Supervolcano beneath Yellowstone update: Caldera Volcano shocks researchers

a toba eruption could be civilization killer, forget about a proportional reduction death toll...a "nuclear winter" of years will see the population of North america drop from 400millon to a handful of people, starvation comes in about thirty days how do expect 400million people to last a potential years?...technology will be dead and we'll be set back a thousand yrs, our accumulated knowledge will be wiped out in a generation...

 

That is the danger of using Wikipedia as a source. Myself, I generally use it as a source for sources, or will use it for general background type of things, not specifics.

In your case, that [citation needed] is saying that somebody put in that claim, but it is unsourced and so far nobody had been able to find that as a source.

 

I noticed that, and thought of checking it. It seemed unlikely that yupik and inupiat would decide to be inuit!

And it supports either way my observation that there is nothing wrong with the word "eskimo".

Regardless of that. the whole claim that "inuit' is the correct name for the northern indig.
is simply wrong. its good for one of the subgroups.

And the eskimos that I met at the U of A, Fairbanks all called themselves eskimos.
the indians called themselves indians.

Observation on the attempt to be PC, calling people "Inuit".

These white people who lean so far over backwards to be sensitive fall flat on their faces.

 

Actually, it is a great many things that would cause this to happen.

In order to survive at any real level beyond hunter-gatherers, you need enough people with the required skill-sets to provide for those who are not providing food. And this is seen at every level of civilization. First excess food was given to the bakers and beer makers, so that they could spend time doing their craft instead of farming. Then this made way for weavers and potters, who provided ways to hold the excess grain. Then along comes the wood cutters, advanced tool makers, then when the group is large enough you need some kind of "Leadership Cadre".

Then you have the need for scribes, and often clergy to help support religion, and it just goes up and up.

Now odds are that the "civilizations" that remain most intact will be the most primitive ones on the planet. They do not have large excess members of the population, that do such esoteric jobs as thinking. Everybody works for the food, so everybody gets food.

In out "civilized world", most of us are so detached from the origin of food it is shocking.



Even our modern farms can not survive without specialized seed, chemicals, equipment, and trained personnel. And the vast majority are "single crop" farms, which would be good to keep from total starvation for a time, but will ultimately help little to nothing at all.

During an Extinction Level Event, expect 75% of the population to die within 5 years. Most will be from starvation, the rest will depend upon the event itself, but exposure and malnutrition and disease will likely kill off the majority of the rest.

And once you cull down any population that much, it becomes a real question if there are enough members to continue the species.

 

A friend from Philippines remarked that her dad, a farmer, could go back 500 years and live
almost as he does today.

You dont need a big infrastructure to do the water buffalo and plow thing, you dont need electricity or anything else from the 21st century.

People like that would do far better if civilization collapsed than the so called "inuit"
whose way of life is utterly disrupted and replaced with cell phones, motorboats, and houses nicely equipped with modern appliances.

There isnt a girl among them who could sew a seal gut raincoat, you send them back to the
15th century and they would all die.

 

Largely, it depends on the individual.

Personally, I prefer the term "Indian", and feel that everybody born in this country is a "Native American". I take pride in teams using phrases like "Warriors", "Braves", and "Redskins", just as I would with "Vikings" and "Cougars". Such names are a badge of pride to me, that they are trying to channel the spirit and fierceness of their namesake, it is not offensive at all (and I regard trying to remove them as a form of spiritual castration).

I am also very proud of my Potawatomi heritage. I do not find "Indian" offensive in the least, and neither did anybody else on that side of the family.

 

after a 100million Filipinos go out into the countryside looking for food let me know how many water buffaloes will survive...when there's famine livestock are the first to go... my parents lived through a famine, livestock, pets, leather shoes, grass everything becomes food...

