Used to guide in Yellowstone. This has no bearing on the greater Yellowstone Caldera (supervolcano) which spans nearly 30miles by 40miles. In my time there I never saw anything like this. If you're ever in a situation similar to this, run as fast and as far as you can.
The interesting thing about geysers and pools is how relatively predictable they are... until they are not. A mathematical and statistical person would have a lot of fun building prediction models for all the different geysers.
> If you're ever in a situation similar to this, run as fast and as far as you can.
I really really want to underscore this point.
You're literally standing on top of ground and under that is boiling water.
If that breaks and you fall in you're going to be in boiling water with no way to get out and you will die screaming.
Also NEVER walk on ground that has no vegetation. If you look around a geyser you will see that the ground is white and has no vegetation. That's because the temperature is too high and it has water under it that's heating the ground.
Walk on that and there's a chance you will fall in.
In the back country there are no fences so you can fall right through the crust.
>> Also NEVER walk on ground that has no vegetation.
There are also places on this planet where toxicity issues preclude vegetation. If there are fumes coming through the soil so powerful that grass doesn't grow, take the hint.
They mean never in the context of fleeing from these explosions.
My sidewalk has no vegetation, but that is because I weedwhacked on Tuesday not because a geyser 10 meters away is flash boiling water in a pressure vessel made of stone and glass shrapnel-to-be.
Hmmm — isn’t it possible that too much awareness of our pending apocalyptic peril at the mercy of the Yellowstone Caldera is what’s arresting your slumbers in the first place?
If only my late night existential crises were based on realistic apocalyptic peril, rather than some kind of unknown that's impossible to put into words. At least then, there's some kind of science and "natural rules" to limit the exposure.
White Island exploded and killed 22 visitors here in New Zealand in 2019 [1]. As you say, if an eruption starts, run. Video from that day is chilling, with comment made about how different to normal the pools looked.
Those with uncovered skin suffered horribly, and it’s quite surprisingly how little covering was helpful.
I am a groundwater modeler (hydrogeologist) and often work in fractured rock (mainly for mining clients). No experience with modeling for hydrothermal projects though. While the physics of modeling fluid flow in these environments is possible (e.g. discrete fracture networks), mapping and having confidence in the distribution and actual inter-connectivity of the fractures (i.e. preferential flow pathways) is incredibly difficult.
Is the difficulty because the sensing techniques give general but not-localized results? I.e. porosity in an area, but no information about specific connected fissures? Or something else?
My cousin is in hydrogeology as well! Fascinating subject!
Is a geyser not inherently self-destructive? As in its a load-bearing pressure test-run on a random set of connection in stone. Meaning the rock fracks itself, and only the valve to above ground allows for repeated runs? Or do they fix fractures with minerals?
There's nothing about a geyser that requires rock to be fractured during an eruption. Geysers occur due to positive feedback as liquid water is removed, reducing the pressure on underlying heated water, allowing it to boil.
Sort of a temporary equilibrium of boiling temperatures as long as water keeps coming out? but because water supply is finite that will only be a few second or ms?
It's that water that's kept liquid when it's sufficiently deep will now boil when that overlying water is removed. It keeps boiling until it cools enough that it's no longer above the boiling point at the reduced pressure.
Over 60 observations of this hot spring erupting in some fashion over the last 18 years. https://geysertimes.org/geyser.php?id=Black+Diamond Many of the reports mention black water and rocks and "big" -- so not particularly rare. This eruption appears to be larger though -- typically the rocks and debris do not make it to the boardwalk.
A geyser gazer friend of mine shared the following image pair: a "before" Google Earth image and a USGS overhead image captured today after the event. The debris field surrounding the spring is evident -- including the damaged boardwalk. (links to a png) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dcd55YX7oF8KPrHsog75vPS_Mc9...
They’re not that rare. The USGS statement references a few examples of similar events including one from 2009 in this same basin, one from 1989 in the Norris basin, and another (small) event in the Norris basin earlier this year.
A great followup for someone looking to dive into the statistical side of this would be the Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone. [1] (Worlds tallest active geyser)
It has a pretty irregular major eruption pattern. What people often forget, is that geysers don't wait for the day time, so many events occur at night when nobody is around to witness the beauty. When a geyser like this only erupts a handful of times a year and for approximately 3 minutes, you have to get very very very lucky to witness it. Especially when you take into account how enormous YNP is.
> This has no bearing on the greater Yellowstone Caldera (supervolcano) which spans nearly 30miles by 40miles. In my time there I never saw anything like this. If you're ever in a situation similar to this, run as fast and as far as you can.
What would be the point of running if the Yellowstone Caldera actually goes bang? I mean, where would you run to? The resulting destruction would be greater than that experienced by the asteroid collision that ended the dinosaurs.
You're better off staying put and vaporising than dying of asphyxiation a week later.
I believe the poster was saying two things separately:
1. This issue is not some precursor to the caldera becoming active - it is a irregular but normal part of areas with geysers.
2. If a geyser, hot spring, etc starts looking different, acting different, or there is an unexpected explosion run away from it quickly. The negative effects will be localized so distance is helpful.
Another tip for falling objects (although this applies only on the descent phase, so more for objects falling from cliffs or building above you):
If when looking up, the object has an apparent motion (left/right/back), it won't hit you, and certainly don't move in the direction it appears to be moving. If it appears stationary in the sky, it WILL hit you or very close, so move fast. Best default strategy with limited time & options is to hug the rock face, especially under an overhang.
Yup! Also applies to cars on intersecting roads especially at odd angles; if it's staying in the same spot in the windshield/side window, one of you needs to change speeds or you'll have an unscheduled rapid disassembly at the intersection.
It's also a real problem for certain intersection angles where vehicles or bicycles with unfortunate timing will be obscured behind the A-Pillar until nearly too late. There was an article (iirc) on HN years ago about just such an intersection repeatedly injuring/killing bicyclists. I once had to seriously threshold brake at an off-angle intersection to avoid a fire truck running a red light, when the timing/speed/distance/angle all lined up to hide the entire truck behind the A-Pillar for a few seconds approaching the intersection.
And in aviation. Aircraft tracking across your canopy/windscreen? Usually NBD.
Aircraft staying in the same spot on your canopy/windscreen? Potentially a Very Bad Thing.
Ha! yup, heard that a looong time ago, but not from any racer. Having qualified for racing licenses and won championships in several types of racing including road racing, it's actually more complicated than that; you're looking at what direction the wheels are pointing, which wheels are on/off the pavement/grass and what'll hook-up or break-loose in the next seconds... e.g., if someone in front of you is two wheels off on the left side, and starts to turn back onto the track, he'll probably loop straight across the track in front of you and pound the right-side wall or sail across the right-side glass. I have pics of me absolutely threshold braking for exactly that situation, which looks like "huh?" in the first pic, then the next pic, I would have absolutely t-boned the guy if I hadn't braked so hard (and no, driving to where he was, half in the grass, wasn't an option).
So, if you don't have any clues, and have a half second to make your choice, I suppose it's better than no rule of thumb, but I wouldn't rely on it as a primary technique.
