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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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So maybe it's not surprising that a video started a stampede of rumors, captioned "alert! Yellowstone buffalo running for their lives," it was posted a week and a half before an earthquake measuring 4.7 rattled Yellowstone this past Sunday.
"We get some pretty wild rumors out there," said Al Nash, public affairs chief for Yellowstone National Park.
Especially because Yellowstone is sitting on what's called a super volcano, which explains all the bubbling and spraying, and if the super volcano ever blew, it would explode with the force 10 times that of Mount St. Helens.
We never discovered who posted the running bison video and some call it fake, but it caught the eye of survivalists.
Park officials are ready to knock down the theories.
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"Those bison are running because that's what they do every day in Yellowstone. This is the time of the year when bison naturally migrate in and out through the park," said Jake Lowenstern, scientist-in-charge at Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
Migrating to forage, the scientist in charge of the Yellowstone volcano observatory says despite recent seismic activity.
"We don't anticipate an eruption anytime soon," said Lowenstern.
And as for the running bison?
"We don't find this very convincing new evidence," he said.
If you want a predictor of seismic activity, maybe you should ask Redwood ants. A three year German study of ants living in mounds on a fault line showed that the ants moved out of their mounds right before earthquakes measuring 2.0 and up.
But wait a minute, which way were those buffalo going?
"I know exactly where those bison were headed because it's about 100 yards from my house. They were headed back into the park," said Lowenstern. Towards the super volcano.
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The possibility of the volcano under Yellowstone National Park erupting is a hot topic right now, especially with the recent 4.8 magnitude earthquake and videos circulating that allegedly show animals fleeing the park.
The volcano under the park is so large and has the potential to produce such a massive eruption that it?s often referred to as a supervolcano.
Earthquakes are common in the area, with between 1,000 and 2,000 quakes in the area per year due to the volcanic and tectonic nature of the region.
Most researchers agree that the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt again, including Ilya Bindeman, an associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Oregon.
?Yellowstone is one of the biggest supervolcanos in the world,? he said in an analysis released by the university. ?Sometimes it erupts quietly with lava flow, but once or twice every million years, it erupts very violently, forming large calderas,? which are very large craters measuring tens of kilometers in diameter.
If a huge eruption happened again, similar to three big ones over the last two million years, he says that the eruption would obliterate the surroundings within a radius of over 100 miles and cover the rest of the United States and Canada with multiple inches of ash. A volcanic event of such magnitude ?hasn?t happened in modern civilization,? he says.
However, Bindeman says he doesn?t think that this kind of eruption will happen anytime soon. He says it won?t happen for at least another million years.
?Our research of the pattern of such volcanism in two older, ?complete? caldera clusters in the wake of Yellowstone allows a prognosis that Yellowstone is on a dying cycle, rather than on a ramping up cycle,? he says.
These calderas form due to the interaction between Yellowstone?s ?hot spot? (an upwelling plume of hot mantle beneath the Earth?s surface) and the North American plate, forming new magma after about a two million-year delay.
?Yellowstone is like a conveyer belt of caldera clusters,? he says. ?By investigating the patterns of behavior in two previously completed caldera cycles, we can suggest that the current activity of Yellowstone is on the dying cycle.?
?It takes a long time to build magma bodies in the crust. We discovered a consistent pattern: subsequent volcanism is a combination of new magma production and the recycling of already erupted material, which includes lava and tuff,? a rock composed of consolidated volcanic ash, he said.
By comparing Yellowstone to previous completed caldera cycles, ?we can detect that the Yellowstone hot spot is re-using the already erupted and buried material, rather than producing just new magma, ? he says. ?Either the crust under Yellowstone is turning into hard-to-melt basalt, or because the movement of North American plate has changed the magma pluming system away from Yellowstone, or both of these reasons.?
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Surprised the conspiracy kooks haven't started harping on HAARP yet in this thread. 
ADG
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