Over last Christmas weekend --December 27 - 28, 2008-- more than 250 minor earthquakes "rattled the Yellowstone super-volcano" in central Utah. Though such "seismic swarms" are not uncommon, geophysicists at the University of Utah report that quakes up to 3.9 on the (logarithmic) Richter Scale may portend escalating tectonic activity over wider areas.
"Quakes this powerful, of this extent, bear watching," said Prof. Roger Smith of the Yellowstone Seismic Network, which monitors volcanic activity throughout the State. "Let's hope this isn't a precursor of a much larger-scale eruption... but we haven't logged such frequent, high-level tremblors in many years."
In passing, Professor Smith noted that Yellowstone's last major eruption some 640,000 years ago coincided with a cyclical reversal of Earth's geomagnetic field. For whatever reason, such periodic occurrences tend to engender cataclysmic volcanism, extremely lethal though short-lived. Should Utah's underlying magmatic plume blast skyward, the entire western United States would be at risk.
By the statistical Principle of Mediocrity, extremes at any given time will be unlikely. But in cyclical context, recurrent catastrophes become all too predictable. Regular as Old Faithful, Yellowstone's super-volcano apparently erupts on average every 640,000 years. Since the mid-1960s, geophysicists have known by deep-ocean plate-tectonics that regular magnetic reversals follow this same pattern. All anyone can do is watch, and vacate premises in haste at any sign of imminent disaster.
As we recite elsewhere, numerous low-key, unrelated indicators may possibly be reinforcing each other preparatory to upheavals not seen since Indonesia's Toba Eruption reduced humanity to about 1,000 breeding pairs in Africa some 72,000 years ago. Can't Earth just hold fire 'til (say) 2075 - 2100, when we'll have moved off-planet so that Ice Time, meteor strikes, massive Yellowstone convulsions need not return us permanently to Old Stone Age venues?
"Quakes this powerful, of this extent, bear watching," said Prof. Roger Smith of the Yellowstone Seismic Network, which monitors volcanic activity throughout the State. "Let's hope this isn't a precursor of a much larger-scale eruption... but we haven't logged such frequent, high-level tremblors in many years."
In passing, Professor Smith noted that Yellowstone's last major eruption some 640,000 years ago coincided with a cyclical reversal of Earth's geomagnetic field. For whatever reason, such periodic occurrences tend to engender cataclysmic volcanism, extremely lethal though short-lived. Should Utah's underlying magmatic plume blast skyward, the entire western United States would be at risk.
By the statistical Principle of Mediocrity, extremes at any given time will be unlikely. But in cyclical context, recurrent catastrophes become all too predictable. Regular as Old Faithful, Yellowstone's super-volcano apparently erupts on average every 640,000 years. Since the mid-1960s, geophysicists have known by deep-ocean plate-tectonics that regular magnetic reversals follow this same pattern. All anyone can do is watch, and vacate premises in haste at any sign of imminent disaster.
As we recite elsewhere, numerous low-key, unrelated indicators may possibly be reinforcing each other preparatory to upheavals not seen since Indonesia's Toba Eruption reduced humanity to about 1,000 breeding pairs in Africa some 72,000 years ago. Can't Earth just hold fire 'til (say) 2075 - 2100, when we'll have moved off-planet so that Ice Time, meteor strikes, massive Yellowstone convulsions need not return us permanently to Old Stone Age venues?
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Just fer laughs, we note that Sol's dark-star companion called by Sumerian portent astronomers "the Destroyer," is said to be in a 3,600-year eccentric orbit perpendicular to Sol's plane-of-the-ecliptic drawn on the Sun's equator. Since 3,600 years is not necessarily precise, we estimate that 178 Destroyer visitations would take 640,800 years (178 x 3,600), fitting Prof. Smith's time-frame to an accuracy of 100 x 800/640,000 = .125% (1.250 parts per thousand).
Whether or not Yellowstone is gearing up for a geomagnetic reversal aggravated if not determined by a Destroyer cycle, a .125% margin-of-error over 640,000 years seems uncomfortably tight. We await the Winter Solstice of December 22, 2012, with trepidation.
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