Just playing back what you said because it's surprising. You're saying that explosion was not caused by water that was superheated by the supervolcano below the greater Yellowstone Caldera? It was heated by some other source?
A defined hydrothermal basin like this is heated by a very local pocket of magma or more properly magma-that-has-mostly-solidified-into-hot-rock, only a kilometer or so deep in this case, that has leaked up from multiple layers of deeper basins creeping up through faultlines, and which is being gradually cooled by water seepage in a dynamically stable way.
Depending on the area, there may or may not be an intermediary superheated brine functioning as a heat transport mechanism, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_areas_of_Yellowston...
Local explosions like this are not very indicative of movements in the county-sized reservoir of magma ten times deeper down that underlies the entire caldera.
I think most of them are new to this type of nature so you're stuck in "is this normal? Am I in danger? If I run, will I look like a fool?" So you're standing there and looking for other people's reactions before making your own. So it's a bunch of people frozen and looking at each other before 1 person makes a run for it and everyone else does too.
Absolutely. That's what you see in the videos. Finally one person starts really running, and it prompts the others.
I think of it as the National Park discontinuity: few people these days have experience being in environments that can be rapidly lethal.
And there isn't a sign in National Parks saying "Past this line, there are apex predators, dangerous natural features, no cell phone service, and/or the nearest medical facility being a backcountry airlift away."
That's a big change from most people's everyday normal.
I saw one take a rearview mirror clear off a car with a lazy flick of its head, while walking past without breaking stride, just because it didn't like something about the car.
As Sean Connery says in Hunt for Red October, "We must give this American a wide berth."
Anyone know how apparent bot posts like this wind up here? Third one I've seen today, now easy to notice after someone pointed it out on another topic.
I can only theorize, but my guess is that a human signs up, then allows the bot to post. I get this quite often from clients where they have an online form with a reCAPTCHA, and they are getting regular spam. I have to explain that some bots are able to figure out the reCAPTCHA, as well as let them know that sometimes real humans are just paid to fill out forms and bot detection isn't going to help in those cases. This is especially true with services like Fiverr.
Fair enough. Why don't you fill out your profile? I would love to read it as I'm always curious about the backgrounds of people who's behavior or personality I don't understand, and you're essentially vaguely summarizing the topics in all of your posts, which strikes me as different from anything I've experienced.
"At around 10:00 AM MST on July 23, 2024, a small hydrothermal explosion occurred in Yellowstone National Park in the Biscuit Basin thermal area, about 2.1 miles (3.5 km) northwest of Old Faithful. Numerous videos of the event were recorded by visitors. The boardwalk was damaged, but there were no reports of injury. The explosion appears to have originated near Black Diamond Pool.
Biscuit Basin, including the parking lot and boardwalks, are temporary closed for visitor safety. The Grand Loop road remains open. Yellowstone National Park geologists are investigating the event."
It saddens me that we've normalized the recording of vertical videos. There'll be so many more historical events caught on video... but it's now so much more likely that it'll be a vertical video. :(
To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context. Also, the fact that the recorder held the camera steady and kept the content within the frame is great by itself. A lot of times, you end up with shaky, useless footage.
> To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context.
Briefly, near the beginning. But not for the rest of the video.
If you're watching a video on a phone, it's trivial to rotate the phone 90 degrees. On a TV or computer, not so much, so you end up with a ridiculous amount of wasted screen real estate and objectively inferior image resolution.
Rotating a phone 90 degrees is trivial and takes a fraction of a second. Rotating a computer monitor 90 degrees is a pain at the best of times. Rotating a laptop 90 degrees makes it unusable. Rotating a television 90 degrees probably requires a toolkit and an assistant. Which of these adaptations seems more reasonable?
For people who don’t use computers and TVs much, no adaptation probably makes the most sense. There’s a surprising amount of people out there who are mostly just on their phones nowadays, plus I’m pretty much sure large platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts and such also pander to that format.
And that's the vast majority of devices that are used to watch videos. "Vertical video is never fine" stems from the good old days of PCs with monitors. In these phone days, according to the same logic, horizontal video is never fine.
For something you want to capture immediately, the amount of time it takes for the phone's accelerometer to decide you have rotated it is already too long.
If, and only if, the application supports it. Frustratingly, not all do, so you're stuck with the biggest black bars framing a microscopic landscape video.
Contrast with a monitor, where it will at least be viewable vertically, even if it too only fills a portion of the monitor horizontally.
Isn't this a technological choice though? Cameras are sufficiently advanced nowadays so it's possible to take horizontal video while keeping the phone vertical, so it's just a software feature away (at the expense of horizontal resolution), or hw feature away (at the expense of a device internal gimbal)
You’d need square sensors, not an internal moving gimbal, so manufacturers would be left with a choice: should the square fit the circle or the circle fit the square? The first would lower quality and the second would increase costs and add wasted pixels (vignette).
It's not a technological choice, at least not at the level of camera design. It's trivial to record videos the right way; people just can't be arsed.
Suppose you implement horizontal recording while the phone is vertical; this would mean the video preview is now scaled and takes only a fraction of the screen (the same way watching horizontal video on YouTube while in "portrait mode"), which people would find annoying.
Alternatively, you could not scale the video; now the video preview displays only a vertical slice of the frame. It looks OK, but people would soon discover the actual video a screen's worth of image on each side of the preview, leading to anxiety and worry - people would have pay extra attention to not capture things that weren't intended to be on the video; they'd soon look for a way to turn this off.
The unfortunate reality is, it's a social problem partially caused by a technological one. Vertical videos are driven by the phone form-factor and because portraits and selfies actually need to be vertical, and people being people, shooting photos of themselves and other is what they care about the most.
So this comment and the sibling mentioning square sensors raise some good points. Let me rephrase the technological challenge: Make all phone screens square. All phones are now squares. Use Generative AI to fill in the sides of non-square screens. Problem solved. I think I need to make this an AI photo startup.
For amateur footage it's absolutely fine, especially in this instance where it's actually a benefit. Nobodys advocating for vertical movies or tv shows.
There's far better things to focus false internet collective outrage at.
"Mainstream" (as opposed, to, say, amateur SSTV) video broadcasting, aka TV, is definitely very obsolete and too elitist in implementation to even get me "onboard". Not a second of interesting content per day for me there. But you know that you couldn't have written this comment without a computer? Regardless of its form-factor...
I was humorously trying to refer to the fact that touch-screen devices seem to overtake the classical computer. But apparently, people here have no humor left.
The subject is in a vertical orientation, so it is perfect and desirable that the original video has all its resolution dedicated to capturing the phenomenon in the best quality possible. A horizontal video would mean that there are less pixels on the subject matter.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of views also come from people viewing vertical screens, so it kind of makes sense? I personally have started to prefer the vertical format for certain kinds of videos, especially when viewing them on my phone… so I’ve also started taking more vertical videos with my phone.
Phones can easily be oriented either way, unlike most laptop and workstation screens.
Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other and therefore whose field of view has a greater extent in the horizontal rather than vertical direction.
