Supervolcano!

Summary

Podcast Summary — “Are We Doomed?”
Episode: Supervolcano!
Date: May 5, 2026
Host: Ben Bradley (NPR Network)

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Main Theme:

This episode investigates the existential (and often sensationalized) threat of supervolcanoes, with a special focus on the Yellowstone caldera. Host Ben Bradley, with expert guests, explores what supervolcanoes actually are, their true risks, why fear about Yellowstone persists, and what real risks we should be paying attention to instead.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Yellowstone Supervolcano (00:16–04:41)

• Dramatic Origins: Host Ben Bradley recounts how early American explorers and Native Americans noted unusual volcanic features around Yellowstone, culminating in the discovery of an enormous underground caldera spanning 40 miles.
• Supervolcano Defined: Described as eruptions so vast that prior ones “blanketed the continent in ash. Apocalyptic” (01:35).
• Cycle & Hype: Eruptions may occur every ~600,000 years; last eruption was—unsettlingly—about 600,000 years ago.

2. Volcanic Scales: Tambora, Toba, and True Supervolcanoes (04:42–10:53)

• Tambora Eruption (1815):

  • Volcanologist Shanika Da Silva (Oregon State University) walks through the catastrophic effects—global climate impact, crop failure, and cultural consequences like the "Year Without a Summer" (05:38).
  • “It is not an exaggeration to say every single person on Earth felt the effects of Tambora's eruption.” (06:29)

• Toba Eruption (~70,000 years ago):

  • “Toba is almost 100 times bigger than Tambora.” (Shanika Da Silva, 09:32)
  • Possible role in bringing humanity to the brink of extinction.

• Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI):

  • Mount St. Helens (1980): VEI 5
  • Tambora: VEI 7
  • Toba: “100 Tamboras going off; 10,000 Mount St. Helens” (Ben Bradley, 09:37).

3. Rarity, Danger, and Potential: Where Are the Supervolcanoes? (10:53–14:36)

• Locations: Only nine sites currently identified, with hotspots in Japan, the Americas, and Indonesia (Shanika Da Silva, 11:18).
• Scale of Threat: Even small eruptions (like Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, 2010) can cause global travel disruption and immense inconvenience; a true supereruption would devastate infrastructure, agriculture, and trigger ‘volcanic winter.’

Notable Quote:

“Even a few inches of volcanic ash can devastate—kills crops, collapses roofs... gumming up machines, short circuits electronics.” — Ben Bradley (12:29)

4. The Myth and Media of Yellowstone (17:10–27:00)

• Persistent Panic: Media documentaries and internet rumors continue to push the idea that Yellowstone is "overdue."
• Expert Perspective: Michael Poland, Scientist-in-Charge, Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, says:
  • “If you want to use the bomb analogy, it’s a bomb that’s not primed.” (Michael Poland, 23:01)
  • “Volcanoes give warnings before they erupt...we just aren't seeing that right now.” (23:06)
  • Signs of eruption would be obvious decades, centuries, or millennia in advance.

Notable Quote:

"Yellowstone is not going to explode in a continent-ending volcanic eruption, certainly not now, maybe not for millions of years..." — Ben Bradley (24:48)

• Rumor Control: Viral animal exodus videos ("they were all filmed at a bear zoo in South Dakota")—all phony, yet widely believed (Michael Poland, 26:39).

5. What’s Actually Dangerous? Not Supervolcanoes... (29:27–36:36)

• Real Threats: “Other volcanoes that are much more hazardous, that are showing more signs of unrest, are more likely to erupt...” — Michael Poland (29:27)

• Tambora-class (~VEI 7) eruptions: Far more likely to disrupt global society than rare supervolcanoes; such eruptions can cause short-term but global climate effects.

• Monitoring and Mitigation: We can’t prevent volcanoes, but we can monitor and evacuate; many active volcanoes still lack adequate ground monitoring worldwide.

  • “Volcanoes give warnings, but in order to receive those warnings, you gotta be listening.” — Michael Poland (35:46)

Memorable Analogy:

“Trying to cool a volcano by pumping cold water in is like trying to use an eyedropper of cold water to cool a pot of boiling water on the stove.” — Michael Poland (38:31)

• Mitigation Strategy: Best approach remains monitoring and evacuation, not fanciful technological solutions.

