Let’s say you decide to live on a volcano, is that a good idea?
1,619,090 residents of Manhattan Island in New York have decided that it is worth the risk. They are urban gamblers, living in one of the most densely populated places in the world that is totally dependent upon outside resources for sustainable living. Those New Yorkers even built over the Bronx farm and the “Meadowlands.” Yes, Central Park is a volcano.
People living in Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington are in worse shape and more danger.
Supervolcanos
“According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a supervolcano is one that possesses "a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning the measured deposits for that eruption is greater than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles)."
The show focuses on volcanic giants that loom over Portland, Seattle and Vancouver and comes on the heels of Hawaii's Kilauea spilling lava into the ocean. Using computer-generated imagery, the show will take viewers inside some of these volcanoes. But the show also focuses on the latest scientific efforts by researchers who are attempting to forecast when and where the next major eruption will take place.
Other supervolcanoes in the U.S. are located in Yellowstone National Park and Long Valley in eastern California.”
It has happened before and it may happen again.
According to Mother Nature Network, there are 160 active volcanos in the US today. Hawaii and Alaska are most visible as is big old Mt. Rainier outside Seattle. Preppers in Washington and Oregon have good cause to be prepared.
“Mega volcanoes responsible for mass extinctions on Earth?
By Tanya Lewis
Published March 22, 2013
LiveScience
Nature's Fury: When Volcanoes Erupt
Belching lava, earth-shaking rumbles, smoke that fills the sky ... volcanoes reveal nature at her most furious. We've recently seen several examples of her anger.
Massive volcanic eruptions may have led to the extermination of half of Earth's species some 200 million years ago, a new study suggests.
The release of gases from giant eruptions caused climate change that led to the End-Triassic Extinction, the widespread loss of land and sea species that made way for the rise of the dinosaurs, the research says. The new study, published Thursday, March 21, in the journal Science, shows that a set of major eruptions spanning from what is now New Jersey to Morocco occurred very close to the time of the extinction.
Scientists suspected previously that such volcanic activity and the resultant climate change were responsible for this major extinction and at least four others. But researchers weren't able to constrain the dates of the eruptions and extinctions well enough to prove the hypothesis. The new study, however, dates the End-Triassic Extinction to 201.56 million years ago, the same time the volcanoes were blowing their tops.
The End-Triassic Extinction to 201.56 million years ago, the same time the volcanoes were blowing their tops.
The eruptions, known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, began when the land on Earth was part of one giant supercontinent called Pangaea. They lasted more than 600,000 years and created a rift that became the Atlantic Ocean. The researchers studied lava from these flows in modern-day Nova Scotia, Morocco and New Jersey. [Big Blasts: History's 10 Most Destructive Volcanoes]
The previous dates for these eruptions had error margins of 1 million to 3 million years, but this study decreases those numbers by an order of magnitude, lead author Terrence Blackburn, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told LiveScience.
The results showed that the oldest massive eruptions were in Morocco, followed by the ones in Nova Scotia 3,000 years later and then those in New Jersey another 10,000 years after that. Animal and plant fossils, along with pollen and spores from the Triassic era, can be found in sediment layers underneath the lava flows, but not in layers above them. This suggests the eruptions wiped out those species. The organisms that went extinct include eel-like fish called conodonts, early crocodile species, tree lizards and broad-leaved plants.
The evidence heats up
Blackburn and colleagues determined the age of the lavas based on their mineral content. When lava flows cool, the center regions remain hot, and some chemical elements, like the mineral zircon, fail to crystallize. Zircon incorporates large amounts of uranium, which radioactively decays into lead at a specific rate. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in lava rock, the scientists could figure out precisely when the eruptions occurred.”
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