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Yellowstone Volcanic Activity?
- Thread starter Durandal7
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The skies will not be black like you seem to think they will be. Do you remember when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991? That dropped the earths temp 1-2 degrees. Bet you didn't even realize it happened. Yes there will be some plant and animal life that loses in the short term but things will survive. Just remember this sort of things has happened thousands of times through out history and the earth has survived every time without our interference. Man has a habit of trying to help and making things worse. We are much better leaving the Earth to cleanse itself. Honestly the change in temperature from the eruption will be so minor that anything less than the 60th parallel will probably never notice.
If you are considering the ice age the problem well I hate to break it to you but an ice age is coming in the near term (in Geological time) whether or not Yellow Stone or any other mountain were to erupt.
The Yellowstone can in no way be compared to Mount Pinatubo. An eruption of the Yellowstone will be of a magnitude of at least 1000 times that of Mount Helen, if not 2500. If Mount Pinatubo erupted at such a magnitude, it would have recovered half of Europe, the Mediterranean sea and the north African shore.
And the fact that planet Earth survives does not mean that mammals will. We may amongst the few survivors in the mammal class, if not the living, only because our technology allowed us to adapt. While our planet did survive without our aid., it took millions of years to recover.
There hasn't been on circumstance in mans history in which his influence on nature has been beneficial. Also the nearing ice age is going to have a lot more affect on animal and plant survival then Yellowstone. You can't save all the plants and animals so you are going to pick and choose the ones you do save and that in itself will do more damage then letting nature take it's course. Animal species as a whole have been dying off and evolving and changing for millions of years without our influence and are better for it.
That's why we need to counteract it with global warming. I'm only half-joking.
Beneficial to whom? I think our influence on nature has been very beneficial to humans. The problems we've caused with other species have been no different than any other selective agents. Let us do what we want, and make nature the way we prefer it. If we happen to cause an extinction here or there, is that different from any other predator causing any other extinction? Let us be humans, that is how we can help other species, by forcing them to evolve. The wolf feels no remorse for the extinction of the brown rabbit in Alaska.
Conjecture. There is no way to quantify any eruption till after it occurs. You can look a past eruptions as a guide, but that's all it is. All the pieces for an eruption could be in place and it could fizzle or send the earth into a volcanic winter.
Lucky for us large eruption happen at nice geologic time scales that we don't really have to worry about them often.
D
bottom line is things are heating up and large icebreaks are occuring. is all of this activity not related?
Actually global warming will lead us into an ice age. If you want to no more about how this is so we can start another thread and me or Mr. Anderson can explain to you why it is so. Just so you know I am a geology Major junior year and Mr. Anderson well I don't know what his degrees are in but let's just say he was part of the study that I quote when we talk about global warming. As a side note I read about the study in my geology classes a couple years before I cam on these boards and met him.
Instead of wasting the space here on MacRumors with a topic that I know has been discussed before and also trying to explain in detail the facts of something I learned a few years ago I found a thread in which Mr. Anderson talks about the global warming ice age correlation.
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28784
Check it out. If it doesn't answer all your questions or it creates new ones feel free to PM (personal message) me.
That is fascinating...I guess for our continued survival on this planet we'll need a much fuller understanding of the Earth's climate and geology in order to develop ways to compensate--I see no problem with changing the environment to suit our needs, as long as we know what we're doing. This "as long as we know what we're doing" is a big obstacle though, but I think it's surmountable. We'll have to do something if we want to stay here for the next few million years, that's for sure.
Absolutely correct on all points. The problem is and has been stated by many great minds including I believe Einstein is that, "All we know is that we know nothing at all.". What really gets man screwed up is when we assume we know what we are doing when we really don't have a clue. This seems to be mans weak point a heightened sense of arrogance.