6. Why the “Supervolcano” Hype Persists (27:01–29:27, 24:13–25:55)

• Media Sells Fear: The term “supervolcano” arose in early-2000s documentary TV and is “a bit misleading… implies that these things only have massive explosive eruptions, which is not true at all” (Michael Poland, 28:24–28:51).
• Distraction from Real Risks: Sensational focus on Yellowstone draws attention away from imminent, though smaller, volcanic risks.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote/Highlight | |-----------|-------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 06:26 | Ben Bradley | “It is not an exaggeration to say every single person on Earth felt the effects of Tambora’s eruption.” | | 07:57 | Shanika Da Silva | "Imagine a massive zit growing in the crust... eventually the top of that zit fails, implodes." | | 09:37 | Ben Bradley | “Toba was 100 Tamboras going off; 10,000 Mount St. Helens erupting at once. That is a supervolcano.” | | 20:50 | Michael Poland | “So it would have been apocalyptic. I think it's a good way of putting it. Epically big. Hard to imagine big.” | | 23:01 | Michael Poland | “If you want to use the bomb analogy, it’s a bomb that’s not primed.” | | 24:24 | Michael Poland | “It’s possible that Yellowstone really won't do that much anymore... several million years from now really.” | | 26:39 | Michael Poland | (On animal migration rumors) “...all the bears leaving the park was filmed at a bear zoo in South Dakota...” | | 28:24 | Michael Poland | “Pushing my buttons right now. Not a fan [of the term supervolcano]. And I will say that my opinion is mine.” | | 35:46 | Michael Poland | “Volcanoes give warnings, but in order to receive those warnings, you gotta be listening.” | | 38:31 | Michael Poland | “It's like trying to use an eyedropper of cold water to cool a pot of boiling water on the stove.” | | 39:41 | Shanika Da Silva | (On volcano “fixes”) “All of them give me concern... provoking a smaller eruption...could drive it to a much larger one.” | | 31:37 | Michael Poland | “Yeah, I'm not worried about a volcanic eruption in Yellowstone.” |

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• 00:16–04:41: Yellowstone origins and supervolcano definition
• 04:42–10:53: Comparison: Mount St. Helens, Tambora, Toba; volcanic scale explained
• 10:53–14:36: Rarity and danger of supervolcanoes; paired eruptions theory
• 17:10–27:00: Yellowstone media hype vs scientific reality; Michael Poland's role and debunking rumors
• 29:27–36:36: Real modern volcanic threats; why Tambora-scale threats matter
• 36:46–40:00: Monitoring, evacuation, failed “fixes” for volcanoes

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Conclusions & Takeaways

• We Are (Probably) Fine: Yellowstone is not “overdue;” there are no signs it is priming for eruption. Any future supereruption would give warnings years, centuries, or millennia in advance.
• Focus on Real Risks: Tambora-sized eruptions (VEI 7) are much more likely to disrupt global society than supervolcanoes; these can impact climate, agriculture, and critical infrastructure.
• Rumor and Media Hype: “Supervolcano” fears persist due to sensational media coverage and internet rumors, which distract from actionable hazards.
• What We Should Do: Invest in volcano monitoring and preparation for evacuations; mitigate “deeply inconvenient” but non-apocalyptic threats.
• Supervolcanoes Are Not Today’s Existential Doom: But continued curiosity, scientific progress, and preparation are the best way to face Earth's tantrums—now and for distant-future eruptions.

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Next Episode Teaser

• Topic: Should we wipe out the mosquito? (Jurassic Park reference included.)

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This summary offers both the scientific gist, the cultural flavor, and the distinct irreverent-yet-informed tone of the episode—complete with the most illuminating moments and quotes for easy orientation.

