[HN Gopher] Defending human civilization from supervolcanic erup...
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Defending human civilization from supervolcanic eruptions (2015)
[pdf]
Author : rbanffy
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-09-20 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov)
| lmilcin wrote:
| The best idea that comes to my mind is to go vegetarian and to
| learn to distribute food better.
|
| We are already producing way more food that people need. If we
| just stopped feeding it to cows, pigs and chicken, readjusted
| production for more vegetarian diet.
| ebiester wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| If crops fail, it's going to depend on what crops fail. We
| won't have the option of radically reapportioning our crops on
| the fly; while a pre-emptive move to vegetarianism might help,
| that's a radical solution for a problem that may happen every
| 20,000 years.
|
| So, consider what happens. If crops like alfalfa end up more
| resilient, we probably won't eat those past their sprout stage.
| However, if they can feed rabbits, it may be incredibly
| valuable as an option.
|
| However, we would absolutely be looking to prioritize
| vegetables that can be processed for either human or animal
| consumption, even if they're not particularly palatable. I
| think the real problem, however, is the calories that would be
| available from such.
|
| I think it's fair to say that if the food dries up, we would
| cull herds early and prioritize the most efficient food
| sources. We would likely be eating much less meat, if at all.
| We would not have room to be picky with our food.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > We would likely be eating much less meat, if at all.
|
| In the short term, we would probably end up eating a lot more
| meat -- most of the hundreds of millions of cows, pigs and
| chickens we could cull wouldn't be slaughtered at the optimal
| time, being too young or too old, but we'd still be insane
| not to preserve as much of the meat as possible.
|
| > We won't have the option of radically reapportioning our
| crops on the fly...
|
| We can't turn alfalfa into wheat or rice, nor grow rice or
| wheat in all places we now have pastures, but we will have
| the option to redirect the corn and soybeans we use for
| livestock feed. These feeds are produced to lower standards
| -- for instance, there are higher limits on residual
| pesticides -- but in a catastrophe it's better than nothing.
| FredPret wrote:
| OK, if you can eat the hay that is currently fed to the cows I
| eat, have at it
| lmilcin wrote:
| You aware that most cows do not live on nice farms when they
| get to wander around and eat grass?
|
| Grass-fed cows are slow to bulk up. That's why they are fed
| with much more calorie-rich food like grain.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| I wonder if we have the milling capacity on hand to convert
| feed maize to corn meal for a one- or two-year crop
| shortage. It needs to be milled and nixtamalized before
| it's fit for human consumption.
|
| It might be more efficient to distribute it as feed and
| just raise a bunch more egg layers in suburban lots.
| Probably faster than trying to stand up a bunch of mills
| right quick, too.
| Zababa wrote:
| > You aware that most cows do not live on nice farms when
| they get to wander around and eat grass?
|
| That's how they live in France.
| Loughla wrote:
| Also, just as a note, almost all 'grass-fed' beef is
| finished on grain supplement. It's what adds that delicious
| marbling everyone wants in a steak.
| scottlawson wrote:
| How exactly will this defend humankind from supervolcano
| eruption?
| lmilcin wrote:
| Humankind does not need to be defended from supervolcano
| eruption. A bunch of people will survive and continue
| "humankind".
|
| On the other if you are in to save actual human lives, lack
| of food is going to be your biggest worry.
| shusaku wrote:
| The above poster asked you to clarify your point in good
| faith and this is how you respond? Clearly he was asking
| for details about how vegetarianism would produce a more
| robust food supply.
| kiba wrote:
| It would be best to approach the supervolcano problem with
| defense in depth.
|
| Increasing food supply production, efficiency, and
| resiliency are commendable goals in itself and should be
| done in conjunction in figuring out how to defuse the
| supervolcano.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >go vegetarian
|
| Hmmm... In _The Road_ they used the complete opposite strategy.
| kleer001 wrote:
| You mean a mycophile diet? Mushrooms will save humanity. High
| protein, doesn't need the sun for energy, lives off of refuse,
| can remediate waste, some have medical properties, etc...
| rednerrus wrote:
| Mushrooms and snails will be on the menu.
| [deleted]
| milliams wrote:
| This seems to be from 2015. That's not to say that it's out of
| date but when it starts with "There has been a significant effort
| over the last two decades", it's good to know which "two decades"
| it's talking about.
| dang wrote:
| Year added above. Thanks!
