Yellowstone: The Natural Wonder That Will Kill America
Yellowstone is one of the most amazing, beautiful, magical and awe-inspiring places on the planet. It is unique, a place of incomparable wonder that enchants millions of visitors a year.
Yellowstone is also a monster that is going to wipe out life in as we know it in North American and much of the world.
Both of these statements are true.
Yellowstone is a super volcano, a ticking time-bomb The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) producer sitting silently under the “American Redoubt”, boiling away.
It’s also something that Spice and I don’t specifically prep for.
Why We Don’t Specifically Prep For A Yellowstone TEOTWAWKI
I can see quite a few virtual eyebrows raising at the statement that Spice and I don’t prep for Yellowstone erupting. I think “Well, why not? is a reasonable question” so I will answer it up front.
If Yellowstone pops it’s really, really big cork, then absolutely none of our bug-in, bug-out or regional bug-out plans will work. Everything that we have panned for… the homestead, the place, Mammy’s house, our “alternate” bug out towns (we have two of them) will ALL be entirely destroyed by the ash cloud from Yellowstone.
Here’s a projection of the catastrophic damage area from a full-scale Yellowstone eruption.
We live in North Missouri as does Mammy, and “The Place” is in North Missouri. Our two “bug out towns” are in Northwestern Iowa and Central Nebraska.
As you can see we are looking at (if these calculations are close) around 25 millimeters (or, right at one inch) of ash on up to 100 mm of ash (or about 4 inches) in the Western part of North Missouri.
What does this mean for us?
We get to do the Big Time Bugout Boogie… that’s right, it’s load up the car and become road people, because there’s just not going to be much point in sticking around and waiting it out.
We are in “Zone 5”, and our fallout prediction looks like this: Buildings are at risk of collapse if the roofs are not immediately cleared of ash… and we have a TON of nearly flat-roofed buildings. Remember, volcanic ash doubles in weight if it’s wet, so if this ash comes with rain (HIGHLY likely) then “bad things” will be happening across much of the western Midwest. Rainwater collection systems would be wrecked with ash.
- Trees would be severely damaged, as would our plants. We can kiss all of our hard work on our orchards goodbye.
- Road traffic would ground to a halt, as trucks and cars die horrible deaths from ash intake damage.
- Rail lines might or might not still operate.
- Electricity will fail, because ash short circuits sub-stations and other power infrastructure.
So… we won’t be able to move short of walking, we will be in the dark for a very long time, our house might collapse, our drinking water that’s not storage will be fouled, we will risk our lungs every time we open the door, our trees will die, our garden will fail… yeah, this isn’t very good.
So What Is All This Yellowstone Fuss About Anyway?
Yellowstone is one of a handful of “Super Volcanoes” we have on the Earth.
Let’s lean on the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to explain the situation:
“Over the past 2.2 million years, the 17,000 km2 (6,500 mi2) Yellowstone Plateau has been shaped by explosive eruptions and profound collapse of the ground, enormously thick lava flows, uplift and extensive faulting, and the erosive power of flowing water and ice. Three cycles of high-volume eruptions each climaxed with an immense explosive phase, which produced pyroclastic density currents that deposited thick ignimbrite, followed by collapse of an area centered above the evacuated magma chamber, which formed a caldera.”
OK, now here’s Salty’s version:
There’s a weak spot under the North American continental plate that has allowed molten rock to get really close to the surface. Every few hundred thousand years, a rupture occurs and there’s a big super huge BOOM and it blows this big huge hole right through the Rocky Mountains, killing everything within hundreds if not thousands of miles.
The last time this happened was about 600,000 years ago. It happens, on average, every 600,000 or so years.
Do you see the problem?
If Yellowstone Blows Up…
If Yellowstone pops its cork, it’s pretty much going to take everything right around it up with it in a big cloud in the sky or kill it outright with so much ash nothing can stand up to it… and when I mean ‘right around’ it I mean pretty much all of Idaho, Montana & Wyoming, all of northern Colorado down to south of Denver, the Western halves of
South Dakota and Nebraska… kind of a big deal if you happen to live in those areas…
It will dump untold tons of volcanic ash all over everything, and that’s going to be a huge problem for North America.
What Is Volcanic Ash Exactly?
Volcanic ash is nasty stuff. Think of it as tiny little rocks and natural glass ejected miles up into the sky by a volcano when it pops its cork. It’s not like regular dust nor the ash left by a wood fire, no this stuff is REALLY abrasive to both animal and machine.
The stuff can clog the lungs of any animal (and I’m counting people as animals in this example) and threaten your health. It can destroy jet engines in a minute, it is conductive so it can fry electrical and telecommunications, damage electronics and clog any type of air intake. It makes a mess of lakes, and it doubles in weight when wet which can kill roofs.
The stuff blows around a lot, which means that every time a wind blows it’s like a new ash-storm. Cars driving over 5mph stir up a huge plume of ash behind them. It’s a real mess..
OK, Salty, You’ve Sold Me That It’s Bad… But…
I don’t get why you guy’s don’t prep for this obviously bad event.
Well, the answer is kind of twofold.
