Will Yellowstone Supervolcano Erupt? Neil deGrasse Tyson & Volcanologist Janine Krippner Investigate

[Music] chuck it's that time again yes it is explainer video and so for today we have a topic that falls outside of my expertise okay i i enjoy thinking about this subject but i don't i don't know i don't know enough about it to be being the explainer so we're gonna talk about volcanoes and with the question is yellowstone gonna blow that's the question okay right and so we need a we need a volcanologist for this all right and so we found one okay okay in the name of janine krippner janine welcome to star talk thank you for having me excellent and you work for the smithsonian global vulcanism program and i'm glad people are thinking about volcanoes worldwide because they're all over the place okay so janine what is yellowstone is in the news anytime someone wants to think apocalyptically so and we've all been told and we've all heard it's a super volcano what is a super volcano super volcano is basically a name that was made up for a volcano that has at some point in the past produced the largest style of eruption that does not mean it's going to do it again it does not mean that every eruption is that big in fact most eruptions are much much smaller so it's kind of a term that basically is the monster under the bed of volcanoes of the current age okay so when you say a big eruption do you speak a volume of ash that comes out or and or so what's what's a typical volume for a super volcano to be called a super volcano so for these super eruptions or we have this volcano explosivity index vei so it goes from one or there is smaller as well but for this one to eight eight is this super eruption where why doesn't it go to ten what do you get what's wrong with eight okay okay i'm a 10 chauvinist i'm sorry well it's looking at volume i'm gonna say never in my life have i been asked on a scale of one to eight how do you feel about no one has ever done that ever okay ever ever well you're missing out okay all right hang out with more volcanologists i'm actually gonna i'm gonna use that now thank you let's go one to eight of yellowstone being eight and and walk in the parking one where is 2020 so a vi8 or these super eruptions are um you're looking at a volume of magma erupting that's around a thousand cubic kilometers so a lot of rock coming out of the ground kilometers so a thousand if you take the cube root you get how big a cube would be on the side so 10 kilometers on a side so for the american audience that you've heard of 10k runs that's about 6 miles so imagine a cube 6 miles across deep and high and that's how much lava came out that's crazy that's yeah yeah so luckily for us it's very very hard to get that amount of magma out of the ground in fact to accumulate that much magma in one place where it's an eruptable state is very very difficult and takes a long time so we all know based on every tabloid headline out there in yellowstone that there is this big magma reservoir under the volcano but less than 15 of it is actually liquid a lot of it is crystals and solid rock so it's kind of locked up in the system you need at least 30 ish for that to erupt so there's not even enough liquid um eruptable magma as far as we know under yellowstone for it to produce the style of corruption well wait so does yellowstone is there a crater rim to that because i visited it a couple of years ago and you're just there you know there's a hot spring here and a singed tree there and i'm not thinking i'm in the middle of a volcanic crater but you're telling me it is a crater it's just way bigger than i could see in that moment so it's a caldera so a crater is generally a hole in the ground formed during an eruption so you have a lot of stuff coming out of the volcano a caldera goes the other way that's when you have so much magma erupting that the ground actually collapses in on itself i don't know yeah and we've had a few recent ones in fact there was caldera collapsed in 2018 at kilauea so they're not always explosive they're not always these big catastrophic events they can be slow um but with these vi8 eruptions they are very catastrophic very very explosive they can produce ash over 40 kilometers up into the air um and it can cause a few years at least of global cooling as well um but so if you go 40 kilometers up now you're in like the jet stream and you can easily wrap the earth if you if you get that high up you still have a local weather it's like global yeah i mean a lot of the heavier stuff because this is solid rock that's coming out this isn't like your ash that you get out of fireplace solid rocks a lot of the heavier stuff is going to fall out within kilometers of the volcano um but you can still get very fine glass and we saw this with the af 2010 eruption which the ash came out of iceland and moved its way over europe and closed the airspaces because it's not safe to fly through this stuff so it would be devastating yeah i do think actually that is my professional opinion don't fly through the volcanic clones fly through an interruption um we've also been doing a lot more research on how much like how much do you need in the atmosphere for it to be dangerous since that eruption so there's a lot more understanding of what you can fly through um or how high or low you have to be to avoid it um and and and how exactly are you getting the uh the empirical results who's who's testing this flying by flying through it there was actually someone there who flew through volcanic ash to test it out wow god so that's just you can get a jet engine and put it in the lab as well that's probably uh yeah that would be the chuck nice way instead of the super dave osborne way of actually flying through volcanic eruptions that's crazy all right so so uh not to put words in your mouth but you're saying we're overreacting in our storytelling about the risks of yellowstone if it happened which at this point there is no evidence that is going to any time zone and by any time soon i'm saying hundreds of years at least um it would be horrible in every sense of that word but it is very unlikely to happen in fact over the last 50 eruptions of yellowstone most of them have been much smaller have been lava flows so yes almost everything you read in the news about yellowstone is an exaggeration so clickbait clickbait clickbait so i think what you said was particularly damning of those of those suggestions when you said it's one thing to have a place where it could happen but you have to gather the magma it's got to all be liquid and it's got to be able to punch through and if you don't it's a checklist basically right if