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I worked in Brian Wilcox's section, at JPL. He reviewed a couple
| of my concepts and of course dismissed them as silly.
|
| My impression of him as a classic polymath is reinforced by the
| fact that he wrote seminal texts on both volcano defusing and
| rover wheel diameter optimization, both of which have come up in
| recent discussions.
|
| He has the signature "first principles" approach of using mostly
| physics with some clever choices of approach to make it work out
| nicely.
|
| Quality JPLer.
| Geee wrote:
| Bitcoin mining has been suggested as the solution for
| incentivizing the effort without massive government subsidies. It
| might be economically impossible to fund the effort if there is
| not enough electricity demand in the local area, resulting in
| huge costs without returns. I.e. Bitcoin mining could be more
| profitable than selling electricity to local network, and make
| the whole effort actually profitable.
| pphysch wrote:
| Putting the energy output of this highly expensive engineering
| project _to waste_ unscrambling numbers is certainly not a way
| to make it economical.
| Geee wrote:
| The heat is waste. The problem is how to make profit from it
| to finance the project, not to make moral judgements about
| the use of electricity. You could build energy-intensive data
| centers too, if that makes you feel better.
| pphysch wrote:
| It's not a moral judgment, it's an economical judgement.
|
| Mining bitcoins costs lots of economic value (energy,
| hardware, personnel) and produces virtually none. It's
| extremely uneconomical in the purest sense of the term.
| Geee wrote:
| Mining produces blocks, and miners are rewarded with
| bitcoin, which have a certain positive value because
| people want to buy them. The operation generates more
| value than it consumes, and therefore it is economical.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It relies on the existence of the proverbial bigger fool
| down the chain.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Ugh, we probably deserve to be blown up, don't we
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Fascinating to see some of the research put toward inward-looking
| events like supervolcanoes. Part of me wonders why bother since
| the Yellowstone one has such a low chance of erupting, but then
| again, same can be said about an asteroid impact, and that seems
| like it has slightly higher awareness in the public sphere.
|
| Also, is there a reason why this is an effort from NASA, and not,
| say, the USGS?
| kiba wrote:
| They are low chance but potentially civilization destroying if
| not existential.
|
| The asteroid problems should partly be solved with the advent
| of cheap space launch.
| imglorp wrote:
| USGS does study it but NASA looks at planetary effect. And It's
| cyclical so there's a /high/ chance of it happening.
|
| The question for us is /when/: during our civilization, or
| after?
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/summary-eruption-...
| dboreham wrote:
| Note: "a supervolcanic eruption has not occurred in the Holocene
| (past approx. 12,000 years) and, therefore, modern human
| civilizations have not witnessed such an eruption."
| jvanderbot wrote:
| TFA says that heat flux out of the supervolcano is the main
| mitigating factor in build-up of explosive potential inside the
| caldera.
|
| Therefore, increasing heat flux by 35% would (we think) prevent
| Yellowstone (e.g.,) from ever erupting again, based on current
| heat influx and the perceived rate of eruptions (n=3).
|
| So, inject more water to cool it more quickly, and, bonus, use
| the hot water to create power at $0.1/kWh, up to 20 GW.
|
| What's terrifying is how quickly we're drying up the water
| elsewhere in the country, and the existing water in Yellowstone
| is the primary method of cooling the magma [tfa]. If we dry it
| out, it's boom time a lot sooner.
|
| They have a whole section on this, but I'm fairly certain this is
| the next environmental movie disaster plot: Increasing water use
| dries out the only heat sink preventing a volcano that destroys
| life on the Western Hemisphere, and causes a near-extinction in
| humans everywhere else.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Nice, digging into the article now...
|
| Only 20 GW thermal? In my head nuclear power plants emit
| roughly 4GW thermal which is converted to 1GW electric energy,
| so cooling Yellowstone seems well within our technological
| capabilities... with open cycle water cooling.
|
| To save water, I wonder if you could use another system like
| air shafts or a closed-cycle water system, similar to how
| nuclear power plants have primary and secondary coolant loops
| -- the primary loops being closed and the secondary loops being
| "mostly closed" or have some other mechanism of discarding
| heat.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Yes, the cooling aspect is what TFA says is doable. It's the
| heat transmission / drilling part that's hard (It's 400C or
| worse and 1+km down).