Inuit culture never relied on livestock or agriculture, they can do without phones, motors for boats and appliances...phone is just a toy, boats can be rowed and house just holds more people and the house won't disappear regardless if there is a volcanic eruption

and let's not get back to your racial respect issues with "so called Inuit" ...i could drop the so called "han or chinese" and reintroduce the chinaman common to an older north american generation that also had the racial respect issues as you appear to have...just because you met an alaskan Inuit that's ignorant of his/her own culture and permits it doesn't make it acceptable...

you've met all of them have you? the natives of alaska that have had their culture gutted by Americans represent all the Inuit do they?

Many of our Elders know how to prepare caribou hides and sew traditional clothing. In this program, young people develop the skills so valuable to their parents and grandparents, skills which are the essence of Inuit culture. They learn to make caribou mitts, boots (kamiit) and more, depending on the supply of caribou hides and their skills. http://www.pulaarvik.ca/youngfamilies/tradClothing.html
the knowledge is there and it's still being used...and their hunting cultural as source of food is still strong...

 

what someone refers to themselves as is their privilege, for others to use it is an another matter ...I have my black S african friends who will call each other Kaffir's, if I were to use that term it would result in a beating, I don't know of any S African white sports teams called the Kaffirs...if you want to demean yourself by calling yourself a redskin that's your right, if I were to do it it should be regarded as an insult because its origins were derogatory and it still is...if I were to go a nearby native reserve and start calling the locals "redskins" it wouldn't go well for me...

 

I came across an article the yesterday on surviving a super volcano...North America has a 3 month supply of food for 400 million people, population decline followed by civil disruption will be dramatic and fast...depending on the size and duration of a super eruption North america could be without agricultural production for a number of years...and the entire northern hemisphere will suffer there will be no emergence food deliveries coming from elsewhere...those closest to our hunter gather roots will have the best chances of survival...the scientist interviewed was of the opinion half the worlds population will be gone very quickly and as civilization and industry breaks down many more will follow...he estimated we may only get as little as 3 weeks warning of the impending eruption...

 

http://supervolcano123.wikispaces.com/A super volcanic eruption could cause serious agrarian issues as volcanic winter is effectively the same thing as is called a "nuclear winter." Yes, many people will starve to death, many would freeze and there would be wholesale efforts to migrate to less effected locations which currently do not have the food production capacity existing northern hemisphere countries.

The next question would be how much war between the existing natives and migrating new comers would we have? Or how much help in producing food for the affective areas could we expect from those areas still capable of producing food? Would the atmospheric conditions be sufficient to actually create another ice age of consequence? I have seen models expressed both ways, and of course any model must take into consideration the severity of the eruptions and ash clouds.

 

And that is the scenario? more filipinos than there are in the world head for the hills.

For a long term survival strategy in a collapsed world order, being a third world subsistence farmer would give you a chance.

They rely on it now.

So called is right. You were so-calling the yupik and inupiat people of alaska "inuit". That is like
calling a dutchman a german. The ones I met all call themselves "eskimo", and corrected me
when i stupidly thought they were Inuit, having heard the ignorant / pc of people thinking that is the word
for any eskimo. I made a point of asking and they said that occasionally they will refer to themselves as yupik or cupik or inupiat etc but they just go with "eskimo". Kind of like you might call someone a German instead of Deutscheslander, or whatever they say. I say Chinese, and dont find it an insult that the word came from elsewhere.

you seem more prickly about this than any native would be.

And its not "Acceptable" if they use it either? you IS more prickly than any native on this non issue!
I doubt you could find an eskimo in the whole state who'd have a problem with the word "eskimo".
If you want to get into ignorant, the alaska esiimos are not inuit.

making your ignorance into me having a racial issue says something about you, not me.

The Canadian eskimos have had their culture gutted too.
You talk like you've met them all. And they dont represent any "inuit".
So called because you are using the wrong word.

"many of the elders" and they have classes at school to teach the cultural heritage?

