Hi everyone,
For those who don't know - I hold meditation/discussion meetings every Sunday (except when I am elsewhere) from 3 pm to 5 pm at 230 Hyde Street (between Turk and Eddy) in San Francisco at the Faithful Fools Meditation Hall. And it is a really nice meditation hall - complete with zafus and zabutons, a bell, nice blank white walls to stare at, a new polished wooden floor, and a very austere but nice little altar over which I hang a very nice gold lettered Omandala. It is as professional a little zendo (meditation hall) as one could wish for outside of an actual temple or practice center.
Anyway, we do silent sitting for the first 40 minutes (though we begin and end with 3 Odaimoku). Then we have a fairly informal discussion about the Dharma and daily life for the next 50 minutes or so. The last 30 minutes we do a Nichiren Shu style service, that of course centers on reciting the Lotus Sutra and Odaimoku.
The following is from armageddononline:
What is a super volcano?
A super volcano is the most destructive force on this planet. Only a few exist in the world and when they erupt they do so with a force tens of thousands of times greater than other eruptions. They lie dormant for hundreds of thousands of years as a vast reservoir of magma builds up inside them before finally they unleash their apocalyptic force, capable of obliterating continents. They threaten the survival of mankind.
What happened during the last eruption of a super volcano?
The last eruption of a super volcano was in Toba, Sumatra, 75,000 years ago. It had 10,000 times the explosive force of Mount St. Helens and changed life on Earth forever. Thousands of cubic kilometres of ash was thrown into the atmosphere - so much that it blocked out light from the sun all over the world. 2,500 miles away 35 centimetres of ash coated the ground. Global temperatures plummeted by 21 degrees. The rain would have been so poisoned by the gasses that it would have turned black and strongly acidic. Man was pushed to the edge of extinction, the population forced down to just a couple of thousand. Three quarters of all plants in the northern hemisphere were killed.
What causes super volcanoes?
Super volcanoes differ from normal volcanoes in many ways. The stereotypical volcano is a towering cone, but super volcanoes form in depressions in the ground called calderas. When a normal volcano erupts lava gradually builds up in the mountain before releasing it. In super volcanoes when magma nears the surface it does not reach it, instead it begins to fill massive underground reservoirs. The magma melts the nearby rock to form more extremely thick magma. The magma is so viscous that volcanic gasses that normally trigger an eruption cannot pass, so a massive amount of pressure begins to build up. This continues for hundreds of thousands of years until an eruption occurs, which blasts away a huge amount of ground, forming a new caldera.
Where are there other super volcanoes?
Not all super volcanoes have been found, but one of the largest is in Yellowstone Park, USA. Scientists searching for the caldera in the park could not see it because it was so huge - only when satellite images were taken did the scale of the caldera become apparent - the whole park, 85km by 45km, is one massive reservoir of magma. The idyll landscape of Yellowstone (below) could soon explode with devastating consequences.
When will it next erupt?
Scientist have discovered that the ground in Yellowstone if 74cm higher than in was in 1923 - indicating a massive swelling underneath the park. The reservoir is filling with magma at an alarming rate. The volcano erupts with a near-clockwork cycle of every 600,000 years. The last eruption was more than 640,000 years ago - we are overdue for annihilation.
What would be the effect of an eruption?
Immediately before the eruption, there would be large earthquakes in the Yellowstone region. The ground would swell further with most of Yellowstone being uplifted. One earthquake would finally break the layer of rock that holds the magma in - and all the pressure the Earth can build up in 640,000 years would be unleashed in a cataclysmic event.
Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. Volcanic ash would coat places as far away as Iowa and the Gulf of Mexico. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would have a force 2,500 times that of Mount St. Helens. It would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years, the time of the last super volcano eruption. Within minutes of the eruption tens of thousands would be dead.