Admittedly I don't understand where the vertical recording fad comes from. Personally I take pictures and photos that are almost exclusively horizontal except in rare cases like taking a picture of a very tall building.
I assume that the vertical recording fad primarily comes from:
1. the people doing the recording being too lazy to rotate their phones, and/or the people doing the recording catering to the lowest common denominator of expecting viewers to be too lazy to rotate their phones;
2. so many "influencer" and related videos these days consisting solely of the narrator's face being right in front of the camera, which makes for vertical being the optimal orientation, due to the human face being taller than it is wide (hence the term "portrait orientation"!).
I also hate it, and I also still shoot almost all my photos and videos in horizontal / landscape orientation. I guess that makes me old.
Well, I used to want to do photos/videos in landscape mode. Until I learnt the hard way that orientation detection is not very reliable on (at least the older) iPhones. Had my share of "come on, turn 90 degrees you useless thing" moments, until I gave up completely on wanting to reorient my phone. Since then, it has stayed in portray mode forever.
I can't easily re-orient my phone when I'm laying (my main use circumstance) because then I have to hold it above my stomach awkwardly. Gets worse when it's charging. Can't put it because I'm fat enough for screen to "dive" and become obstructed. Vertical mode has no such issue.
When I'm sitting, holding vertical feels natural, holding horizontal feels awkward again. I can put my hand on a lap and basically rest in vertical. High risk of dropping it in horizontal (and while rotating). Same for walking.
I don't really see how you can do it "easily" apart from purely geometric considerations. I can rotate my PC display more easily cause it's arm-mounted (which is one of the PC life changers).
where the vertical recording fad comes from
Most popular content today is "person focus". People are vertical.
When you're taking a self-portrait it's easier to hold a phone vertically one-handed, your self image fits the screen better, and your followers are going to view it in portrait mode on TikTok anyway.
When you go yo take a selfie of something other than your face, you just keep the habit.
For social media, vertical pictures and videos is preferred. Instagram adds some borders around your media if it's in landscape mode, same with TikTok, so the idea is to use vertical recording to not have added black bars around your media.
Yes this is true, but we tend to favor horizontal information over height. Thus our eyes are horizontal. A decent rational would be because that would favor our survival since most things are pinned to this plane via gravity.
I do not have links for you, but the last time I checked there was a general consensus among the majority of scientists that given the low percentage of molten lava in the upper chamber and low percentage of molten magma in the lower chamber we would have at least 10K years of low probability of a VEI 8 eruption. An eruption currently may damage part of the park from low basaltic flows and part of the park would be shut down. Should that happen it may impact the park's tourist revenue but the governor is working on diversifying the states income. The risk level of eruption was a decision making factor in my moving so close to Yellowstone.
My only concern is flood plains. I had 8' of water in my basement at the first house I lived in. Technically not in a flood plain but close enough to a river. Never again.
Yeah: common risks across a neighbourhood will usually lead to severe problems trying to claim your cover. And subsequent property resale issues: if insurance is unavailable, a mortgage is unavailable; if a home can't get a mortgage then you can only sell for cash at extreme discounts.
Avoid risky areas unless you can afford to lose your home.
A fair bit of the rich soil in the mid west, west, and north west are from previous volcanic eruptions. Substantial areas have 1 meter or more of high quality soil, which we are squandering by over watering, overly intense agriculture, not preventing erosion, and using too much fertilizer.
Not only is fertilizer very energy intensive to produce, it also contributes to de-oxygenation of lakes, rivers, and the ocean. It's no exaggeration that this might well end civilization on earth. If we lose the oceans (which are already becoming oxygen depleted) it's going to be that much harder to feed everyone.
So I'd consider volcanic ash a pro, not a con. Sure we might lose a single growing season, but could help us for centuries, if properly managed.
Fertilizer isn't just energy intensive, the phosphorus part of it is non renewable. We get it from mining, there are limited deposits, the process of building the deposits happens on geological timescales. My hope is that the running out will be a slow process that comes with a slow price increase so people are eventually incentivized to find alternatives.
Also, the mining process leaves very toxic tailings, but that is true for most mining.
Eventually we'll be mining average crustal rock for phosphorus, at 0.1% concentration, as well as recycling phosphate-containing wastes back to soils. It could be the mineral that sets the minimum global annual mined volume after fossil fuels are done (those currently dominate, ignoring such things as gravel and ground water.)
On the positive side, I believe most phosphate fertilizer is not immediately absorbed by plants, but instead goes into forming relatively insoluble phosphates in the soil (phosphate fertilizer is formed by solubilizing phosphate minerals by treatment with large amounts of acid). This forms a phosphate bank in the soil. Over time, if I understand correctly the residual solubility of these minerals (especially under the influence of organic acids secreted by plant roots) will reduce the need for additional phosphate additions, assuming the soil doesn't erode away.
As far as I remember, the caldera erupting is not an extinction level event (for humans at least)... would be bad for sure, but southern hemisphere would manage I think
We didn't have toilet paper because some people freaked out, you think there's a maintained warehouse of perishable supplies? Or just a big vault of cans somewhere?
No, nations do not have the means to feed their constituents in a nation ending disaster. It's easy to move food from Florida to California in a state sized crises, but the logistics of maintaining a just in case food supply for hundreds of millions distributed around the country? It's a safer bet to assume you'd die in the disaster than to convince people to plan for the future.
Having a supply of something that is suddenly supply constrained is pretty much a literal definition of how to make a profit. No need for a ??? step on that one. Of course you will take a storage cost loss for potentially thousands of years first.
I find this result in researching many things. For instance in nuclear armageddon, the southern hemisphere is relatively ok, temperature and fallout wise. Wondering if I should move there.
Is this a potential sign of the fault shifting or whatever the correct terminology is? A warning shot before a massive earthquake? Or just a geyser-like phenomenon?
> These very large and violent hydrothermal explosions are independent of associated volcanism. None of the large hydrothermal events of the past 16,000 years has been followed by an eruption of magma. The deeper magma system appears to be unaffected even by spectacular steam explosions and crater excavations within the overlying hydrothermal system.
Note, however, that much larger hydrothermal explosions have occurred than the one that just happened. There are some large craters in Yellowstone Lake from hydrothermal explosions. These would certainly kill people who were nearby if they happened again.
Arm chair take here. Probably means nothing. On the scale of earthquakes and larger geology, this is insignificant.
Look at the White Island eruption a few years back. If you are on the island it was an awful event. But in terms of eruption scale it was so small it barely registered.
If it was a sign of something larger it probably would not be so isolated, all the geysers in the area would have gone off. I would guess this is either the formation of a new geyser or an old one which has a long duration between eruptions or just a one off.
See the second video of the broken bridge and the rocks thrown around. Clearly someone could have been badly injured if they were there. I don't think it goes through the pool, just close to it.
At least for the next 2500 presidential cycles or so the chances of the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupting is considered quite low. We have some understanding of the physics involved, there's not enough lava and magma in the chambers currently for such an eruption. Even if a previously unseen phenomenon started to rapidly fill those, rapidly on a geological scale is still measured in thousands of years.