First, the chances of Yellowstone erupting without giving off significant warning signs are so low as to not bear considering. The USGS has a huge operation there at Yellowstone, the USGS Yellowstone Observatory (YVO)… whose main task is to measure and monitory every little shake, shimmy and rumble the big volcano makes.
The last time I was at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) at Kilauea, I talked with a USGS scientist on temporary loan to the HVO from the YVO, and I asked him point blank if the general public would know with plenty of warning if Yellowstone started getting frisky.
He told me that this is job-one of the YVO, public safety, and while he may have been spinning me he was looking me in the eye and I believed him.
So What Did The USGS Scientist Think?
I also asked him what his thoughts about the chances Yellowstone would blow in the next 50 years and he said that the signs were currently very stable, but then he stated that we have no real way of knowing how full the magma chamber is and that changes can happen quickly within a volcano… so basically he thought short term (the next 5 or so years) that it would be pretty unlikely. After that, he couldn’t say.
That talk happened about 6 years ago.
The second reason we don’t specifically prep for Yellowstone is that it’s just plain one of our catastrophic bugout scenarios. Because there would be too many unknowns, we would hit the road heading south and east and get to a location where we could stop and re-evaluate as conditions became more clear.
We could just bug in, but there’s a lot of risk in doing that if the ash fall is much heavier than we had anticipated.
Bug Out Plan
So now we come back to our bug out plan. There are just plain times when you have to bug out, period, so EVERYBODY needs a bug out plan… and that plan needs to include places to head locally, regionally, in a nearby state and a thousand miles away.
We have that kind of a bugout plan, so that’s why we don’t really prep for Yellowstone. If she blows, and if it’s bad, we will see you somewhere down the road.
Here’s Some Yellowstone Eye Candy From Spice’s Trip Last Summer (All Photos By Spice)
Spice’s note: Hiking in Yellowstone is a walking over an unquiet earth. It’s not just a couple of big ‘tourist trap’ geysers and some pretty pools. It’s walking along the game trails to find a steaming mound breathing brimstone. It’s crossing a creek and finding the water warm as a hot bath. It’s checking a hillside for the wolf pack you hear howling and seeing instead gouts of boiling water jetting dozens of feet into the air from a geyser no one even bothers to visit. The hot core of the earth is just under your feet, and it feels very much alive.
Yellowstone will trash its whole quarter of the planet when it goes; and the ash cloud might well usher in the next ice age. It probably won’t happen in my life, but it might. Until then I’ll gladly walk over that unquiet earth.
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Being based in MA, I’m far enough east that my Yellowstone plan is to bug in, and I’ve got a fairly comprehensive plan.
Highlights: Shutting off the automatic generator and wrapping it in 6-mil plastic to keep as much ash out as possible. Sealing all windows with the same 6-mil plastic and setting up pseudo-airlocks at front and back doors for when I need to go outside and reduce the amount of ash infiltration indoors. I already have ponchos, half-face gas masks with a LOT of N95 filters and a selection of ski and swim goggles for eye protection.
If ash fall is heavier than expected, I have a roof rake designed for snow, but it should work just as well to get most of the ash off the roof….although given the snow loads the roof is designed for it’s unlikely that it’ll be necessary since ash should just slough off other than a skim coat.
I will also be filling all empty containers, including my WaterBOBs in case municipal water stops flowing. This should allow me to go for about 2.5 months without restocking water at which point I’m hopeful that I’ll at least be able to get water at the river and pre filter it a few times before putting it through the Berkey filters (I want to be careful how much ash I expose the Berkeys to since I don’t know what those tiny shards would do to the pore structure inside the black filters.)
Once the ash is washed out of the lower atmosphere I can unwrap everything and use the generator as needed. But all of this is a delaying action since if global food production is affected as badly as worst case scenarios predict then it’s going to be an ugly 10+ years post eruption. Having 2+ years of food stored makes us better off than most folks, but I’m hopeful that we’ll find a way through it. Of course I’m also hoping that Yellowstone doesn’t blow during my lifetime, but I’ve tried to plan as best as I can.
Yellowstone, Asteroids, etc.
I don’t worry about events I can’t control but do what I can to control those things that are in my grasp.
If it were a minor pop then things such as extra air filters for the vehicles would be needed, face masks, water filters, covered dishes for animals etc. I remember Mt St Helens where even here we got ash cloud that caused a few issues
My family ranch in Selah WA was directly in St Helens ash cloud. Collapsed the Barn we shoveled it off the house roof like heavy snow. Redneck engineering added coarse air filters to our vehicles and tractors but stupid folks removed filters as constantly jammed with ash. Moist bandannas were pretty standard breathing gear for several days. Chain drive’s wore out chains like crazy like Hay Balers, chainsaws and motorcycles so even now we have spares on the Ranch. We salvaged and rebuilt the barn and about the 2nd year+ we had bumper crops of alfalfa and had bought adjoin lands cheaply from folks who gave up.
The year with out a summer recounts the effects of a super volcano in Asia blowing it’s top and ash blocking the sun. A prepper with 2-3 years storage foods I feel has a decent chance of doing well if Human Troubles don’t kill you off.
As one wise prepper told me 80% of your SHTF problems will come from a 10 mile circle of your place. Plan according. Know your neighbors, know your troublemakers, know your flood and fire hazards and pray for wisdom and prepare.