The long-term effects would be even more devastating. The thousands of cubic kilometres of ash that would shoot into the atmosphere could block out light from the sun, making global temperatures plummet. This is called a nuclear winter. As during the Sumatra eruption a large percentage of the world's plant life would be killed by the ash and drop in temperature. Also, virtually the entire of the grain harvest of the Great Plains would disappear in hours, as it would be coated in ash. Similar effects around the world would cause massive food shortages. If the temperatures plummet by the 21 degrees they did after the Sumatra eruption the Yellowstone super volcano eruption could truly be an extinction level event.
http://armageddononline.tripod.com/volcano.htm
So please come and join us at Faithful Fools - before its too late!
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
Have a swell time in Japan, Michael! Be sure to give us an update when you get back. Best, Byrd in LA
Posted by: Byrd in LA at May 22, 2006 03:19 PMA yellowstone erruption would be an awesome disaster. It would deal a death-knell to worries about global warming. Chicken Little would have a field day, and a lot of people would die, have to wear masks a lot, maybe animals would go extinct in North America again.
In the long run all that ash would replenish the soil across a broad swath of North America and bury some unsightly vestiges of kitsch civilization. English would cease being the dominant language and some other one would become dominent, perhaps Chinese, French or Spanish. Those who survived will have wonderful stories to tell to their grand-children.
If we don't perish by fire, it will be by cold, if not by cold, then by epidemic, if not by epidemic, then by the hand of man, if not by the hand of man, then if we are lucky we'll perish in our beds of old age.
Oye vey. May you live to be a 120
Posted by: Chris at June 8, 2006 02:41 AMFrom: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3024/
If another large caldera-forming eruption were to occur at Yellowstone, its effects would be worldwide. Thick ash deposits would bury vast areas of the United States, and injection of huge volumes of volcanic gases into the atmosphere could drastically affect global climate. Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption. The probability of a large caldera-
forming eruption within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low.
...
Any renewed volcanic activity at Yellowstone would most likely take the form of such mainly nonexplosive lava eruptions. An eruption of lava could cause widespread havoc in the park, including fires and the loss of roads and facilities, but more distant areas would probably remain largely unaffected.
Posted by: robin at June 8, 2006 09:41 AMMore:
Scientists evaluate natural-hazard levels by combining their knowledge of the frequency and the severity of hazardous events. In the Yellowstone region, damaging hydrothermal explosions and earthquakes can occur several times a century. Lava flows and small volcanic eruptions occur only rarely—none in the past 70,000 years. Massive caldera-forming eruptions, though the most potentially devastating of Yellowstone’s hazards, are extremely rare—only three have occurred in the past several million years. U.S. Geological Survey, University of Utah, and National Park Service scientists with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at Yellowstone in the foreseeable future. Recurrence intervals of these events are neither regular nor predictable.
Posted by: robin at June 8, 2006 09:44 AMWell Robin, you are probably right. The odds of yellowstone erupting in our life-times is fairly low. I can't do the calculations because I didn't keep my statistics books. Still it is delicious to speculate.
From what I understand calderas like yellowstone are how continents and oceans form. In the case of Yellowstone if that magma doesn't erupt, and the hot spot moves, eventually all that magma will cool and form igneous rocks.
On the other hand, eventually yellowstone could become a center of rifting, a tear reach from there down to who knows where, older sections of the Atlantic plate could start plunging into the mantle, and the Americas start splitting and heading in opposite directions from one another. Eventually parts of the atlantic would disapear and where it used to be huge mountains form. There is evidence that much of the ocean that used to separate California from the US (the Juan de Fuca plate) is now located deep in the mantle near the core of the earth. It is slowly heating up and merging with the mantle (at least we hope).
That is probably how the rockies were made in the first place. The hot spot where Yellowstone stands on some Island that might have looked like Hawaii or might have looked like Iceland. All this stuff happens over time spans measured in thousands of life-times so we might as well enjoy Yogi Bear while he lasts.
Chris
Posted by: Chris at June 8, 2006 07:51 PMRe: super volcanoes
In the words of Lieutenant Dan, "Is that all you got?!"
Charles
Posted by: Charles at June 11, 2006 01:10 PM