Transcript

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[Ben Bradley]

It sounds like something out of National Treasure Thomas Jefferson Mysterious maps and a dangerous secret buried beneath a famed national park. The first hint to the secret showed up in 1805. A map sketched on a bison pelt showed the Yellowstone river and next to it a picture of a volcano. President Thomas Jefferson hung this map in the entry hall of Monticello, his estate. Then famed explorer William Clark of Lewis and Clark jotted down Native American accounts of a sound like thunder that makes the earth tremble coming from Yellowstone. The indigenous people already knew something about the secret. In 1870, an expedition arrived arrived at Yellowstone to chart the area they named the famous geyser Old Faithful. And while there, a soldier guarding the expedition looked out from a high peak and remarked, the park sure looks like a big old volcano crater. It took almost another hundred years to fully confirm that casual observation and find the secret. It required plane travel, a government aerial photography project, and a lot of scientific measurements. There is a volcano at Yellowstone, one so indescribably vast that the eye cannot comprehend it from the ground. This volcano's caldera, the past fire spewing maw, stretches over 40 miles, and the magma chamber below sprawls even beyond the boundaries of the park's 2 million acres. Past massive eruptions have blanketed the continent in ash. Apocalyptic. And none of this is the scariest sounding part. It's erupted in a cycle about every 600,000 years, and the last time roughly 600,000 years ago. So naturally a question's arisen. This is are we doomed? A production of nuance tales, distributed by the npr network. Ben I'm ben bradley. We live on a shifting, dangerous rock under our feet. Under a thin, habitable surface where we grow trees and food and more humans is fire and pressure, which occasionally erupts like a popped zit and even less frequently erupts like a shotgun through the Earth's crust to to devastating effect that is often dubbed a super volcano.

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Supervolcano.

[Ben Bradley]

And no, supervolcano has gotten more attention or been the subject of more doomsday theories than the one at Yellowstone. The facts I laid out a moment ago are true. It's apocalyptic in size, it has devastated life on the continent, and a recurring cycle would seem to make us doomed to how scared should we be? When I first Started reporting this episode, I genuinely did not know the answer. Supervolcanoes are real, absolutely wild Earth phenomena. They can be globally destructive. I'm just gonna cut to the chase, though. When it comes to Yellowstone, we're fine. At least for the foreseeable future, we're good. But what's most interesting, I think, is the story of why we're fine, how we know, and why the fear about Yellowstone's supervolcano still persists. And finally, all that focus may be obscuring a bigger risk. Maybe not a world ending one, but enough to be deeply inconvenient to all of us humans. Let's first establish what a supervolcano is, and the best way to do that is to talk about what a supervolcano is bigger than. Which brings us to the largest volcanic eruption in the history of human civilization. 1815, an island in Indonesia. A mountain called Tambora, stirs earthquakes and

[Shanika Da Silva]

rumblings for maybe several weeks, telling us that magma is moving up through the volcano.

[Ben Bradley]

Shanika da Silva is a volcanologist at Oregon State University who studies our biggest eruptions. He told me the story of Tambora. Not a super volcano.

[Shanika Da Silva]

It gets more intense with time, and then it pops.

[Ben Bradley]

It pops, yeah.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Completely destroying the area close to the volcano. So most of the island of Sumbaba would have been covered in a thick blanket of ash.

[Ben Bradley]

Anyone in the area around Tambora's explosion was dead. But its ash shot further, a marathon distance straight into the sky that then

[Shanika Da Silva]

produces a kind of haze in the atmosphere. This ash and gas and so on gets up into the stratosphere and acts as a filter.

[Ben Bradley]

The haze spread around the globe actually

[Shanika Da Silva]

impacts the Earth's climate.

[Ben Bradley]

It's called volcanic winter. This is what truly powerful volcanoes can do. Crops failed in Ireland. There was famine in France, Food riots in Massachusetts. They referred to it as the year of 1800 and froze to death. It's also known as the year without summer. All from a volcano in Indonesia. And the effects didn't stop there.

[Shanika Da Silva]

The summer was so bad in Europe that Mary Shelley and her husband and Lord Byron, poets, authors, they were so depressed that they wrote these very sort of dark stories. One of them was Frankenstein. And Lord Byron wrote the poem darkness,

[Ben Bradley]

including the famous line, the bright sun was extinguished. Underappreciated consequence of volcanoes. Poetry, yes.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Science meets art, I guess.