|
| They have some reasonable solutions. We'll never do it.
| Environmental conservation groups would see it as a
| capitalist cash grab, and the right would see it as a waste
| of money and energy based on alarmist scientists getting too
| much press. And anyway, we'll drain all the water out of the
| west coast in 50 years and there'll be nothing left to set up
| a pump / capture plant.
| seandoe wrote:
| So take your ball and go home.
| dboreham wrote:
| Water in the Yellowstone ecosystem comes from local
| snowpack -- the area contains the headwaters for the
| Yellowstone and Snake rivers and so is a net exporter of
| water.
| irrational wrote:
| That is very interesting. I live in Portland Oregon, recently
| we were driving out to a park and looked over and saw a
| mountain we had never seen before. It literally took us 5
| minutes, looking at google maps, to realize it was Mount Hood -
| a mountain that we had seen hundreds of times before. But we
| didn't recognize it because it was snow free. In 21 years we've
| never seen it without it's cap of snow/ice and couldn't
| recognize it. It was shocking to say the least and really hit
| home what is going on with water in the region.
| teslabox wrote:
| The year 1816 was known as "The Year Without A Summer" because it
| was 3degC cooler (in France) than normal. Crops failed, and there
| was much misery throughout the world.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
|
| Scientists later determined that the 1816 temperature anomaly was
| caused by volcanic eruptions in 1815 and 1814, which sprayed
| volcanic ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, thereby
| shading the oceans and preventing them from storing the usual
| amount of heat over those two years.
|
| Our modern Civilization is more vulnerable to an average once-a-
| millenium volcanic eruption than it's ever been, on account of
| our numbers and our dependency on supply chains for our
| sustenance.
|
| From the linked article: "In fact, the U.N. Food and Agriculture
| Organization estimated the 2012 worldwide food storage to last
| for 74 days." (pg. 9)
|
| Grains are useful because they store well. Storage is not
| economical, but it is essential for reducing the suffering which
| would result from an 1816-like scenario in our modern world.
|
| Edit: the 1816 anomaly is classified as a volcanic winter [1].
| Solar minimums have also resulted in years/decades with cooler
| summers than normal.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
| est31 wrote:
| > Our modern Civilization is more vulnerable to an average
| once-a-millenium volcanic eruption than it's ever been, on
| account of our numbers and our dependency on supply chains for
| our sustenance.
|
| I think it's more robust than ever, because of our ability to
| ship food around the world. Second, most of our food is grown
| to be eaten by animals that we then eat. If we ate the food
| directly, you could feed way more people than through the meat.
| So if there is a reduction in capacity through such an event,
| unless it's too extreme, we'll still have lots of food left.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Try to eat corn or grass used to feed animals. It's not going
| to end well.
|
| And a global supervolcanic eruption would disrupt the
| production of food worldwide, not just in a single continent.
|
| Therefore, I doubt we are not "more robust than ever", as you
| claim.
| gojomo wrote:
| Does the example of the world's recent adaptations to
| COVID-19 give you confidence that "we" would make the
| necessary adjustments to redirect livestock feeds to humans
| in an emergency?
|
| I doubt that for any famine of the last 200 years, including
| those that killed tens of millions, the problem has been,
| "not enough food in the world". The problem has been, "failed
| institutions don't put the food where it's most needed".
|
| Vaccines are even easier to ship than food. Are they getting
| to where they're most needed?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Unless anyone pulls a Stalin and intentionally mismanages
| things to starve people we'll probably be fine. Modern
| communications and commerce channels should let us route
| around stupidity unless we're prevented from doing so.
|
| If someone does pull a Stalin at any meaningful scale
| that's probably not gonna be possible to keep on the down
| low and heads will roll, likely literally.
| jltsiren wrote:
| It does give me confidence.
|
| There were three periods in the COVID-19 response. The
| initial response was limited, because people were still
| unsure whether the virus was a serious threat. Then, in
| March 2020, we saw determined efforts to stop the virus
| that were unprecedented in speed and scale. People were
| playing it safe, because it was obvious that the threat was
| serious, but nobody knew how serious it would be. Around
| May 2020, it became clear that the threat was not that
| serious after all. The focus then switched to the cost-
| effectiveness of the response from various points of the
| view.
|
| The worst case for COVID-19 was maybe 1% of the population
| dead, 10% with serious long-term health consequences, a
| global depression, and a handful of coups, revolutions, and
| civil wars. It would have been bad, but only on the level
| we should expect a few times in a century anyway. It was
| serious enough to warrant a large-scale response but not
| serious enough to mobilize the entire society.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Corn raised for feed is not the same as corn raised for human
| food. You could probably eat it wafted some form of
| processing. But judging by our slow response to the pandemic,
| I doubt we could pivot fast enough before it rotted.
