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March 20, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
12:24
No, the Yellowstone caldera isn’t about to blow any time soon
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So there's renewed concern that the Yellowstone caldera is about to blow.
And I get a little perturbed at some of the headlines on this because...
And I'll read one to you because when I see these headlines, it's like, are these journalists complete morons?
They don't know how to describe probability figures correctly?
So here's...
Here's the headline.
And this is from the Express in the UK. Yellowstone about to blow?
Scientists warning over supervolcano that could kill millions.
That's the headline.
And here's the subhead, which makes no sense.
Here it is.
Scientists have warned the world is in volcano season, and there is up to a 10% chance of an eruption soon killing millions of people and devastating the planet.
Well, a 10% chance of an eruption soon?
Okay, first of all, when you're talking about geological events and you're using statistics like a 10% chance or a 20% chance or whatever, a percentage makes no sense without a time frame.
You can only have a percentage chance within a certain specific time frame.
For example, you could say, oh, there's a 1% chance maybe this year or a 1% chance in any given year.
For example, when we're talking about solar flares, often you'll see experts talk about, well, the risk of having a catastrophic solar flare that could take down the power grid is about 12% every decade.
For example, I think that's actually a correct number.
We're very close to that.
I remember it's roughly about 1% every year of a catastrophic solar flare.
But this headline, it says, oh, there's a 10% chance of an eruption soon killing millions of people.
It's meaningless.
It's numerically meaningless, scientifically meaningless because it doesn't give a duration.
And this story is actually quite misleading because it says that this Yellowstone National Park poses a threat to the earth, which is true.
But it says then, there are few real contingency plans in place to deal with the ticking time bomb, which they conclude, and this is a quote from the Express, which they conclude is likely to go off within the next 80 years.
All right, now that's just complete BS.
I'm sorry.
I mean, I'm the first to try to warn people about legitimate threats that, you know, of things that are happening, a financial collapse or solar flares or what have you.
But to say that the Yellowstone caldera is going to explode in the next 80 years is just complete nonsense.
And how do I know?
Well, because actually that caldera explodes about once every 600,000 years.
Unless you have some astonishing evidence that shows it's about to erupt right now, which they don't, then you can't really take a 600,000 year window and say that it's going to happen in the next 80 years.
That's far too narrow for an event on this geological timescale of 600,000 years.
Now, granted, the explosion of Yellowstone is kind of, quote, late on this timescale.
It typically, throughout history, has exploded every 600,000 years, we're told.
And this time, it's like 100,000 years overdue.
But that doesn't mean it's going to happen in your lifetime or my lifetime or in the next 80 years.
You can't derive that from a 600,000-year timeline window.
It scientifically just doesn't add up.
Now, the rest of this story is somewhat accurate, that when these calderas blow, and Yellowstone is a very large caldera, it's beyond a supervolcano, actually.
I've toured Yellowstone quite extensively, and I've looked at the geological science underneath Yellowstone.
It's quite fascinating, actually.
It's not a volcano.
It's a caldera that has an accelerated explosive effect when it starts to rupture.
In other words, when the ground above the caldera becomes destabilized enough for it to begin to explode on a small scale.
The loss of pressure allows an explosion that is accelerating and throws far more mass into the atmosphere than any normal volcano, like, for example, Mount St.
Helens, which happened, I believe, in the 1980s.
Was that the 1980s?
Yeah, I think it was, in Washington State.
So, Yellowstone is a very, very large sort of super volcano.
Again, larger than a volcano.
It's a caldera that's going to go.
It's going to blow at some point.
And when it does, it will have massive, a massive devastating effect across the world.
So, let me talk about that for a minute.
Because that part of the story is true.
It's just that the chance of this happening in the next 80 years is probably so minimal that it's not even really worth being bothered about unless we get new information that there's new rumblings, new earthquakes at Yellowstone that are unusually severe, for example.
There's a lot of earthquake monitoring and geological surveys going on in and around Yellowstone for this reason.
But if Yellowstone were to blow, it would blanket at least a third of North America in ash.
I'm talking about a massive, almost like a nuclear winter type of environment where the skies...
At least in the northern hemisphere, all around the planet, and to some extent the southern hemisphere, would be darkened for at least a year.
We're talking about an absolute collapse in global food production followed by the mass starvation of humanity.
Yes, it's that bad.
