeda nuc could be delivered to near-enough the Yellowstone magma chamber to start it blowing.

Joseph says in A-2012 that there are "three rings of doom" coming in Yellowstone 4.

First is the blast-kill radius. Live things above ground will be killed. If it's a medium rip, Denver is toast. LA might live, if the booming shocks from Yellowstone 4 don't trigger the San Andreas lock-up.

Second ring of doom is the radiation poisoning. The Yellowstone hotspot exists because it is home to the planet's largest deposit of uranium and other naturally radioactive minerals. It might be the only supervolcano on the planet whose cause is radioactive. Degree of radioactive blowout in its supereruption is an unknown ghoulish evil.

The third ring of doom is the ash fall. At a distance of 900 miles, Tulsa can expect -- I'm estimating from various scientific writings -- three to twenty feet of ash depth, depending on the winds.

In two weeks time, the jet stream(s) and associated winds wander all over the continental US. We should expect significant ash fall all across the country -- to water's edge on the Atlantic coast. The large supereruption 74,000 years ago -- Lake Toba, Sumatra, 600 cubic miles of extruded rock -- left over a foot of ash depth at a distance of 2600 miles. It's 1800-1900 jet-stream-assisted miles from Yellowstone to Philadelphia.

A cubic meter of wet volcanic ash can weigh up to 4,400 pounds. Our building codes for snow load is a tiny fraction of that. We should expect -- and be prepared for -- roof-crushing ash loads In Chicago and Detroit. Oh, yeah, we don't know much about ash removal.

Volcanic ash particles are tiny jagged pieces of glass. They can't be breathed without ripping up lung tissue. Dust masks and respirators are required.

Wet, volcanic ash is slipprier than ooze. It's electrically conductive. In the atmosphere, its conductivity causes T-storms. Ash fall is almost always in a rain. When the ash fall comes through the radiation and sulfuric acid droplets that will cloud downwind from Yellowstone's super-eruption, it will be wet, heavy, slippery, radioactive, and heavily acidic. The acid will attack anything metal. This could be ugly.

Of course, there's a fourth ring of doom -- zero preparedness. Katrina times a hundred million. It's the whole point of this essay. We must hold our elites responsible for knowing that Yellowstone 4 is inevitable. Makes no difference whether it happens next week, three years from now, or twenty years from now. Zero preparation means a death toll in the tens of millions before any significant counter-measures can be taken. And, in an informed choice, zero preparation is exactly what Monkeybrain's government has chosen.

Worse, Yellowstone 4 is just the paradigm -- just the single disaster-tip of the iceberg. Yellowstone could trigger, or help trigger, the Cascadia Subduction Zone lockup on the NW coast, the San Andreas lock-up near LA, the New Madrid (Missouri) Seismic Zone's fabled multiple 7.5 earthquakes along the Mississippi, the Long Valley supervolcano SE of Yosemite, and/or the Valles supervolcano just west of Los Alamos, NM. Both of those supervolcano calderas are somewhere between due and past due.

Combined natural disasters? Monkeybrain's government has chosen zero preparation.

Even if you reject Gaia concepts, you might be killed by explosion and impact chain reactions among the building and inevitable natural disasters.

We haven't even begun thinking about national preparation for the next space rock that slams home about every 60 to 65 million years. That cycle is hard-science documented. Did the dinosaurs die in vain 65 million years ago? You'll know the answer to that question when they announce the next space rock. We're somewhere between due and overdue right now. Schumacher-Levy 9 was soaked up by Jupiter. Had it lined up on us, we'd likely be space dust right now. However, prepared, some of us would survive the dinosaur-killer.

And we haven't even begun thinking about national preparation for the probable magnetic pole reversal process, which is already weakening our magnetic field protection against human-harmful solar flares and massive increases of ultraviolet. Now is a good time to start. As our Milky Way galaxy rushes toward its collision and merging with the much larger spiral galaxy, Andromena, it seems to be moving our solar system through a high-energy area of interstellar space. The sun is going crazy, shooting more and bigger flares in the recent years of its solar minimum than what it shot in recent solar maximums. We've already lucked-out once, with an earth-frying solar flare shooting away from us instead of at us.

The volcanic-spacerock-nuclear winter and solar-flare-earth-frying that we face in those ugly scenarios have underground prep work written all over them.

Downside. If we're unprepared, Yellowstone, by itself, will crush the national economy as we know it. But it won't get the offshore production facilities of the long-fled, US-fed corporations. It won't get the corporate Swiss bank accounts. And it probably won't get any of the superrich. (The unAmerican cowards need an attitude adjustment and other retribution.)

Big downside. Yellowstone's volcanic winter will last long enough that all plants and animals restricted to the earth's surface will die. Obviously, the less we're prepared, the more death, and the more difficult the national recovery.

GOING UNDERGROUND

When the Roman Empire broke up, much of the population survived by moving to country estates. The 'villa' was a self-supporting unit. It provided shelter, food production, water, community, and the Roman politics of elite control. Over time, elite control twisted into the feudalism of the Dark Ages, butchering ordinary people at the whim of elites for centuries.

