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The tsar bomba5/2/2023 ![]() ![]() “Yellowstone Supervolcano Earthquake Swarm Hits 200 Shakes in Less than Two Weeks.” Newsweek, Newsweek, 20 Feb. So maybe keep that bunker stocked anyway, just in case. And, in February of 2018, Yellowstone was hit with a quake storm with over 200 measurable quakes over the course of a week and a half. So please get out of your bunker, it’s okay, Yellowstone is probably not going to blow up this year.Īll that said, the world is a big place and unlikely things happen all the time. And by and large the event not having happened in a while doesn’t make it more likely to occur now. But most disasters are statistical events with a small chance of happening on any given year. There are some cosmological events that take place on nice regular cycles, the earth going around the sun for instance. Or how we’re “on schedule” for another mass extinction event, magnetic storm, reversal of the earths magnetic poles, or whatever. One of the core properties of a Poisson distributions is that they are “memoryless”, which means the expected time to an event doesn’t decrease as time goes by.Įvery once in a while, I see an article talking about how we’re “on schedule” for another big earth quake in the San Fransisco Bay Area. ![]() The number of Earthquakes, patients arriving in an emergency room, and meteorites falling in a given span of time all are closely approximated by what’s called a Poisson distribution. In fact in any given year, scientists estimate Yellowstone has about a one in seven hundred thousand chance of going off. Yellowstone blowing up is more like rolling a 1 on a die with a simply enormous number of sides, than it is like a ticking time bomb waiting for it’s moment. But most of the actual data we have seems to show something more like rolling dice, where as the power of the event goes up exponentially the likelihood of it happening goes down exponentially. My basic intuition around fault-lines, earthquakes, and volcanos, seems to say that pressure should build and build and build and then release all at once before waiting to “charge back up”. The important thing to see here is that each roll of the dice isn’t effected by the rolls around it. How many times will you have to roll it before a 1 comes up? The answer is roughly 6 times, but you could roll a 1 your first time, or you might get a string of bad rolls and not get a 1 till the twentieth roll. Imagine rolling a 6 sided dice over and over again. First off, I said that these explosions have a semi-regular schedule but that’s a vast oversimplification. Now stop panicking, there’s a couple important things to keep in mind which all basically boil down to statistics. We’re overdue for an eruption that would coat the US with ash, send us into a global winter, and level a solid chunk of the Midwest. ![]() That last eruption which I should mention was the smallest of the three super-explosions, was six hundred and thirty thousand years ago. Over the last two million years it’s had a super eruption semi regularly every six hundred thousand years. Over the last eighteen million years this hot spot has had occasional explosions and intermittent slower lava flows. This explosion was nearly six hundred times as powerful as the simultaneous explosion of ever nuke on earth. The combined nuclear arsenals of all the powers in the world is about one and a half thousand megatons. Now I’ve already tried to put that number in perspective by saying that it is almost twenty thousand times greater than the Tsar Bomba, but let me try again. The last time it went off it’s explosion was estimated to have had a yield of almost nine hundred thousand Megatons with an ash-fall that covered most of the US west of the Mississippi. The whole 35 by 45 mile crater was a single super volcano. And what did it look like? One enormous caldera. Christiansen had the good luck to live in a time where NASA was starting to take satellite photos from space and so he was able to see what Yellowstone looks like from above. It probably went something like this “All of Yellowstone’s geysers and hot springs are obviously volcanic, so where is the volcano?”. And that it’s on schedule to explode any day now.īack in the 1960’s Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey asked one of the most horrifying questions we’ve ever asked. How would you feel if I told you that there is a place in the United States that is sitting on an explosive yield almost 20,000’s times that of the Tsar Bomba. When I read about the power of the weapons man has created I sometimes want to go hide, quivering, in a bunker somewhere. ![]() It had an explosive yield equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT. The Tsar Bomba is the biggest man made explosive ever detonated on the face of the earth. ![]()
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