 

You're all overestimating the effect. The maps I've seen show the immediate effects of even the more powerful eruptions, such as copious ash everywhere, being limited to about 1/3 of the area of the US, and not a very populous third at that. The rest of the ash will go very high and it is this that will have worldwide effects. It may make some crops fail for a decade or even more in some places, but might just as well make other crops prosper elsewhere. The climate will cool some, but not entirely, and there is no evidence that any single volcanic eruption has ever "triggered" an Ice Age. (They are not "triggered" at all, it's now believed, they evolve, fairly slowly on a human time scale at least.)

Even in the most affected area, the ash is not going to affect things indoors at all, at least not at first, and by the time it's realized there is a danger we will have the military mobilized to prevent the ash from getting to important things, like electric generators, computers, water pumps, etc.

And what about all the stuff that's buried? Even if NYC was covered in several feet of ash (which wouldn't happen, as it's not in the most affected area) I don't think the steam heat in the tall buildings would go off, nor the lights

There would be, undoubtedly, widespread death and destruction, (and I can't help but think it is the primitive people's who will suffer most, not least) but I have to repeat myself. We have seen widespread and worldwide death and destruction before. We didn't backslide at all, recovered completely in 20 years and came out stronger in many ways. By your logic we should just be struggling into the 1600's by now.

 

In many ways, this would be akin to the onset of the Little Ice Age.

However, in that era most of humans were agrarian, and lived in largely self-contained communities.

In such a lifestyle, the community raised all of it's own foods, from tubers and grain to fruits and nuts. And also had it's own livestock, from meat and dairy cows to chickens and sheep for both food and cloth. And every farm grew multiple crops, and was largely self-sufficient.

Today, the vast majority of agriculture is "single crop", and rely upon selling that crop (say sugar beets), and then buying everything else they need (eggs, beef, corn, wheat, etc). So unless the farmer is fairly primitive, they will not be able to feed their family for long at other then a survival mode (which in long term will result in malnutrition).

Personally, I expect most people to be dead within 3 months. Basically most within 100 miles of any city of 100,000 people or more. And a majority will be dead within a 250 mile radius as those living in the cities wander off in search of food, and naturally raid farms and agricultural areas.

In a true ELE event, expect 50% dead in 3 months, 50% of those dead within 6-12 months, and then 20% or so of the remainders over the next period of time 2-5 years after the event has run it's course. And the remainders will be wide-scattered and cut off from each other.

Think of the survivors being thrown back to 10,000 BCE as far as population density and the area of their "world view".

 

Ridiculous.

Just one question to show how you are not thinking this through. How will hungry survivors just "wander off"? People who are starving are weak. They tend to go a little ways and then stop to rest more and more until they die. They don't form huge bands that roam the countryside. Unless maybe you have them all eating each other, and then I think they wouldn't tend to form bands of any size.

None of the things that all you apocalypse theorists postulate ever happened in Germany or Japan after WWII, and there was very, very widespread death from starvation in both countries for several years.

 

You are not thinking about everything however.

Recently we have seen how eruptions in Iceland (2009-2011) have had major disruptions in air travel across the Atlantic and Europe. An eruption of this magnitude will likely ground all air travel in the Northern Hemisphere (and most in the Southern Hemisphere) for years.

Welcome 1901, fastest way to travel once again is by boat.

And what you are missing is that that "not very populous 1/3rd") is the largest food producing land on the planet. The US is the largest food exporter and donator in the world, and that very "flyover country" landscape is what enables it to do that. Take that away, and starvation is a very real thing to huge areas of the world.

This is what I believe will be the "trickle down" effect that will cause the most problems. Europe imports over $10 billion in food alone from the United States. In total, the US exports over $141 billion in food every year. And most of this is bulk staples, like corn, wheat and rice. Rip out that huge supply of food, and a great many nations will starve.

Period.

It would be akin to destroying all of the oil in the Middle East. Sure, there will still be oil, but nowhere near the supply that was available before. But you can't eat oil.

