yellowstone – The Red Pen of Doom

A regular volcano is easy to spot: oh look, there’s a big mountain with a crater-mouth thing on top from when it went boom last time.

I live in the shadow of big honking volcanoes, including Mount Rainier (ginormous, but has not gone off lately) and Mount Saint Helens (also big, and went kaboom).

A super volcano is an entirely different animal. They aren’t mountain-shaped. These things are so big, you could be standing on one and not know it.

Yellowstone is one giant volcano, for example.

1) What happens when one of these things explodes?

Bad things.

No, seriously. Really, really bad.

A regular volcano can cause lahars (think of being buried in 30 feet of steaming mud), lava, poisonous gas and all kinds of ash entering the air. That ash can circle the world and cause temperatures to drop a bit, no joke.

When a super volcano goes off, it’s 2.4 bazillion times worse. Instead of a local mess, it’s a regional disaster, even continent-wide. If the Yellowstone super V blew, it would bury Nebraska in seven feet of ash.

The worst part: Nebraskan farmers wouldn’t have to worry about shoveling seven feet of ash from their fields, because nothing would grow anyway. So much ash gets ejected into the atmosphere that it blocks the sun. Scientists believe super volcanoes cause short ice ages. Short being the geological term, you know, “300 hundred years” instead of “10,000 years.”

2) How likely is this type of apocalypse?

The bad news? It’s a 100 percent guarantee.

There are at least a dozen super volcanoes around the world that have gone off before. Scientists say they erupt on a rough schedule.

The good news is those schedules are also on a geological time frame–for some of these supers, it’s 600,000 years.

Back to the bad news: some of these super volcanoes are overdue.

3) How could you prepare?

This is a tough one. You can’t really predict when or where one will explode.

Stocking up on canned food and ammo wouldn’t help that much, seeing how it would be a global disaster and food production would grind to a halt. There’d be massive starvation, and your three-month supply of baked beans and tuna fish would last you…three months.

Unlike other apocalyptic scenarios, such as WATERWORLD: KEVIN COSTER IS OPTIONAL, you’d want to move toward the equator instead of away from it, since those areas would be warmest.

Whatever animals survive the mini-ice age might get quickly hunted to extinction.

While this sounds completely unappealing, growing mushrooms in a cave is the kind of last-ditch thing that could work here, and in just about every other apocalyptic scenario. I’m just not sure humans can survive on mushrooms alone. Wouldn’t you get scurvy and such?

4) Is this preventable?

Unlike zombies and killer robots, super volcanoes definitely exist. They will wake up, as they have before, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

The only truly preventative measure that might safeguard people is going full Elon Musk: establish colonies on the moon, asteroids and Mars.

Then when it’s safe after a few hundred years, send people back to recolonize Earth and reconnect with hardy survivors hanging out in caves and nom-nomming on mushrooms.

So people are freaking out because (a) the Yellowstone supervolcano blows up every 600,000 years, (b) it would turn North America into a sea of ash and create a mini Ice Age, (c) the magma pit under the supervolcano is causing earthquakes and bulging and (d) there’s a viral video of bison running along a highway, supposedly fleeing the coming explosion.

Well, grab your bug-out bag and run for the hills.

Except it might not happen for another 100,000 years. So there’s that.

This video lends weight to survivalist types pointing at the stockpile of canned food and ammo in the basement and saying, “See? It was all worth it. Throw the tent in the pickup and let’s head to the Yukon.”

On the other hand, a supervolcano is a complicated thing. It doesn’t sleep for eons and suddenly wake up to go boom, as this man of science explains in a smart, rational look at Yellowstone.

And finally, this park ranger at Yellowstone, who sort of knows more about the bison and the supervolcano, seeing how it’s his job, destroys the whole “the bison are fleeing, so we must run for our lives, too!” thing.

In the end, I disagree with the viral video folks and End of the World theorists saying “This is it.” Will this supervolcano go nuts? Someday. Scientists say there’s a 1 in 10,000 chance Yellowstone will blow in our lifetime.

Those odds make this far, far more likely than (1) a zombie infestation, (2) U.N. black helicopters coming for your shotgun or (3) killer robots that transform into cars making a mess out of Manhattan. If you’re going to be smart about being prepared, yeah, it’s worth thinking about Yellowstone.

But it’s not worth obsessing over, and there’s no need to panic.

It’s far smarter to think about heart disease, traffic accidents, cancer, getting mugged in a dark alley, diabetes, climate change.

Will you likely dodge most of them? Sure. But 10 out of 10 people die, those are known dangers and it only takes one of them to get lucky and add you to the list. It’d be smart to prepare and prevent the most likely dangers, seeing how they’re basically sure bets compared to Yellowstone going boom or a giant asteroid slamming into Florida because Bruce Willis was too busy making THE EXPENDABLES 12: BUSTING OUT OF THE NURSING HOME.

So while I agree with survivalists about being prepared for more than a flat tire, you should be brutally practical and look at the odds, then spend time and energy on the most likely Terrible Things You Would Like to Avoid, and 99 percent of those problems aren’t solved by me stocking up on more cases of MRE’s. Though I do have a killer plan for making any house zombie proof.