"There are around 20 known supervolcanoes on Earth, with major eruptions occurring on average once every 100,000 years, according to the BBC resulting in mass starvation, with a prolonged volcanic winter potentially prohibiting civilization from having enough food for the current population.
In 2012, adds the BBC, the United Nations estimated that food reserves worldwide would last 74 days.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Brian Cox said that "I came to the conclusion that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat."
He proposes that the logical solution could simply be to cool a supervolcano down by extracting its heat.
NASA estimates that if a 35% increase in heat transfer from the Yellowstone supervolcano --essentially a gigantic heat generator, equivalent to six industrial power plants--could be achieved from its magma chamber, it would no longer pose a threat.
Six hundred thousand years ago there was a colossal explosion from a cauldron of magma, the most massive known supervolcano, the 2.2 million acre Yellowstone caldera that forms the world's highest plateau capping a seething magma chamber forty-five miles across-the size of Rhode Island- and eight miles thick of hot molten rock that rises up from 125 miles from the Earth's core.
When Yellowstone explodes, and it will again, someday, Hiroshima will look like child's play.
When Yellowstone explodes, and it will again, someday, Hiroshima will look like child's play.
What no knows for sure is, when.
The ancient Yellowstone caldera exploded with such violence that it left an ash layer almost ten feet deep a thousand miles away in eastern Nebraska killing all plant life and covering almost all of the United States west of the Mississippi..."
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