you don't satisfy this checklist go home you know go study another volcano yep yeah so i don't study it i'm saying volcanoes that are more likely to erupt at this stage but if you look at it right i don't i don't have time for the do nothing i don't have time for that i'm sorry okay i have to spend my time she did not do this with her head while she said i need i need time to see what's happening stuff that's actually happening yeah a little more active like less than more than much more recent than 70 000 years ago thank you i let the i let the old volcanologists deal with yellowstone i need some action yes exactly i mean there are great volcanologists studying this volcano and doing incredible work just not my area we can't study everything in one time so if i can broaden this just a little bit um there were other super volcanoes in the history of the fossil record um one of them i learned about from my from my dinosaur colleagues the deccan traps in india i think they were known to have exploded 65 million years ago about when we lost the big dinosaurs so here we have a case where holding aside the asteroid that i i got an asteroid i gave you 65 million years ago was that not enough to kill your dinosaurs but they're invoking a super volcano so as darkening the earth and possibly affecting the food chain so you would agree that a modern super volcano would have would be as devastating is that correct no that's not a super volcano that's actually something entirely different so those very large um flood basalt volcanoes they they they occur over millions of years first of all they produce a lot of very runny lava um and they've generally got smaller over time and we don't know that another one will it's an official term runny lava it is today okay okay low viscosity low viscosity very runny um and they go over enormous distances and there have been multiple of them so the columbia river basalts over in washington and oregon is a more local example for america um and those who are repaving a whole area of earth's surface yes and tens to hundreds of meters of stacked lava flows over millions of years so it's not just one event whereas a super eruption is one event much more explosive much stickier or more viscous lavas as well so different lava type altogether much shorter event still devastating but those big flood basalts those are much worse okay so people thinking that the yellowstone is ready to go at any time makes great story fodder and janine a volcanologist says no no and go to the yellowstone volcano observatory it's not just the united states geological survey you know there are trust issues with government everywhere in the world it's a group of different organizations that are monitoring this volcano plus if this volcano was going to produce something big you could not hide the signs even if you wanted to and as volcanologists we never do we want to help people that's what we do we're trying to warn people and keep people safe but if for some non-existent reason people wanted to hide this you couldn't there would be a lot of warning um to get that magma moving towards the surface this was really sticky solid like magma there are going to be a lot of signs there's going to be a lot of gas emissions a lot of earthquake it's going to break a lot of ground going through not to say that earthquakes mean a volcanic rupture is going to happen there's also a tectonically tectonically active area um and it'd also be deformation there is normal definite deformation in that area too but it'd be much more significant you'd see increasing activity around the park over a large area you couldn't hide that so janine the the corresponding example of that in my field is if you looked at the film armageddon and so apparently the government found an asteroid the size of texas headed towards earth and kept it a secret from people you can't keep the sky a secret people we have telescopes we can look up okay i can find that and it is not something the government can keep as a secret yeah and why would you want to and you need to so but the the story needs it because you don't want to be able to trust the government but anyhow janine we gotta we gotta sort of bring this [ __ ] you knew to a thought you knew to a close um give us some something someone is thinking about being a scientist tell us why they should be a volcanologist if you love volcanoes that's the thing to do it's very difficult career like any career that needs a phd and experience but it is it's an incredible field i absolutely love what i do it's you know whatever you want to do whether it's volcanoes whether it's space or there's art whether it's singing whether it's comedy you know if that's what really makes your heart sing go for it if it's hard it's going to be hard anyway you may as well be doing something you like i'm going to disagree with the comedy don't do that please don't ruin your life don't ruin your life don't ruin your life you don't want to do it let me ask you this if you could have a saying for if volcanologists had like the army they used to have those commercials we do more before 6 a.m than most people do all day which is why i didn't join the army because that just sounds like really hard like they're they should have gone with you know we sleep until 12 and then we have pancakes i'm like oh sign me up sign me up um i bet you're so gg what's your tag what would the tagline for a volcanologist be uh maybe earth we're watching you oh oh look at you all right you know that's hot okay right off i like that i like it very nice very nice well jenny you say hot because magma like of course i did but you know i didn't want you to point it out see what you did there oh by the way there are volcanoes on some of the moons of jupiter and saturn except they're ice volcanoes so having volcanoes not a matter of being hot it's a matter of how much pressure is there you're gonna have pressure at any temperature smoking like a true neil degrasse tyson i love you i thought i put that in all right we gotta end it there janine great to have you thanks for sharing your expertise chuck always good to have you always a pleasure neil degrasse tyson signing off

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 309,175

Rating: 4.9401045 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, Janine Krippner, Yellowstone National Park, supervolcano, crater, caldera, eruptions, Deccan Traps, volcanology, volcano, will yellowstone kill us all, will yellowstone erupt anytime soon, yellowstone, yellowstone volcano, yellowstone volcano what will happen if it erupts

Id: 6ZQfTg7Z9pg

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020