Also, similar things like "the Big One is due in the Northwest" are just sensational headlines. The Cascadia Subduction Zone indeed produces earthquakes every 3-500 years and the last one was in 1700 but that doesn't mean there's an equivalent of a hourglass. It just means there's a historical average of that.
And it's the concern of FEMA to act after something like this happens, not a matter of national security. National security concern, I imagine, would involve defusing these via some military ways and defusing such events are far beyond the capability of humankind at this time.
As explosions go, especially volcanic explosions, this was pretty tiny. Also I don't know where you're getting this idea of an "expanding magma bubble" that could "burst". There's magma chamber that is not to my knowledge changing size, and it can't really erupt at all right now. There's certainly no air inside it, unless you want to count dissolved gas in the magma.
I mean an external explosion which triggers the burst of the magma bubble. For example L. Ron Hubbard speaks about it where Xenu does this. “Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes and detonated simultaneously, killing all but a few…”[1].
It would probably take a sizeable nuke to have that kind of impact. And if someone is lobbing nukes at us, we have more immediate concerns that a potential volcanic eruption.
Every time I see videos like this I’m astonished by how blasé onlookers are about the whole thing.
I know it’s armchair quarterbacking but please don’t be like the people in the video. If the Earth is erupting in front of you: turn and run. Don’t stay there filming. Don’t gently jog while constantly checking over your shoulder. Turn. And run.
I’m not saying panic. I’m not saying trample anyone in front of you. But get to a safe distance with alacrity. You have no idea if the situation will rapidly escalate, and you may only have one opportunity to put enough distance between you and the unfolding situation. Assume the worst until you know better.
In this scenario, falling rocks are a concern. Superheated steam is a concern. Poisonous gases could have been a concern. Corrosive liquids could have been a concern. Lava could have been a concern. Further eruptions could have been a concern. For all of these your odds are improved with distance. In the moment you have no idea of the full extent of the dangers and in many cases by the time you realize it’s too late.
That said I’m very thankful nobody was hurt in this incident.
Did you watch the whole thing? Skip to the 1:15 mark where people go back. The criticism is absolutely warranted here. I guarantee none of those people are capable of predicting what comes next after an explosion like that. I certainly don't. What if the next one is beneath where they're standing at the 1:15 mark and beyond?
I'm not sure how OP's comment doesn't reflect HN's standard of quality. It's exactly the type of quality response that's appropriate for this instance. I'd say your response isn't quite up to it if anything because you're making an argument against someone that is encouraging safety and well-being; and for no apparent reason at all but to point out someone is flawed? I don't get it.
After it stopped and no additional material was being expelled, they do go back to look. Not recommended, but how often are big eruptions followed by even bigger eruptions?
Are you saying they should've run away from the park for the entire rest of the day or trip?
> how often are big eruptions followed by even bigger eruptions?
Quite often, I'd say.
Disruptions in the stability of geological processes frequently have a compounding domino effect... a volcanic eruption is often preceded by the opening of smaller vents, small landslides can trigger large landslides, small sinkholes can suddenly develop large ones, a trickle over a levee can turn into a total breach, most M>7.0 earthquakes have foreshocks...
You can't tell where the peak severity will be in a cluster of geological events except in hindsight after the entire cluster is passed.
There's no way to know if you're dealing with that until after the fact. A lot of the gawkers taking video ended up with serious injuries (not sure they all survived, some of those videos are quite close in retrospect)
Three simple facts here: 1) This is obviously abnormal enough for the people in the video to flee 2) the aftermath - (1:15+) - clearly demonstrates it was unsafe to be there and 3) there is no way to predict if the next eruption would be equally abnormal or worse unless one were trained in this field
There is no arguing those facts, it's 100% clear from that video you linked. Am I going to stay away from the park the rest of the day? I don't know, maybe. It really depends on the circumstances. I am not a volcanologist. I'm not even a scientist. I don't understand the specifics involved here. If it were me, and I can clearly see something abnormal happened, I would NOT risk going back unless I can somehow verify it was safe to do so. That's common sense. It might involve finding a park ranger to speak with or calling the ranger station to get more information. I've been to the geyser at Iceland where they have signs that explicitly tell you about the unpredictable nature of it and how people have been badly burned. This is not a no-risk situation, especially when the situation is not the norm.
I've been to the big island of Hawaii during volcanic activity and they explicitly tell you to stay away from it due to the gasses, rocks, lava, etc. Maybe that elevates my skepticism over the safety here, but it seems that's for good reason.
EDIT: here you go mate, you don't need to look at Hacker News comments. Take it from the Park itself:
> What if the next one is beneath where they're standing at the 1:15 mark and beyond?
Looks to me like they are forced to walk back to get home. A couple of people are dawdling, otherwise it's an exit. Do you want to disagree and OSINT it?
I don't want to argue with dumb nerds flipping out brain farts. Have you thought about it from the safety of your own home and felt like they actually went back in that video or is this thread a waste of time?
Under your "anywhere could explode" "theory" you'd be getting angry if they sheltered in place and waited for helicopters.
HN is why women don't like men anymore, sitting around circle jerking about being irrationally afraid of stuff that hasn't and won't happen to them. How will they ever do... public speaking?
Lots of mammals do this too. I've walked up on a deer where it's so confused as to how you got close to it that it just stands there deciding what to do.
That's actually a very evolutionarily logical response to encountering a predator though.
Most predators can outrun deer (and ever more so, humans). If you start running, they WILL instinctively chase and kill you. If you stand there, look big, and stare at them like you don't give a shit, predators actually start to question their own confidence and there is a good chance they will walk away rather than take a chance with you.
As for geological events, I imagine evolution hasn't really optimized much for that. They are extremely rare, if you're a deer standing on an erupting volcano you can't exactly outrun it either.
It's a big boardwalk feature at a high-profile park and sees hundreds of visitors a day with vanishingly rare incident. It triggers the same kind of passive trust that people bring with them to Disneyland or a dinner theater, where guests default to thinking everything is part of the show and needn't warrant actual concern. It's the same reason people get too close to the wildlife there.
It's thoughtful of you to encourage people here to be more vigilant, but the lack of that vigilance is a direct outcome of the park trying to culture an experience of safety and wonder instead of danger and awe (in its traditional meaning).
Exactly. It's very well developed and seems an incredibly "safe" environment. People aren't in the mindset that there could be danger (even if they should be).
It takes processing time before people even realize that this isn't normal. Also there's social proof all over. When it goes off people look around, see that nobody else is bailing, so they assume things are ok. It takes a little time to override that tendency and get people to start moving.
"People aren't in the mindset that there could be danger (even if they should be)."
This could be said of life generally. It seems like very few people even have a minimal level of situational awareness while walking to the mailbox or walking through a store.
Being near, or crossing, streets are traditionally dangerous. There are plenty of lawsuits from people getting hurt in stores every year. People who think they don't need to pay attention to what's around them in those situations are just ignorant.
