> > > Hmm, yes...terrible news, except that Horizon seems solely to come up with more and more ways for everyone on the planet to die. If I remember rightly, within the next few years not only will a supervolcano erupt in Yellowstone Park, wiping out most of America (does Horizon have some sort of a vendetta against America?)
> >
> > Yeah, I remember watching something about this supervolcano underneath Yellowstone on a Discovery program at one in the morning (shut up, I couldn't sleep that night). About every 600,000 years or so, a huge packet of lava contained under the area where Yellowstone is located explodes.
> >

You're assuming that this supervolcano will actually stay put in the Park. No dice. Geologists record that the hotspot under Yellowstone (as seen by its geyers and mudpots) is a particularly active one that has been erupting in various part of North America for 600,000 years, as the North American continental plate gradually slides over it. The Yellowstone hotspot is even more violent and active than the undersea hotspot which has been creating the Hawaiian Islands.

As for other volcanoes wiping out North America, there are plenty to choose from. Mount St. Helens made an interesting attempt a while ago.


> > This leaves a huge impact crater. This has happened three times in the past and the last one errupted, yep, you guess it, 600,000 years ago. So scientists predict that within the next 200,000 years, Yellowstone with explode again.
> >
> > Mar "Has a pretty good memory at one in the morning" vin
>
> Your memory missed one little detail. The crater would be a volcanic crater, not an impact crater. Impact craters are caused my meteorites.
> Howard

Technically, this kind of crater is called a caldera.

Caldera • "a large, usually circular depression (volcanic crater) resulting from the collapse of the ground on top of underground magma reservoirs. Calderas have a diameter that is many times greater than that of the volcanic vent."

Wolf "what would you do without a geologist in the family?" spirit


P.S. Other 'calamities' for which the planet is presumably overdue:
(1) Another Ice Age. There have been many, many expansions of the polar ice sheets over the planet. The last one ended about 10,000 years ago. Either we're due for another one, or we're already *in* the middle of one, but we can't see it because of...

(2) Carbon pollution from The Greenhouse Effect is warming up the atmosphere at a rate never seen in the last 30 million years. [I got that timeframe from the ice cores sampled during the Antarctica TV show.] Global warming undoubtably creates serious climatic changes on land and in the seas.

(3) We also seem to be overdue for polar magnetic reversal, where the Magnetic North Pole becomes South Pole, in a colossal 'flip-flop'. The earth's magnetic field has reversed approximately 170 times over the last 100 million years. I don't know how much of our modern technologies are still dependant on the location of Magnetic North; but it's possible that it will create mass extinctions in species who have developed sensitivity to magnetic flux flows (used as guidelines in migratory patterns).

(4) Another planet-flattening meteor like the GIANT Chicxulub impact crater buried in the Yucatan Peninsula, Gulf of Mexico. It hit the world during the Cretaceous/Tertiary Age, about 65 million years ago. Enough said.


I guess we're also way overdue in developing the ability to get off the planet...