[Ben Bradley]

It is not an exaggeration to say every single person on Earth felt the effects of Tambora's eruption. And every time you see a green stitched up monster with bolts in its neck, you're still arguably glimpsing the effects. But remember, Tambora, not a supervolcano. Tambora is just our comparison point. The eruption that brought you Frankenstein is just there to keep in mind as volcanologist Shanika da Silva tells another story of another hotspot also in Indonesia. Also for confusion's sake, starting with the

[Shanika Da Silva]

letter T, let's zoom in now to Sumatra. There is a very famous tourist location called Lake Toba.

[Ben Bradley]

70,000 years ago, there was no Lake Toba was a flap of earth overlaying seething, angry molten rock and gases bubbling. This was a supervolcano gathering strength.

[Shanika Da Silva]

The signs of this eruption may have started tens of years to hundreds of years before the actual major eruption. Smoking, shaking, small eruptions. The wildlife would have been scattering, birds

[Ben Bradley]

flying away, animals screeching at the sky, being like, what is happening?

[Shanika Da Silva]

The nascent human population would have been completely confused as to what was going on.

[Ben Bradley]

Chanika says probably Toba began to swell.

[Shanika Da Silva]

You used the term zit earlier. So imagine a massive zit growing in the crust and that zit produces a welt on the surface as it's growing. So that's the magma accumulating in the crust. Eventually the top of that zit fails, implodes.

[Ben Bradley]

It's like Gallagher smashing a watermelon. Except the watermelon is the size of Rhode island and filled with hellfire. Volcanologists use a scale to measure the power of any given eruption, like the

[Shanika Da Silva]

Richter scale for earthquakes in volcanoes. We have what's called a volcano explosivity

[Ben Bradley]

index, a name that is to the point on that scale. Let's graph three volcanoes to get a sense of their relative sizes. First, one we haven't talked about, but very famous.

[Shanika Da Silva]

If we take an eruption that probably people are very familiar with, which is Mount St. Helens in 1980, you know, that seemed like a really big eruption.

[Ben Bradley]

Mount St. Helens was the most disastrous eruption in U.S. history.

[Shanika Da Silva]

And that's a VEI 5 pretty big.

[Ben Bradley]

But nothing compared to our next volcano, Tambora of Frankenstein fame.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Tambora is thought to be 100 times bigger.

[Ben Bradley]

So 100 times bigger than Mount St. Helens.

[Shanika Da Silva]

100 times? Yeah. So Tambora is a VEI 7.

[Ben Bradley]

And finally, 70,000 years ago, the Rhode island sized watermelon Toba.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Toba is almost 100 times bigger than Tambora.

[Ben Bradley]

Toba was 100 Tamboras going off 10,000 Mount St. Helens erupting at once. That is a supervolcano. Toba is a supervolcano. It was A big one at that. Its eruption could have nearly filled Lake Michigan, turning it into the world's most unpleasant Jacuzzi. Imagine the poems it would have inspired if written language had existed. Next, consider if its little puny cousin Tambora caused volcanic winter. What would the atmospheric effects of Toba have been during its eruption 70,000 years ago? One school of thought is massive ice age Toba may have changed the world's atmosphere for long enough and made it cold enough that it nearly brought humans in our cave dwelling prehistoric infancy to the brink of extinction. It dwindled us to just a few thousand in number, almost cutting us off before we really got started. Now, that theory has come under question in recent years, but on a real maximal scale, that's what we're dealing with here when we talk about supervolcano. These are real things. They are incredible, they are apocalyptic and they can happen.

[Shanika Da Silva]

They're extremely rare, but they do occur in the geologic record.

[Ben Bradley]

Like I said earlier, we're fine, I promise for now. But first let me just scare you a little bit because if you follow the volcanic breadcrumbs, you could easily think we've got ourselves a problem. Can I ask how many supervolcanoes we think that there are? Yes.

[Shanika Da Silva]

So the most likely location for a future super eruption is where there's been one in the past. There's nine places on Earth that we've identified, okay, Three of them in Japan, there's a couple in the Americas, there's Indonesia, and then there are some which get very close. For instance, there's a very famous the volcano in Italy, Campi Fillegre, around the Bay of Naples.

