General Chat

El Nino

Forget "Supervolcanos" ask anybody who,s had a "Dodgy Curry" on a friday night,and they will assure you they are a danger to the public. Hal.

I have the CD of Bill Bryson's "A short history of almost everything" in which he says that geologists have been noticing for some time that the geysers in Yellowstone Park have been acting strangely. Even scarier, he said that on average the earth narrowly misses being hit by a meteorite about 3 times a week - he describes the miss as like having someone fire a bullet which travels up your sleeve without hitting your arm. That's scary! nell

SUPERVOLCANOES WARNING Slumbering supervolcanoes powerful enough to wipe out much of the planet may awaken much sooner than it had previously been thought. Experts believed it would take hundreds of thousands of years for reservoirs of molton rock, or magma, beneath a supervolcano to build for an eruption. But a new study indicates the time between super-eruptions can actually be tens of thousands of years - and many are already long overdue. A blast from a supervolcano would be strong enough cause mass extinction and change the world's climate. The findings, published in the Journal of Petrology, are bad news for anyone living in the centre of the US. An overdue monster supervolcano is hidden underneath one of the country's premier holiday spots - Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The last blast there, which occurred more than 600,000 years ago, covered half the US - around 3,000sq miles - with volcanic ash. Researchers in New Zealand analysed zircon crystals, which grow within volcanic magma, to calculate how long build up takes before eruptions. Their answer was no more than 40,000 years - a relatively short time in geological terms. Supervolcanoes are estimated to carry a force thousands of times that of a normal explosion. They spew thousands of cubic yards of ash, dust and poisonous sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and create a giant crater, or caldera. Recent measurements indicate that over the past century the earth above the Yellowstone magma chamber has risen almost 19 inches. Scientists say this is telling evidence of pressure building below.

.NB>>>>BUY A TIN HAT