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah this is more about not having people starve than
| having people eat their optimal meal.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| I find this curious. How different can they really be?
| dexwiz wrote:
| Sweet corn (what we eat) needs to be cooked but is edible
| raw. Feed corn is tough as nails. Field corn is more
| starch than sugar and has a much lower moisture content.
| Almost all corn is field corn, more than 95% of the total
| crop. You can eat field corn but it's about as appealing
| as hard tack.
| mrbungie wrote:
| To reassign crops for feedstock to human consumption is not
| as easy as it sounds. If Covid-19 has taught us anything, is
| that our global food supply chain is a complex beast.
|
| Also, just a reminder to those lucky enough to survive this
| pandemic: a marginal increase in food prices (plus inflation)
| due to supply chain disruption might leave poor people with
| less foods on their tables.
|
| https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/food-
| suppl...
|
| https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-
| se...
| jdavis703 wrote:
| > To reassign crops for feedstock to human consumption is
| not as easy as it sounds.
|
| This is correct, but feedstock type foods are easier to
| store and re-route than other food with a shorter shelf
| life. Over the pandemic I never had an issue finding basics
| like flour or potatoes. Foods that became scarce were meat,
| dairy and highly-processed foods.
| jwin742 wrote:
| > Over the pandemic I never had an issue finding basics
| like flour
|
| flour was almost impossible to buy early in the pandemic
| in the US at least. Seemed like more of a demand side
| issue as everyone (including me) started baking bread at
| home. It took months for them to start having full stocks
| of flour again.
| 83 wrote:
| At least in the midwest that was just the retail small
| bags of flour. I noticed the same as other comments -
| none of the restaurant supply stores around me were ever
| out of 50lb bags of flour, which is what I ended up
| buying. Yeast was a little more scarce however, even the
| bulk bags.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| One pound bags of flour coming to grocery stores through
| the grocery supply chains were in high demand, because
| previously almost no one bought flour on that channel.
| Meanwhile, bakeries kept on trucking along, AFAICT, with
| an uninterrupted supply of 50lb bags from the non-retail
| supply chain.
| Super_Jambo wrote:
| Yup, in the UK the local butcher started selling flour in
| clear plastic bags with a hand written sticker on it.
|
| I guess they had an existing relationship with flour
| wholesale to make their pie pastry and just re-bagged it
| in house.
| est31 wrote:
| Of course it's hard, but note that the volcano eruptions
| happened one year before the, so there's a year to prepare.
| Ideally you plant human edible food in the first place. As
| for "those lucky enough to survive this pandemic"... most
| people didn't die. It's only a small minority that actually
| died from covid. It's been significantly more than would
| die usually, so this was extremely annoying for the
| healthcare system, but it's not been sth. like the plague
| or so.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > To reassign crops for feedstock to human consumption is
| not as easy as it sounds.
|
| It is done all the time. On dry years, when grain prices
| increase, meat producers hush to sell their cattle and the
| extra grain does get into the people's diet. The reverse
| happens all the time too.
|
| On the customer side, a change on food price leads first to
| a change on meat consumption, what couples nicely with the
| production side. Of course, any price change pushes some
| people over the starvation line (on whatever direction),
| but this is something societies can fight.
|
| It's just not done on the scale that a supervolcano would
| imply.
| qaq wrote:
| Well global worming is protecting us from that scenario
| mlinksva wrote:
| Periodic reminder to support https://allfed.info/
| pitspotter2 wrote:
| Often it's the _reaction_ to external threats which proves
| decisive. A rotten civilisation doubles down on its rotten
| values, fearing to try something effective.
|
| But in the case of supervolcanoes our recently improved ability
| to grow food in vertical farms under LED light might be of great
| help. Ideally backed by nuclear fusion since solar would be less
| effective under the attenuated sunlight. Obviously, we don't have
| that power source yet, but, hey, there are a dozen high quality
| fusion projects out there, what are the chances they'll _all_
| fail?