And insensitivity. That's why we put one person on guard so everyone
else can go 'shields-down'. Dangerous situation requires an assigned
responsible person whose job is to be heads-up for that time and
empowered to raise alarms, order people back etc. I guess if this is
some kind of "nature spectacle theme park" you need someone
permanently around who is an expert on the situation and knows when to
call it.
Not really. There are different levels of situational awareness. One doesn't have to be on high alert. Just being alert enough that you hear a pallet jack coming down the cross aisle is more alert than half the people seem to be.
Maintaining any level of vigilance is still more exhausting than maintaining none at all, even if at some personal level you believe it shouldn't be hard to do.
Do you look before you cross the street? Do you turn to see what a beeping noise is that is approaching you in a store? Do these things exhaust you?
It's super easy to have basic awareness. Crossing the street is a great example because you need the awareness that you're near a street. Then the awareness to see if it has a crosswalk/light/etc. Then what the light status is (if applicable). Finally looking for cars.
People who lack any awareness at all are the ones you hear about falling in manholes because they were looking at their phones.
>It's a big boardwalk feature at a high-profile park and sees hundreds of visitors a day with vanishingly rare incident.
It is also important to consider the context of the park itself. Roughly half of the world's known geysers are in Yellowstone. One of the primary reasons to go there is to see all the hydrothermal features. It is easy to watch this video from your laptop and know it is dangerous, but if you saw this explosion an hour after seeing this[1], the danger would likely be much less obvious.
At least when I last visited Yellowstone, the place was full of signs and stories about how people have died (and IIRC, their bodies were never recovered) from trying to swim in the colorful fun-looking pools of water, or from kids and pets wandering off. I don't know what else they could do to add more "danger and awe" apart from planning on having some sacrificial tourists every day. People are just generally bad at perceiving or respecting abstract danger.
But that also adds to the same effect! Their moral is to stay on the boardwalk and don’t stray off from it. Their morale is to look out for your kids and pets that they do the same. Which equates boardwalks with safety. Which, as an approximation is kinda true. But then something like this happens which undermines the assumptions under that approximation and if you are still using it as a heuristics you can be in trouble.
> People are just generally bad at perceiving or respecting abstract danger.
Maybe? But also, all the yellowstones hydrothermal features look like the gods have cursed the land. If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around. The park cultivates a sense of safety otherwise it wouldn’t be a park.
> If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around
I think you're assuming much more individualism in the primitive dynamic than actually existed. As I said, individual humans are terrible at judging danger. There was an article posted a few days back about collapses while trenching for construction, and the difficulties of getting people to take that risk seriously until it actually happens.
So at the state you're envisioning, I'd say it's more like others in your tribe telling you to stay away from those weird holes in the ground, because some tribe members had already been killed by them. And the contemporary dynamic is more like an extreme scaling up of that, with a much more nuanced understanding of the dangerous mechanisms.
I'm not sure if you're commenting on Yellowstone specifically, national parks and wild areas in general, or simply the everpresent risk from our heads being ~6ft above the ground and kept aloft by one hell of an inverted pendulum problem.
Similar issue was at play in the 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption in New Zealand (which, sadly - unlike today's Yellowstone explosion - caused numerous deaths and serious injuries). The visitors were made to feel safer than they actually were. The tour operators were complacent, and were later found negligent of having an inadequate safety regimen in place. Too much trust, too little vigilance, human memory too woefully short compared to geological event timescales.
Jurassic Park keeps coming to mind. It must be safe as long as you observe the signs, because it's an institutionalized park, right?
I don't know at what point I, as a first-time visitor to such a park, would start to question whether what I was witnessing was unusual or just part of the show.
Doesn't matter. People need to wake TF up. Even Disney world can be dangerous. I know the NPC meme is dehumanizing but FFS people make it so hard sometimes.
I'm a FL resident (firmly NOT republican), Goto Disney Parks once or twice a month. It's amazing how people there will walk just inside a doorway and stop, or be in the center of a walkway with a group of half a dozen while oblivious to the mass of people around them. It's common to see people stand as a group blocking the entrance to attraction queues or even just entering the park they don't have their pass out before they get to the podium or they scan their pass wait a few seconds and then put their right index finger on the reader, both slow things down alot. Oddly those people are the ones you come across later in the day that insist on standing so close behind you in queues that shifting your weight will make you bump into them, it seems strange people don't grasp there's nothing to be gained from being close enough to smell what the person in front of you had for breakfast.
It's more common than you would think to come across a wild turkey(those bastards deserve the annual culling), deer, geese, coyote, a few months ago there was a black bear in tom sawyers island(they closed off a third of the park until it was captured). A few weeks ago I was leaving the magic kingdom and was going to walk from the main parking lot monorail station over to the bridge toward the Polynesian resort to the parking lot(I loathe the trams, prefer walking). I was just rounding the walkway and came across a snake that was upset about something in the center of the walkway. I think it was just a black snake, but I have a phobia for that particular type of animal. I reversed and took a different route. I have actually seen snakes a few times over the last couple years around the Polynesian resort, turkeys encounters are very common at the campground.
People think that because the parks are very safe as far as public places go that everything in the Disney bubble is "safe". If you're in an area where you aren't familiar with the local wildlife you should always err on the cautious side. But generally people are oblivious to anything around them.
It's really easy to offer advice like that on the internet, but having found myself in a couple of unexpectedly dangerous situations in real life... it just happens. You're not as rational as you think you are. I keep going back to these situations and thinking how I should have acted differently, but it's not how your brain works at the time - not unless you train for it beforehand.
Even on a conscious level, this advice just doesn't work. If you duck for cover because a nearby car misfires, you're gonna get mocked or worse. Modern life gives as far more opportunities to overreact than to underreact to risk, so to appear rational and function in a society, we learn not to be too jumpy.
This isn’t a car misfiring. This is a large eruption of tens of feet in front of you. Even primed to anticipate geysers, this needs be setting off alarm bells. The quicker you can assess danger and override your social instincts that minimize your response in a situation like this, the more likely you are to survive.
Yes it’s easy to armchair quarterback. I have no idea if I would perform any better than those in the video. But we should all aim to respond more accurately when in actual danger.
They had to go that way to get back to the parking lot. The alternative would be walking on the ground, which is even more dangerous and why the boardwalk exists.
Every time I see posts like this admonishing people I am astonished by the apparent ego of the authors and the power of assumptions.
I don't understand the psychology of it either. It's like they think that appearing overly concerned about something potentially dangerous is more embarrassing than being killed by something actually dangerous. That or they have lived such safe and sheltered lives that they cannot identify real danger. I don't have any other explanation.
I would assume it's more due to them not realizing that this isn't just something that periodically happens at the park (like Old Faithful). It might seem unusual, but they don't know how unusual or dangerous it is. It might just be no more unusual than a low road near a body of water that gets a tiny bit flooded in one spot after a heavy rain -- the kind where locals who know about it just drive through because it's only an inch or two deep but visitors might be more hesitant about. In the case of this explosion, the aftermath video shows that it was indeed very unusual and dangerous.
