Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, is about the size of Södermanland. There are more active geysers there than anywhere else on earth.
Everyone understood that that heat must mean that there is a simmering volcano, somewhere under the ground. But it was only when NASA tested a new space camera that it was understood that virtually the entire park is a volcano. The reservoir of magma could fill the Grand Canyon 14 times over.
The last time this volcano erupted, about 640,000 years ago, it sent out 1,000 cubic kilometers – about two Fujibergs – of rock, dust and ash into the atmosphere. The Midwest, which accounts for most of US food production, was drenched in ashes. When the Pinatuba volcano in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it lowered the global average temperature by nearly 1.5 degrees. That eruption was about a thousandth as big as an eruption could be in Yellowstone.
There are 20 known “supervolcanoes” of the Yellowstone variety
No one knows how to predict an outbreak. It moves and boils in the ground under Yellowstone all the time. And the volcano has previously erupted 600,000 years apart. It is 40,000 years behind. There are 20 known “supervolcanoes” of the Yellowstone variety. The risk of them erupting has been underestimated, some researchers claimed in an article in the scientific journal Nature this week.
And of course we have the earth’s magnetic field. The poles in it have been reversed at irregular intervals. On average, every 250,000 years. It is now 780,000 years since the last reversal.
A reversal begins with the strength of the magnetic field decreasing. It’s not so fun for us, because the magnetic field ensures that the solar wind does not wear down the ozone layer, which ensures that we are not burned by ultraviolet radiation. The fact that Mars’ atmosphere almost completely disappeared is said to have been due to the planet’s magnetic field losing its power.
Since the first measurements of the earth’s magnetic field in the 1830s, it has decreased by about 15 percent. But it is still quite slow, so we may have time to be bombed to death before then.
Scientists have found that it is 100 percent certain that the earth will be hit by a devastating asteroid
There are just over 2,200 known PHOs in the vicinity of the Earth. PHO stands for Potentially Hazardous Object, or “possibly dangerous object” if we are to try a translation. About 160 of them are larger than one kilometer in circumference. All asteroids larger than 35 meters are considered a significant threat to a city.
The good news is that 99 percent of these high-speed mountains are not believed to be on a collision course with Earth within the next 100 years. The bad ones are that 70 to 80 percent of dangerous flying objects are unknown. Researchers at the B612 Foundation, which deals with issues of this kind, have stated that it is 100 percent certain that the earth will be hit by a devastating asteroid, but that they are not 100 percent sure when it will happen.
NASA needs between five and ten years’ notice for them to have a chance to somehow prevent an impact. Most likely we get a little less than a second. It in the form of the light when the space rock hits the atmosphere, a moment before it hits our planet with the power of 850,000 Hiroshima bombs, or so.
Of course, this does not mean that we should ignore the climate. You should do what you can. But everything will go to hell anyway.
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