Yellowstone’s Going To Kill Us All! Not.

Photo by Nicolasintravel on Unsplash

As of the time of writing, if you do a news search for Yellowstone Volcano, it’s dominated by headlines like “Yellowstone volcano: ‘Greatest catastrophe ever’” and “Yellowstone eruption ‘worst-case scenario’ exposed by USGS Chief.”

Yup.

We’re all going to die.

Here’s the good news…that full page of horrible Yellowstone headlines are all from the same paper, the Daily Express. A British tabloid. For reasons I haven’t ever worked out, British tabloids love to predict Death By Supereruption.

So, what are the actual chances of Yellowstone erupting, and if it does, will it end the world?

Past Supereruptions

Yellowstone has, indeed, caused chaos in the past. The Yellowstone hotspot track has been associated with more than one of these. The largest was 8.7 million years ago, and was called the Grey’s Landing supereruption. The most recent major eruption was 630,000 years ago. This has caused some people to argue that we’re somehow “overdue” for one.

Volcanos Don’t Have a Regular Pattern

Unlike Old Faithful (who really isn’t anymore as the hotspot drifts), volcanos don’t erupt on any kind of a schedule.