We should be able to do better this time around. With nothing more complicated than a medium Yellowstone supereruption, Roman Empire breakdown parallels will be operative. Disruption of the Asian monsoons will make Yellowstone 4 a near-extinction event.

Survival in underground communities is just about the only national option we have. Happily we can still take most of our technology with us -- if preparation begins very soon, and if the Yellowstone monster stays quiet for a few years.

Above-ground power generating systems -- windmills, photovoltaics, and small hydroelectrical units -- will have to be stored until the worst is past. But, if we're quick, we can still create self-supporting fuel cells that run on hydrogen fuel produced by algae feedstock and mini-biorefineries. The fuel cells could supply the juice for grow-lights needed for the small algae farms.

The algae farms can also grow a different feedstock that would supply high-grade biodiesel. Before oil-crony Clinton shut down the research in the early 1990s, scientists had already established that we could replace 100 percent of our transport fuel needs with algae biodiesel. (See Michael Brigg's essay, "Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae", at the Biodiesel Group site, University of New Hampshire.)

Food production will need a lot of fuel cell power, too. Hydroponic systems need water pumps and grow-lights. Shrimp aquaculture can go on in near darkness, but most livestock raised for food will need some light.

Some of the small scientific/engineering communities will have to take DNA and cloning technology underground with them. On the far side of volcanic winter, we'll have to be able to clone all the species of ducks. I love ducks. And trout. I love wild trout in a little mountain freestoner. And how important would survival be without the migration of Monarch butterflies or Bottlenose Dolphins?

Not that we'll duck out from under our volcanic winter and loose all those lovelies back into the world on the first summery day. The cold snap that followed the last volcanic winter led directly to a major ice age.

Of course, there'll be a plankton die-off in the lack of sunlight. The pelagic food-chain will starve from the bottom-up.

The Swiss can put every one of their 7.5 million citizens into underground shelters in a matter of minutes. Why that same level of preparedness is not available here can be laid on the superrich and their corruption of US government to gain their obscenely excessive profits.

CLEARING THE POLITICAL DEBRIS

The upside is that, with our bare-bones survival at stake, we have solid reasons to impeach, remove, criminally prosecute, and imprison any and all of the treasonous constitutional criminals who pervade our national and state governments.

The six-plus years of anti-Constitutional governance under Monkeybrain, the Congressional Republinazis and Demofascists, and the fascist thugs masquerading as SCOTUS judges must be ended short of the sovereignty-crushing North American Union. The deep planning and secrecy of the elites' NAU can now be seen as the intended despotism for the sovereign people's post-Yellowstone torturous future. We don't need another Romanesque Empire, with tomorrow's absolute despot butchering ordinary people for power, profit, and entertainment.

We purely do not need Monkeybrain's anti-Constitutional, 3-branch fascist despotism ruling our supervolcano catastrophe and non-recovery as it did our New Orleans catastrophe and non-recovery. We need a government that represents all the people, not just the white billionaires and their financial corruption machines.

We need to start smash-mouth politics with the constitutional criminals -- right now. As soon as we've cowed the criminals, we need Constitutional amendments that give us fully independent citizen lawmaking, nonpartisan government in all three branches, a corruption-minimizing unicameral Congress, an independently elected and recallable Attorney General, and an independently elected and recallable federal bench that is dependent on a majority of the citizens in each court's jurisdiction. All arguments against such reforms are vacuous.

The constitutional republic/democracy is still the best. But an indifferent, dumbed-down, and politically unsophisticated civil society is its certain death. And civil society just must have the fully independent tools to check and balance the corrupt collusions open to the bribery and coercion of the financial and governing elites.

We should expect the small underground communities to go many different directions with their politics. Most, I think, will opt for a combination of vertical hierarchy and horizontal direct democracy. It was how our first New England towns thrived. But we should also expect to see theocracies and elities-controlled pseudo-democracies. There are still a lot of American servile. We'll have a long time to sort it all out, after volcanic winter.

For now, as the truckers have been singing for decades -- we've got a long way to go and just a short time to get there.

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See especially:

BBC Supervolcano Links at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/supervolcano/

USGS, Volcanic Hazards Program at http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/

USGS, Volcanic Ash at http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/ash/

USGS, Yellowstone Volcano Observatory at http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/

ACPD, Initial Dispersal ... A Yellowstone Case Study, Timmreck and Graf, 22 Aug 2005, at http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acpd/5/7283/acpd-5-7283.pdf

The Geological Society, Super-eruptions: global effects and future threats, June 2005, at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/pdfs/Super%20Eruptions.pdf

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Supervolcano Politics was originally published Sun 18 Mar 2007. It was caught in a kludge-knot of Blogger kludge this date, 28 Mar 2007, and deleted, when there was no order to delete it.
Modified Wed 21 Mar 2007, at 9:30 a.m.
© 2007 by Stephen Neitzke