 

humanity as we know it has not experienced anything of this potential...the last being Toba some 70K years ago and I don't know if even that has Yellowstone's potential...and DNA studies suggest Toba nearly wiped out our hunter gather ancestors, people that weren't dependent on agriculture or pastoralism... ash isn't the biggest danger it's temperature drop/climate change and resulting repeated crop failures...

short term change from a single eruption will a temporary cooling as the emissions clear from the atmosphere warm temps will return...long term sustained eruptions will obviously bring a longer cooling period but as the skies clear the excessive build up of volcanic CO2 emissions will remain and the opposite will happen with much higher than normal temps, this is the hypothesis for the great mass extinctions resulting from long term sustained Siberian and Deccan eruptions...

you can repeat it all you want but that doesn't make it true...humanity has never seen destruction on this scale, WW2 was nothing more than an isolated minor inconvenience in comparison to what a super eruption will be...the primitive hunter gathers of amazon who unless their forest dies won't even be aware civilization is falling apart, it'll just be another normal day for them...

you're also oblivious to what the effect it will have on law and order and a functioning society, there will be no effective army or police to maintain order, everyone will prioritize the safety and well being of their own family before protecting your's...no food and society breaks down in 2 weeks and it's everyone for themselves...

 

so the reports of cannibalism in WW2 Leningrad are fiction?...in neither Japan or Germany was famine total, agricultural production never stopped...

 

I would think that would be obvious, but let me spell it out for you.

They will not be "starving" at first - simply hungry. The average human can survive in excess of a month without food. And to be honest, most will be "sheep", and strip everything within 20 miles as they wait for somebody to come and put things back together again. This is why most large cities will be "dead zones", as the people who live there stay far to long and strip everything bare.

Then you will have those that will think of the agriculture outside their immediate area (say the Central Valley for those in the San Francisco area), so head off in that direction. However, this is once again all large-scale single crop agriculture (not all of it edible or even in season). So it will not last long. Within a month all the livestock will be gone, and most of the edible food to the remainder will wander off again.

Expect the majority to remain at home for the first week, expecting things to get back to normal and living off of the food in their homes. Then as that is mostly gone and no replacements appear in the grocery stores, they will start to forage.

The difference between an ELE event and what happened in Germany and Japan is not even close. There were large amounts of imports headed to Germany and Japan after the war was over, most agriculture was more localized and primitive, and "Victory Gardens" and truck farms were much more common, to make up for wartime shortfalls. Most people who had a yard had gardens to produce food. That is not the case today.

 

you're flailing now, every response more illogical and desperate than the previous...there is no defense to made for a racial superiority attitude no matter how you twist turn and deflect...

 

which is reflects my parents and older siblings experiences at the end of WW2...they had a large garden and grew a variety of food during the conflict but by the winter of 44/45 there was no seed to even plant in the spring of 1945, they resorted to digging through german military garbage dumps, allied air drops and convoys saved them from starvation...and as my brother related to me there no cats or dogs to be found, you may love your pet but your neighbour would have no sentimental attachment to it...

 

Not bad, you got seven of the most common internet "debate" cliches into one sentence fragment!

And you probably still think that any Alaska Eskimo is an "inuit".

You are the first one to introduce a racist term, you know.

But you still pulled out the"racist" card to play against me. Dont forget "ad hom" next time, that is a perennial fav. of the feckless.

 

90% of all transport is still by boat. The Midwest is not the world's only large producer of food and not all types of crops would necessarily be wiped out for a decade even there. Also air transport would be affected for a year at most, by then the lower level dense ash would have settled and filters would be on jets that flew high. Additionally, it would not ground the whole world at any time. Things might slow down a bit, but they wouldn't cease.

Food IS produced in many other areas in the world, and not all types of crops in the immediate area would be ruined even for the next season, let alone the next decade

There were a lot fewer of us then and the ones who died were largely concentrated in the area of Toba, that is Australia and Indonesia. The DNA indicates that those who were still in Africa were hardly affected at all.