[Ben Bradley]

Now imagine what it would be like if one of these nine hot spots, blue, went off like our big watermelon Toba, except in Italy or Japan or here. What would that do to us today? I mean, we just have so many more humans and so much more infrastructure built up. And I understand that location would be

[Shanika Da Silva]

a part of it, but location would be key. But you know, we saw what happened with a very small eruption in Iceland and the impact that happened about 15 years ago.

[Ben Bradley]

Can you pronounce the name of that volcano?

[Shanika Da Silva]

I think it's Ajafjia Yokel. I hope I got that right.

[Ben Bradley]

That's very impressive. Okay, to back up, Sean is saying that when this volcano in Iceland, Eike when this volcano in Iceland blew, it caused global headaches, even though it had a vei of four, meaning it was a tenth of Mount St. Helens, a thousandth the size of Tambora. And a hearth fire compared to our supervolcano Toba. And yet nevertheless, this volcano kicked enough ash into the sky to close most of Europe to air travel for days. It cost billions of dollars and a lot of reporters had to learn how to pronounce the volcano's name. Even a few inches of volcanic ash can devastate it kills crops, collapses roofs. If it gets wet, it's like cement. It gums up machines, short circuits electronics. All of which indicates if a supervolcano did its supervolcano thing, we would expect continent wide destruction, years of cold famine from crop die offs, just real bad. We would not be fine. And what if it wasn't just one?

[Shanika Da Silva]

There is now work going on that's suggesting that there may be paired super eruptions on sort of opposite sides of the globe.

[Ben Bradley]

We might have to worry about double supervolcano.

[Shanika Da Silva]

So for instance, there's the Toba eruption and then as far as we can tell, there is a synchronous eruption on the other side of the globe in Guatemala.

[Ben Bradley]

Supervolcano twinsies. Or how about Supervolcano symphony?

[Shanika Da Silva]

There are throughout Earth history pulses of these supereruptions. So you can imagine the impact of, well what happens if you have, you know, two tobas going off instead of just one? Then you can start imagining that the impacts of these things will really multiply. And then you have catastrophic situation for the Earth.

[Ben Bradley]

Why is the Earth doing this to us?

[Shanika Da Silva]

The simplest answer is the Earth. It had a violent birth, hurt people, hurt people was born as a basically a hot molten mass and it's been cooling down since its formation. And that cooling down process hasn't finished yet.

[Ben Bradley]

So the Earth's troubled childhood results in these occasional fits of boiling anger. Of all the supervolcanoes on Earth, one has gotten more attention, has been the subject of more speculation and public worry that it might go off than any other. It is in our own backyard. I'm talking of course about the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park. If we want to be scared, it's easy to do for a reason. I've already mentioned, but that's more concerning to hear from an actual volcanologist.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Yellowstone has had three major eruptions and they have an approximate period of about 600,000 years. The last one being 600,000 years ago.

[Ben Bradley]

But remember, it's probably okay. In a moment. Yellowstone hysteria. Why we're not doomed and why this all still matters.

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[Ben Bradley]

Regarding the massive supervolcano under Yellowstone, we are probably fine. Why, oh why would anyone ever be under a different impression? Yellowstone is due for an eruption. It would look like hell on Earth. I wonder if there's ever been a breathless documentary or three on the subject.

[Shanika Da Silva]

That whole area is a ticking bomb.

[Ben Bradley]

Has anyone made a TV movie that could contribute to the hype? Based on the latest predictions of leading scientists, there's gonna be an eruption. Okay, we know that.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Supervolcano Sunday at 8.

[Ben Bradley]

Oh, for two decades, the Yellowstone supervolcano has played a recurring role in a certain type of cable TV documentary. And if you search the Internet today, you'll get hits like eruption Scenario, how it could change the world, which parts of the US Will be devastated. Yet I keep telling you, we are almost certainly fine. Why is that? And if that's right, why the disconnect? Why has hype of an impending doom spread so widely? There is one person who I think has the most direct and current window to help answer all of this, both about the volcano and the seething rumors around it. So I called him.

[Michael Poland]

My name is Michael Poland. I'm a geophysicist with the US Geological Survey, and I'm the scientist in charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

[Ben Bradley]

Michael Poland is literally the scientist in charge. That is his title of monitoring what's happening under Yellowstone. Michael's part bearded, rugged mountain man backpacking through tough terrain and part absolute nerd about rocks.