|
| _There may be trouble ahead But while there 's starlight and
| music and truth and romance Embrace the future and dance!_
| cossatot wrote:
| I'm a geologist who has worked a little in Enhanced Geothermal
| Systems and (independently) in volcanology though I am a
| specialist in neither (I mostly work on earthquakes, and
| probabilistic seismic hazard analysis). I think this paper is
| quite interesting but the caveats are briefly noted though
| actually enormous.
|
| A key one is here: _Beyond human intervention, huge pulses of
| heat energy into the magma chamber may at times precipitate
| eruptions, with brief periods where the heat flux is so large
| that engineering solutions would be impractical. If heat flow
| were sufficiently massive then it may be impossible to mitigate
| supervolcanic eruptions._
|
| From what we know about more well-studied volcanic systems (which
| are volcanic arc systems like the Cascades in the US or Mount
| Fuji in Japan), the heat flux into the upper magma chambers comes
| in the form of episodic injections of extremely hot basalt from
| the deeper magma plumbing systems (5-20? km depth). The size of
| these injections likely scales with the size of the volcanic
| system, so for a mantle plume they may be enormous. The heat flux
| is not steady state and the shallow crust/ upper magma chamber
| does not just heat up linearly with time until the eruption
| threshold is reached. We definitely have no control over the deep
| basalt plumbing systems and can't drill anywhere near that deep
| and hot (Deepwater Horizon, which by most metrics is the deepest
| well drilled, reached 12 km depth in cold crust, not getting
| above 120 deg C [1], but in the Yellowstone area this would be
| almost certainly well above 500 C (perhaps 900-1100 C)...
|
| Additionally the failure mode for hydrothermal cooling of the
| volcano is really bad. Explosive eruptions are basically
| triggered by the release of volatiles in magmatic systems
| (expanding gases in a magma froth as H20 and C02 come out of
| solution). As is stated a few times, the increase in temperature
| with depth above the magma chamber basically follows the increase
| in boiling point of water, so the system is essentially on a
| critical threshold. Perturbations to this can be quite bad
| because any volatilization of fluids in the system can cause a
| small phreatic (partially hydrothermal) eruption that could
| remove some shallow mass, which decreases the confining pressure
| at deeper depths and causes further volatilization due to
| decompression, leading to a runaway cascade of larger and larger
| eruptions culminating in a major magma-chamber-emptying eruption.
|
| They mention this here: _in any realistic system there is a
| possibility that, as we artificially extract heat energy out of
| the magma chamber, we could cause phase changes (e.g. volatiles
| coming out of solution) that would reduce the overall density
| causing expansion and cracking in the overburden, possibly
| opening a channel to the surface and precipitating an eruption._
|
| Now also consider that n=3 over 2.1 million years. If this is a
| Poisson process, then the probability of an eruption in any given
| year is ~1.4e-6, or 1 in 1.4 million. Though the most recent 3
| events are quasiperiodic (mean 0.7 M years apart, stdev 0.075 M
| years), before these 3 eruptions, the eruptive center was in a
| different spot farther to the southwest, and there was a 2.3 M
| year quiescence between events[2]. I don't think there is any
| clarity over whether the next major eruption would occur in the
| same magma chamber as the previous several events or would form
| to the northeast towards Red Lodge, MT. So even in a periodic,
| geographically stationary system, which is sort of the most
| dangerous scenario, we could say that we're 90% of the way to the
| next eruption which therefore has an annual chance of happening
| of 1 in 140,000.
|
| I think that any sort of mitigation efforts are still going to
| try to address a rather low probability event with uncertain
| technology, possibly in the wrong geographical location, and
| could trigger the event we are trying to forestall. At a certain
| cost of billions (pocket change w/r/t the costs of an eruption,
| sure), and the major modification of the first and probably most
| famous National Park (and therefore the permanent slandering of
| otherwise promising geothermal technology in the eyes of
| environmentalists). Not sure what the value proposition of all of
| this is but maybe our efforts could be spent elsewhere...
|
| [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42496-0 [2]:
| https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/summary-eruption-...
| tomohawk wrote:
| Not sure what the big deal is - we'll just lock down and wear
| masks.
|
| If that doesn't work, we'll resort to name calling and finger
| pointing.
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(page generated 2021-09-20 23:01 UTC)