I had though we were talking about a Yellowstone type eruption. If you're proposing something like the Siberian or Deccan traps I have to agree, but they lasted for possibly 100 million years.

Even the most primitive people live mainly on the leavings of modern civilization. Governments go out of their way to protect and support their primitivism as part of their heritage, without such most would collapse in a few months. If the ravening hordes of starving people you propose ever do exist why do you think they will first go where others like them already are?

FInally, why do you think the Armies and Police will simply disappear? These people actually have plans for emergencies, and supplies laid in. Why do you think they will simply go away.

Leningrad was a city under siege. I have not heard of many reports of cannibalism in the occupied areas of Russia

Exceptional humans have been known to go up to three weeks. Month long survivors are true exceptions. And in any case, starvation produces weakness and lethargy not strength for taking from others and stamina for wandering the countryside. Hunger may motivate someone quite well for a little while, but, unless it is sated, will kill them much faster.

There will be very large amounts of exports headed here after the disaster. Not enough for everybody, no. I have admitted that millions will die, but I do not see civilization as collapsing.

You need to study the history of the 14th century. Climate Change started it by producing two decades of widespread crop failures which weakened the population so that they were easy prey to the Black Death, which may have killed a third of the world's population in less than 5 years. Wars, rebellions and more famine occupied the rest of it, so much so that it is called "The Age of the Scythe". Yet civilization did not collapse. It came out of it better and many historians believe it triggered the Renaissance

 

Wow, this alone was enough for me to stop and realize that you do not understand what you are talking about at all.

To begin with, that region of the country will not be uninhabitable for "the next season", it will be uninhabitable for decades at a minimum.

First of all, you have this amazingly long word, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanocon, or commonly shortened to pulminary silicosis. In short it is from breathing in volcanic dust. Now this is not dust, face masks are of little use. What these people are breathing is volcanic glass.

And I have explained this before, but let me do it yet again. Before it was known as the Yellowstone Caldera, this exact same hot spot was 12 million years ago the Bruneau-Jarbidge Caldera, along the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border (350 miles further West and South then it is today). And when it went up, it left what we now know of the Ashfall Fossil Site. This is in Eastern Nebraska, over 1,200 miles away.

Now this spot over 1,200 miles away was still covered under 8 feet of volcanic ash. 8 feet. And the fossilized animals did not die by suffocation, but because they inhaled fatal amounts of ash. Their lungs were shredded by the volcanic glass in their lungs.

It will likely take a century or more until this region can once again sustain any kind of ecosystem more complex then migrating birds. The landscape will be under feet of ash, with few nutrients to sustain plants, and no animals. It will be a wasteland.

And odds are this event will continue for years if not decades and centuries. We can't really tell how long these eruptions continue, because the geologic record is not that precise. But the evidence in Idaho of large cinder cones with ashfalls between the strata give evidence that these events go on for a prolong period of time.

And to show how far off your concept of time is in this, when Mount Saint Helens went up in 1980, it left hundreds of square miles barren for well over a decade. And today (33 years later), the bushes are only now starting to gain a foothold in the areas that only had a few feet of ashfall.

Your order of scale is many orders of magnitude short here.

 

Well I have about two years of meat on the hoof right now and that is for a family of four. Heirloom seeds can be saved from generation to generation and they do quite well. I know how to save seeds. As long as you could get soil temps up and about a month of frost free weather and light frost for two months you could raise Cole crops. These crops are also good for livestock. Or you could build cold frames and raise veggies that way.

You could also consider fish and other foods...heck ,clover is high in protein...acorns make flour...you can eat cattail roots.

 

Yes . . . and then, too, there will be a great climate change across the entire world immediately affecting not only humanity but flora and fauna in general and in a generally traumatic manner. It would be very bad around the world for quite a long time.