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ORIGINAL: DesFIP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Interesting reference to the effects of massive amounts of volcanic ash in the air. Perhaps we should start stockpiling food and wood.

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Chile says Chaiten volcano still poses danger

The government has not dismissed the possibility of relocating the small town and making the whole area a no-go zone for years to come, but many locals have said they want to return to their homes in Chaiten.

"The volcano is still active," Perez-Yoma said. "Given the latest definitive information, we will be making a decision in the coming days."

Chile has the second largest and most active chain of volcanoes in the world after Indonesia.

About 90 percent of the town was flooded in May as volcanic ash caused nearby rivers to breach their banks.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081229/sc_nm/us_chile_volcano_chaiten;_ylt=Av6MLedd6CHR15DNjU6XsiEhANEA

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ORIGINAL: Sanity

If I see a little blurb about a volcano or an earthquake somewhere, I follow the link and read the full article every time. For the last two years my road trips have been all about volcanos because I'm drawn to them for whatever reason. In 2007 we visited Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Ranier (All in Washington State) and the Sisters volcanos of Oregon.

This year (2008) we went to the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Yellowstone. Next year the plan is to visit Crater Lake, Oregon...

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The ground near one of the long-dormant Three Sisters volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains of west-central Oregon has risen approximately 10 centimeters in a 10-by-20-km parcel since 1996, meaning that magma or underground lava is slowly flowing into the area, according to a research team from the U.S. Geological Survey.

link

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ORIGINAL: DesFIP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Interesting reference to the effects of massive amounts of volcanic ash in the air. Perhaps we should start stockpiling food and wood.

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ORIGINAL: Sanity

You're a Kuna Kavegirl?

Sweet... 

It's a pity what's happened to that area, how it's just another big city now, or just a suburb really. 

Yep, and since you spelled it right, I can tell you know the area as well. The good old black and gold!

I didn't even recognize it when I got back to Idaho after living in Australia and California. It was too much and I had to get out to the country - hence Owyhee County. Can't get much more rural than that!

Rain

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ORIGINAL: Sanity


This year (2008) we went to the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Yellowstone. Next year the plan is to visit Crater Lake, Oregon...

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One way of looking at the power of volcanoes is what scientists call the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI) — sort of a Richter scale for eruptions. And like the Richter scale used to measure earthquakes, the power of an eruption increases exponentially from number to number in the VEI index.


The VEI scale runs from zero to eight. The higher the VEI number, the bigger — and less frequent — the eruptions. On one end there are the burbling, rather gentle eruptions that happen on the big island of Hawaii. These happen daily on Earth, and even with their occasional impressive fountains of lava, they rate a zero on the VEI. At the other extreme is the Yellowstone eruption of 2.1 million years ago, which is described on the VEI as an eight: mega-colossal, with a towering ash cloud 10 miles high that pours out at least a thousand cubic miles of ash. That Yellowstone eruption had 10 times the ejected material as a VEI 7 volcano, which modern humans have never seen either.

In fact, the last VEI 7 eruption was in Toba, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago, and it caused such global cooling that some scientists think it nearly drove humans to extinction.

The largest known eruption in the last several thousand years is believed to be that of Tambora, Indonesia, in 1815. It was tens of times more massive an eruption than Mount St. Helens in 1980. Despite pouring out 7 cubic miles of ash and causing short-term global cooling, Tambora was small fry compared with any of Yellowstone's big eruptions, or even the eruption of Toba 74,000 years ago.


http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/supervolcano/under/under_03.html

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ORIGINAL: LumusandtheLady

Yep, I grew up in that area. Grew up in Kuna and lived out in the west Treasure Valley (Owyhee County) before moving here to Lumus at the end of May. Used to go hunting and fishing in the Hells Canyon area all the time. I still have my house there and my family is in the Nampa/Caldwell area.

And all the lovely hot springs....... ahhhhh!

Rain

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Here is a passage on the Yellowstone supervolcano from "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. He interviews a Yellowstone geologist, Paul Doss. I don't find it reassuring:


I asked him what caused Yellowstone to blow when it did.

"Don't know. Nobody knows. Volcanoes are strange things. We really don't understand them at all. Vesuvius, in Italy, was active for three hundred years until an eruption in 1944 and then it just stopped. It's been silent ever since. Some volcanologists think that it is recharging in a big way, which is a little worrying because two million people live on or around it. But nobody knows."

"And how much warning would you get if Yellowstone was going to go?"
He shrugged. "Nobody was around the last time it blew, so nobody knows what the warning signs are. Probably you would have swarms of earthquakes and some surface uplift and possibly some changes in the patterns of behavior of the geysers and steam vents, but nobody really knows."

"So it could just blow without warning?"

He nodded thoughtfully. The trouble, he explained, is that nearly all the things that would constitute warning signs already exist in some measure at Yellowstone. "Earthquakes are generally a precursor of volcanic eruptions, but the park already has lots of earthquakes-1,260 of them last year. Most of them are too small to be felt, but they are earthquakes nonetheless."

(More here).

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Last week, geologists at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) announced they had recorded a "notable swarm of earthquakes under way since Dec. 26 beneath Yellowstone Lake." The strongest tremor among the hundreds in the past week measured 3.9 on Dec. 27; most of the readings above 2.8 were felt by park employees and visitors around the lake area. The activity relaxed in magnitude early this week but then flexed upward again to top 3.0 by early New Year's Eve. "This December 2008 earthquake sequence is the most intense in this area for some years," YVO reported, "and is centered on the east side of the Yellowstone Caldera," the ancient collapsed volcano beneath Yellowstone Lake. The scientists said they cannot immediately "identify any causative fault or other feature without further analysis."


This activity could have a whole range of consequences. In a study released last year, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said possible hazards could include hydrothermal explosions, when steam breaks through the surface and forms a crater. That has happened 26 times in the park's 127 years of record-keeping. The USGS discounted chances for cataclysmic eruption of the caldera, noting that the hot, active magma chamber below Yellowstone has turned into "largely crystallized mush." But the same study also said: "Depending on the nature and magnitude of a particular hazardous event and the particular time and season when it might occur, 70,000 to more than 100,000 persons could be affected; the most violent events could affect a broader region or even continent-wide areas."

(Full article here).