Years ago there was a hurricane that made it up the New England coast. I remember a story of a father and daughter in Acadia National Park who had wandered out onto some exposed rocks (with about 40 other people) to watch these huge waves crash just below them. Eventually one wave was larger than the others and it knocked all 40 people onto their asses, while dragging the father and daughter (who were right on the edge) into the ocean. The father drowned.
All I could think was how colossally dumb you had to be to assume the waves just going to sit there crashing below you. It was clearly a huge storm surge. And then how horribly tragic and preventable the outcome was. Some people, man.
EDIT: Misremembered it. Three people were swept out, and it was the 7-year-old daughter who died. God damn, how awful.
Here on the US West Coast so-called sneaker waves kill a handful of people every year, sometimes sweeping (and killing) entire families into the ocean who were strolling along a beach with unthreatening surf. I was oblivious to this until the 3rd or so incident that caught my attention, then on a hunch poked around with Google search enough to realize (after over 15 years living in the Bay Area) it's actually a regular occurrence. It happens on some stretches more than others, and its more likely in the winter, but it's not confined to "dangerous" beaches and can happen at any time. For some reason it hasn't captured the public's (or media's) attention to become a "thing"--a known hazard that people keep in mind. Every incident tends to be reported in isolation, notwithstanding any blurbs about recent incidents if they happened to occur close enough in time and locality.
It's natural to qualify and rate tragic events by degree of perceived "innocence". Families swept off quiet beaches to their doom without warning is about as innocently tragic as you can get. That said, some incidents are arguably less innocent then others, such as fishermen venturing onto narrower stretches of beach at low tide during winter, when Pacific surf is stronger and more varied. But even then usually it seems people aren't doing anything that onlookers would consider inviting tragedy, and quite often it happens on well trafficked beaches and during times of the year that people wouldn't consider risky.
Fortunately I grew up along the Gulf Coast so Pacific surf has always felt ominous to me. OTOH, I have a higher risk tolerance than many others, especially of younger generations, so maybe it's a wash for me.
I had one in Oregon with my then 8 or 9 year old step daughter. We were on rocks WELL above the wave line (like 6+ feet, dry rock leading the surf maybe 20 feet away). And (this is where I screwed up) we were about 50-100 yards out on this outcrop (so rapid scramble not possible).
Then, sneaker wave. I basically had her jump up "into my arms" so to speak, wrap arms around my neck, legs around my waist, while I situated myself as best I could, and grabbed onto rock with both hands. The water came up to my waist.
It's not that. I was on a plane where a guy tried to break open the door to the outside mid flight and it takes a good 30-60 seconds for people to comprehend reality and make a decision. It's easy to judge from a screen but when an actual disaster hits, the brain does weird things
It typically takes much longer for people to process and make 'intelligent' decisions on novel information than we realize.
Again, typically the brain will skip these checks and go into fight or flight mode where you punch or run without knowing what you are doing. I'd like to think we break a lot of this response in the modern world by not being around a lot of spontaneous dangerous stuff, which leaves us gawking at times.
To be fair, you cannot really open a door of an airplane mid-flight (due to pressure difference), so passengers were in fact in much less danger than they perceived.
This is true when the aircraft is at altitude, but there have been cases of passengers opening doors in flight at low altitude, where there is little or no pressure differential:
Yeah, the door opens in before it cams over to opening out (or can be thrown out onto the wing in some cases), so it’s being held in place by about 3000 kilos of force at typical cabin pressures. Good luck trying to pull it open.
Now, near the ground before the aircraft is pressurised, it could be dangerous mostly because it could pose a risk to the aircraft structure or systems if it tears off and impacts the aircraft in flight. Other than that, a jetliner can fly perfectly well with a door open at low altitude. (Not sure about special large cargo doors though)
Having been there recently, it definitely would not have been immediately clear to me that there would be a problem. The boardwalk is next to the pools but clearly not in structural danger. The videos show the eruption being basically vertical, so if you aren't directly next to it, it isn't obvious that the ejecta will spread out a little, and that doesn't happen for a couple of seconds. So if you aren't right next to it, it initially doesn't seem unsafe.
Also, you are likely to visit this area before Old Faithful, so the most you will have seen is some steam going up. My visit was the first time I'd ever seen a geyser, so I would have had no idea what to expect, and presumably the boardwalk is in a safe location. If it were unsafe, they wouldn't have built the boardwalk there, right? (And it doesn't seem like anyone was injured, so...)
If you run in a panic when normal geyser erupts, it would be embarrassing, right? Now, what is a normal geyser eruption and what is not normal? If you never tried to research this, you do not know.
So we come to an uncertainty. This seems pretty big, and probably is not normal, isn't it? Or it is? So you are not sure, should you shake off social norms of behavior (being calm, not shouting, acting like a grown adult) and to switch to a survival behavior (running away, shouting commands "run" to others, dragging people with you by their limbs, or doing whatever you think is the adequate behavior for such a situation).
Looking at the video carefully, people in a few seconds come to a conclusion that this is dangerous and start moving away, but they didn't get away from norms of everyday behavior. These two different priorities (to act normal or go to the survival mode) are still there, and they are still fighting in minds of people for a dominance.
Their response was "gently jog while constantly checking over your shoulder", because they decided it is dangerous and you need at least jog away, but they are feel that they may be underestimating (or overestimating) the danger, and they keep themself aware of the events to be able to change their behavior accordingly to them.
The very situation prompts for rapid change from a normal mode of existence to a survival mode, and there is no clear unambiguous signal that it is the case. The geyser erupts? Didn't we come here to watch geysers? Wouldn't it be embarrassing to run from the geyser? There are a lot of questions, and System 2 is a slow one. People are educated to keep System 1 in a check and to think things through. They are educated to know some dangerous situations and they can react to them immediately, but this is something unusual, they are not trained for it, and their minds become overwhelmed by a massive visual stimulus and by all the thoughts and ideas that may be relevant, but only System 2 could decide and to prioritize them properly.
When I was watching the video I instantly saw that it is dangerous, but I was prompted about it by the article, so I was ready to see something impressive AND dangerous. Therefore I'm not sure would I be better in that situation if I was watching it in real life without any prompting.
> they have lived such safe and sheltered lives that they cannot identify real danger.
I wrote about it above, but I want to stress it out:
1. we are conditioned to think before acting,
2. most of us have no experience with geysers and we cannot access the hazard level of a geyser at the first glance, and we know that we can't, so... goto 1.
It's not necessarily psychology, it could be an involuntary stress response called freezing behaviour. It's where you stop, become hyper alert and observant of your surroundings to make a conscious decision about how to act. It's basically the conscious alternative to fight or flight.
Who? Everyone in the video is running by 6 seconds in, and it reasonably takes 2-3 seconds to be clear that this isn't just a normal geyser eruption.
Some of the runners are shambling or in a very light jog, but that looks like it's down to form or fitness rather than being blasé. I don't see anyone "strolling".
The woman in the white shirt, tan shorts only started running because the people behind her started running. She was strolling away from the explosion. Same with green shorts in the foreground. We don't actually see him run, just walking away.