If Yellowstone really were to blow, it would wipe out perhaps 80% of the current human population.
It's a global killer event, okay?
It's worse than being hit by an asteroid, unless the asteroid is so large like the one that took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, I believe it was.
I'm talking about a smaller asteroid that hits the ocean, for example, and might create tidal waves that destroy human cities.
Even that wouldn't be as large as the total destruction and wipeout caused by Yellowstone erupting.
And if you've never been to Yellowstone...
That place is just a death trap everywhere.
I've actually rented snowmobiles with some friends, and we went cruising through Yellowstone on snowmobiles in the winter.
You're driving around bison all the time, and you're driving around the hot steaming pools that you don't want to drive into, obviously, because you'll be roasted.
And, you know, there's wolves out there that they actually reintroduced, I think, back in the 90s.
It's a death zone, basically.
But it's also fascinating.
There's a lot of fascinating geology happening.
Of course, you have Old Faithful, which isn't as faithful as you think.
Sometimes it's late.
Sometimes it's early.
But anyway...
You have pools of water that look completely cold because there's snow all around them, but if you touch it, it's actually almost boiling temperature.
If you jump in, you'll die.
So Yellowstone is a fascinating place, but it is a place where the...
The magma, the hot magma from inside the earth is very, very close to the surface of the earth.
It's sort of a thin point of the earth's crust at that location.
Now, except for all of you who are flat earthers out there...
I gotta say, if you think the Earth is flat, then none of this applies to you.
But for the rest of us who realize the Earth is a sphere, you have magma in the Earth that is heated, that's very hot, which is where volcanoes come from and why the Hawaiian Islands exist and so on.
Plate tectonics, obviously, the movement of the plates over the hot spots, which is why you have a series of islands, Kauai, The Big Island.
What are the other islands out there?
I don't know all the islands, I'm sorry, in Hawaii.
But that's why you have a chain of islands.
Oahu, is that one of the islands?
Yeah, I think it is.
Anyway, sorry, I don't mean to diss people who live in Hawaii.
It's a wonderful place.
I'm just not that familiar with the geography there.
I do know that all the islands are contaminated with Monsanto's GMOs.
That's one thing I do know about Hawaii, especially the Big Island.
But yeah, Kauai, right?
The Garden Island.
That's another one.
So anyway, okay, but moving on, moving on.
Yellowstone is not going to blow next week.
So on your list of things to be worried about, there are legitimate things, like the risk of a cyber attack taking down the power grid, causing a grid-down scenario, or the risk...
That just happened in the Ukraine, by the way.
Malicious code took out the regional power grid, dropped power to 700,000 homes.
Another thing is, excuse me, EMP weapon detonation from North Korea.
They now claim to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, which means they can put it on the top of an ICBM.
They can launch it in a high altitude above North America, detonate it, cause a cascading voltage wave, in essence, to sweep through the United States and destroy all the electronics and take down the ATMs to sweep through the United States and destroy all the electronics and take down the ATMs and the cash machines, which would, of course, if it took out Well, if it took out iPhones and people couldn't access Facebook and Twitter, there would be a zombie holocaust, you know, is really bad.
So there are legitimate things to be worried about.
Financial collapse, global debt, pyramid imploding and things like that.
But Yellowstone, I would not put that high on my list of things that are likely to happen in your lifetime.
Financial collapse should be very, very high on that list.
Social chaos stemming from that and so on.
War with Russia or China or cyber attacks, EMP weapons, even a solar flare is far more likely than Yellowstone blowing.
Far more likely.
So, if you're a prepper, like I am, it's important to actually have some kind of a scientific understanding of statistics and probability and fundamental mathematics.
And if you do the math on Yellowstone, it blows every 600,000 years.
The span of a human lifetime is really not...
Not much to be worried about that it's going to blow during your life.
There are other things that are far more worrisome and far more likely to take place.
So I think this article in The Express is very irresponsible to say it's likely to blow in the next 80 years.
That's complete nonsense.
They're essentially just making that up.
Not even true.
Oh, and then they have another sentence.
They say there are already fears that Yellowstone could blow any time within the next 70 years on a scale that would wipe out the Western USA and affect the course of global history.
Well, again, they just don't have any evidence of why it would blow now.
Yeah, it's going to blow someday, but probably not in our lifetimes.
All right?
Just put it that way.
Thanks for listening.
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