These people have no sense of urgency around danger, or they cannot recognize danger.
> It's like they think that appearing overly concerned about something potentially dangerous is more embarrassing than being killed by something actually dangerous.
This is a real psychological phenomenon. Most people don't want to be the first person to yell "fire!", or to appear to take a situation more seriously than it warrants, because they might be wrong and they'd stand out as being wrong and feel embarrassed. That feeling can "stick" shockingly long after you'd think the situation was obvious.
We have not socially normalized and trained the concept that it's better for people to occasionally be understandably wrong than to delay reacting to problems. The right reaction to quick reactions that turn out to be incorrect should be "Thanks for calling attention to what might have been a problem!", not an array of signals that all convey "what a weirdo".
It is a combination of those factors along with what I call TV-Brain, a subconscious assumption that it’s not real, it’s just like when I see it in the rectangle.
Remember, most people in the western and especially American world, simply do not experience real world risks and dangers, everything is so sanitized and cleaned and protected and safe, that they simply do not connect reality with their own demise or even a risk to it. On a related note, it is alway why I believe there are so many and increasing numbers of injurious contacts with bisons, moose, elk, bears, etc in Yellowstone, because they think they’re cuddly animals that they saw in wildlife documentaries and know from cartoons and tv stories of the child that is friends with the talking bear, etc. most people are simply so detached from reality that they simply have no reference for what they are doing that is extremely dangerous to their continued state of being alive.
The first time I visited the Everglades there was a family that had been at Disney for some time and the kids would not believe the many enourmous alligators laying around were real.
On the other hand, my two year old (who had been hitting kids in preschool and getting a lot of "don't hit" messaging, turned and queried, of an alligator on the boardwalk about ten or twenty feet in front of us "No hit the Alligator?"
While my heart and heart rate spiked, I swiftly grabbed him up and agreed, "yes, no hit the alligator!"
The other side of that is "everything is very survivable on TV". Like you see constant explosions and people just getting knocked over, dusting themselves off, and keep going.
About a year ago, I was in the United Club at O'Hare, and the fire alarm went off. I was getting a Bloody Mary when it happened, so I left my drink on the bar, went to the table where my family was, and said "let's go". Other than the sound of the alarm, you wouldn't know anything was happening. People were still getting food from the buffet, sitting at their tables, like nothing was going on.
A minute after we left the area, everyone else came out - not all willingly, it seems. Fortunately, the fire turned out to be nothing (flare up in the kitchen, I heard) and we were let back into the club after a bit. I learned quite a bit about human nature that day.
A life time of fire drills teaches everybody that a fire alarm is just some box tickers way of pointlessly interrupting your day to confirm that nobody has forgotten how to walk out of a fire exit. You can pretty safely bet your life that nothing bad is happening.
We will all die. But if a historic event can be captured on film, the event can be studied in greater detail. I'm all for people choosing to place their very lives at risk in order to further our scientific understanding of the universe.
Everyone is always an expert in hindsight. "If I saw that, I would have". You need to first determine "this is unusual" which takes a long time. That's why despite so many Internet experts being instant responders, most people in these videos are not. If you're like that, how come you're not in the video running? Because you're not a fast responder in real life.
You see all kinds of things splashing and shooting out of the ground at Yellowstone. It would be easy to initially assume this is just another splashy thing you normally see. From the videos it seems people figure out this isn't the norm in about the right amount of time.
I've seen people at Yellowstone pet bison and surround grizzly moms walking with their cubs for a quick photo op. I don't think a lot of these people have a real concept of nature and the unlimited ways it can kill or permanently injure you.
Looks like it would be difficult to run in this scenario where you’re confined to a narrow wooden platform. You’d either have to start shoving people off or risk burning your feet in the ground below.
this, I feel like a lot of people are just so abstracted away from harsh reality in the modern world that many don't take things seriously. Massive normalcy bias and enhanced bystander effect. A lot of people's first instinct is to pull out their phone and record something as well
Humans take risks all the time to fulfill our desire to explore or see wondrous things. Travelling to space for example. Maybe all the other intelligent life in the universe is prioritizing survival.
Ever since I watched that documentary on the steam volcano eruption that killed all those tourist in New Zealand I would never go near anything steam related coming out of the ground.
agree, but also slightly disagree. I was here last year and alot of these geysers erupt like clock work(see Old Faithful). Yellowstone pulls in many tourists from Asia and Europe and and also urban areas of the US and there is nothing like what is there where they come from. Also you have many a placard saying geyers erupt on a regular basis around that area, and also there is a well defined boardwalk around them (for your saftey and to not disturb the area around you) that was vetted by geologists and park rangers. So some of the tourists perhaps thought it was typical, when what happened was extremely abnormal.
In a similar vein, I’ve heard an old priest say that if you start seeing a supernatural phenomenon, including the second coming of Jesus, don’t stick around.
I felt the same way when watching the Trump Assn. attempt. The number of people in the stands who just remained standing and gawking with no self preservation instinct (duck!) was eerie.
I honestly can't tell which part you think wasn't normal. Other people have kind of poked back at what you are saying, but I feel without really questioning which part of this you don't like, as it kind of sounds as if you are just saying "don't hang around near geysers... and, thereby, don't go to visit Yellowstone".
If you saw this same video but without the black color, would you have run? Because that would feel a bit silly to me: these kinds of explosions are happening all around you the entire time you are there. Some are even larger than this one, and you don't just stay as they happen: you sit on a bench and wait for an hour or two hoping to see it while you are there, and there are giant clocks trying to estimate when the next eruption will be.
Now like, what if the color were grey and there was mud? Some of the geysers have mud. Most of these are not a concern. What was a concern here was the black color... but as someone who has spent a bunch of time filming these geysers I found the black color so confusing that it really took me a moment to go "oh shit those are rocks". I could easily see myself having that pause we see from the other people before they all start running.
But, again: I don't feel like you are saying "these people should know rocks are dangerous" or "this was obviously different and you should be informed and on your toes ready to run"... you seem to be saying that, if you were standing somewhere and the ground suddenly exploded that you'd of course run; and, maybe that would be the absolute safest thing you could do, but then... why are you even there in the first place, if not to see an explosion of superheated steam?
Also, remember that the entire region seriously smells like sulfur and other strange gases... this is an area of terrain that people have long ago artistically (maybe even mythologically) described as the doorway to hell, between the smells, the color, the explosions, and the regions of trees that are either scorched, petrified, or merely poisoned. It honestly does make sense to question why people visit such an area in the first place, but once you decide to be there... well, it seems strange to question why you don't see everyone panicking about the explosion.
The same could be said of how many people barely reacted to the shooting in the Trump assassination attempt. For god’s sake, if someone is firing, hit the deck!
Unfortunately we have created a reward system that gives a huge number of "followers" to the one who records. Followers are capital that translate to money (cf. cougar guy, hawk tuah, etc.) Someone could be the next to monetize their following as the "yellowstone lava dude".
Can we somehow instead create an socioeconomic system that instead rewards those that turn and run?
Like if you can prove that you turned and ran, you don't have to pay taxes that year to the IRS.
The government in turn saves money on rescue efforts of sorts. It all works out.
If it erupted as per your hypothetical, then they wouldn’t have stood a chance anyways. Video wouldn’t exist because the headline would read as “Dozen of tourists died at Yellowstone due to sudden eruption”
I think we underestimate people’s reaction to dangerous events. Surprisingly, most people will appropriately respond.
These incidents are rare and isolated enough that the few they take out or not makes no differece to the survival of the population and thus correct response isn't an advantage so it never got selected for.
I grew up in the surrounding area. Tourists, and some locals, died every year, frequently at Yellowstone. Relevant Baudrillard quote:
> Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
If you’ve been socialized not to really believe anything is really real, and your life is mostly spent in social modulation, physical danger that doesn’t register immediately with the hindbrain can really trip you up.
I know of a scenic overlook someone falls off every couple of years, going well back before the smartphone selfie era.
Ideally we should be mining Yellowstone completely for its geothermal power, starting at its periphery, then digging inward gradually. If we don't, the only other eventual outcome is destruction of North America from its supervolcano eruption. Mining it kills two problems with one stone, the energy problem and the supervolcano problem. Of course no fracking chemicals should be used.
National Parks (and the ADA) are some of the few great things that America has going for it and turning Yellowstone National Park into a power plant would not be one of them.
You are not even trying to understand. Aesthetics is not more important than existence. If Yellowstone is not mined, then when it blows, there will be no Americans left to appreciate it.
Secondly, the mining stations will be limited. Yellowstone is a vast land. There is expected to be no diminishing of the forest.
The answer to your concern is right there for you, both by YokoZar, and also in my comment above.
It is that we start at the periphery, very gradually going inward over a thousand year period. We should have enough data of the effects of our peripheral perturbations in the first few hundred years. It should provide a testable model for how to proceed safely as we go inward.
It is not that big a deal. It is in fact a lot easier than mining deeper geothermal which we can also do, but at much greater expense. Yellowstone aside, exploitation of resources is one thing America is profoundly good at. If we start now, we can finish it in say one thousand years and fully eliminate the supervolcano risk, also enjoying much green energy in the process.
I am probably one of the most free-market leaning ppl on HN.
National Parks are a very good place to curb the free market.
It's a classic Tragedy of the commons, the value is huge and would not exist without the government. There is no incentive structure where privatization would leave millions of acres open for a token fee.
I quite often think how people should be encouraged more to go to the natl. parks, they really take your breath away and are something to cherish. Buffalo running wild, Grey wolves if you're lucky, crazy weird geysers, go!
I live about 40 miles from the edge of the caldera. I've wondered about drilling down to get heat. Nobody else has done it though, with the exception of the various hot springs around here. There is a hot-ish spring on our property, in that it stays snow free through the winter. That said, if there was a bunch of heat near the surface presumably our well water would be hot. It isn't.
I'm not sold on this (deep geothermal pilots such as the Geothermal Habanero project in Australia have proved expensive busts, and the productive lifespan of a given borehole is limited to a few decades). But it's worth consideration.
I've written on Habanero previously. The project consistently overran time and cost estimates, and delivered far less power than initially planned. That's not to say that the concept is fatally flawed, but it's also not the panacea first projected. By contrast, surface geothermal fields have been and are developed at commercial scale worldwide, and have been for years: The Geysers in California, in Iceland, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, and elsewhere. In fact most viable fields have already been tapped, with the largely untapped resources now existing in the African Rift Valley (largely within Kenya, where it could hugely bolster the country's fairly anemic generating capacity), and of course Yellowstone in the US, where there are significant environmental and political barriers. A USGS survey getting on two decades ago of US geothermal resources conspicuously excludes Yellowstone from any consideration at all. From 2007: <https://www.usgs.gov/publications/usgs-national-geothermal-r...>
In Yellowstone, if I am not mistaken, the energy is extractable at its land surface, or quite close to it. Drilling 4 km does not seem necessary at Yellowstone. Is this incorrect?
Secondly, there exist efficiencies of scale that come with drilling at ten or a hundred sites rather than just one or a few.
Efficiencies of scale from multiple drilling operations likely pale in comparison to the costs of each well. Keep in mind that some factors, such as well casings, drilling mud, drill bits, labour, and support costs remain high on a per-well basis. A 10% savings evaporates quickly if 100 wells are required to match the energy return of 1 or 10. Well depth and diameter are major determinants of drilling costs in both petroleum and geothermal operations.
The ability to achieve a high, long-term return on relatively shallow drilling operations probably trumps any learning-curve efficiency improvements in drilling itself. Sites such as Yellowstone (based on some former research I'd made) contribute significantly to US baseload electrical generation, should the US choose to exploit them.
It's also worth noting that there already is considerable expertise in drilling generally, with over 160 years of experience over millions of individual wells, and that the efficiency / improvement curve is likely fairly ... well ... exploited.
The top of the magma chamber starts ~5-17 km from the surface with another magma chamber ~20-50 km from the surface. Heat starts and goes well above that of course but if your goal is to meaningfully hook into and extract the heat of the chamber itself it's quite deep. Put from another perspective: if a significant amount of the energy of the chamber were imminently near the surface it would already fizzle itself out over thousands of years without the need of digging short holes to do it in a few.
Geothermal in Yellowstone is no better or more useful than geothermal at many other less important places. It isn't even the place with the most surface level geothermal energy in the first place. Overall geothermal technology advancement makes a lot of sense but starting said advancement via sandbagging for an outcome 1000 years after developing one of the best national parks to do so does not make sense.
Regardless of all of that, there are significantly more than the two possibilities of either starting drilling today or having catastrophe in an eruption.
AFAIU the "last mile" (or last 5--17 km) transfer largely occurs through ground-water migration. Yellowstone combines extensive geothermal energy with ample surface water flow (e.g., Lake Yellowstone, which is itself a major geothermal zone). I'm really well beyond my depth here, though looking up soem background:
Mostly addresses seismic activity, though there's some discussion of inferred structures from that. Based on the journal article by Sin-Mei Wu, Kevin M. Ward, Jamie Farrell, Fan-Chi Lin, Marianne Karplus, Robert B. Smith. "Anatomy of Old Faithful from subsurface seismic imaging of the Yellowstone Upper Geyser Basin". Geophysical Research Letters, 2017; DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075255 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075255>
(The Smithsonian piece is based on the same article.)
Exactly. I am not convinced that drilling 5 km is necessary at Yellowstone. I suspect the energy is ripe for the taking much closer to the surface due to this water migration.
Yellowstone has accessible thermal gradients. Even if a remote approach is made, say, outside the National Park boundaries and intended to minimise surface impacts, necessary drilling should be minimal, and a small number of wells should provide far more energy return than a large number of deep boreholes.
That said, I'm, ahem, well out of my depth here ;-)
The interesting thing about geysers and pools is how relatively predictable they are... until they are not. A mathematical and statistical person would have a lot of fun building prediction models for all the different geysers.