[Michael Poland]

My specialty is how the ground moves.

[Ben Bradley]

I asked him about the supervolcano. I asked him about the rumors. I asked him if we're doomed. But first, I just thought we should establish what is actually going on beneath Yellowstone. That bison skin map of Thomas Jefferson's was right.

[Michael Poland]

There is a volcano underneath the national park. Kind of in the central part of the park is a solidifying magma chamber. It is huge.

[Ben Bradley]

You could say it's the size of a dozen grand canyons. Although I think he hates that sort

[Michael Poland]

of silly because it doesn't quite work that way. Most of the magma is solid, but it's still hot. And that's what fed recent eruptions. Recent being sort of geologically recent.

[Ben Bradley]

The last supervolcanic eruption, it is a supervolcano, was 600,000 years ago. You almost certainly weren't born. And there have been smaller eruptions since.

[Michael Poland]

But the last eruption was 70,000 years ago.

[Ben Bradley]

Michael says it wasn't big or violent, Just literally the last time any lava

[Michael Poland]

came up created a lovely plateau that you can go hike across today.

[Ben Bradley]

Because in between, supererupting supervolcanoes often spend their time as volcano Clark, Kentucky, trying to act normal.

[Michael Poland]

They mostly have smaller eruptions.

[Ben Bradley]

Nevertheless, an almost incomprehensibly vast chamber lies underneath most of the park. But Michael says do not think of it as a bucket of liquid or empty space.

[Michael Poland]

That's not true at all. Magma chambers are really complex mixtures of solid particles of liquid melt and even some gas moving around in there. Sort of like a soda that's carbonated.

[Ben Bradley]

The soda occasionally fizzes up until the can bursts 600,000 years ago and Earth before that, et cetera. It burst pretty darn hard. Some estimates have the force of a Yellowstone supereruption equaling the entire global nuclear arsenal going off 600 times over. What would that look like? Basically hell on earth.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Supervolcano Sunday at 8.

[Ben Bradley]

Even Michael, who is as adverse to supervolcano hype as anybody, can't help but gush over Yellowstone's rap sheet.

[Michael Poland]

So it would have been apocalyptic. I think it's a good way of putting it. Epically big. Hard to imagine big.

[Ben Bradley]

Here's the picture of what's happened in the past

[Michael Poland]

in the big catastrophic explosive eruptions. They're putting huge volumes of ash and gas into the atmosphere.

[Ben Bradley]

Blankets of ash roll across the ground

[Michael Poland]

right in the area of the eruption itself. You sort of wipe the area clean with these ash flows that rush across.

[Ben Bradley]

What do you mean wipe the area clean?

[Michael Poland]

Well, they are kind of hurricanes of hot ash and gas. They are rushing across the landscape. They are incredibly hot. They are incredibly fast. So they really just kind of wipe out everything in the area of the eruption itself.

[Ben Bradley]

Yeah. Outside that immediate area, Yellowstone's eruptions dropped deadly ash over most of the continental United states. One eruption 12 million years ago, you were definitely not born, turned a pole portion of Nebraska into animal vesuvius. It buried whole rhinos and camels and saber toothed deer, helpfully preserving them for modern paleontologists to look at. By the way, my editor asked me if this is true or I'm joking. This is true. It's called Ashfall State Park. So if a similar eruption happened today, if Yellowstone did blow again, it would be bad. Like movie bats, super evolved, even a

[Michael Poland]

few centimeters, a few inches of ash can be pretty destructive. It can cause houses to collapse, roofs to collapse.

[Ben Bradley]

It would do all the super volcano things we discussed.

[Michael Poland]

Super volcano might devastate infrastructure, agriculture, electrical, water systems, things like that. It could cause global volcanic winter that might last years. And so worldwide, even if you weren't touched by ash directly, you would feel the effects of this.

[Ben Bradley]

And once more, it has happened in the past 600,000 years ago and et cetera. So why have I kept pounding the table that we are fine? So the very basic question is, are we due for another super eruption? Is this, are you basically observing a giant bomb that's going to blow up the United States right now, Michael, is that your job? No.

[Michael Poland]

If you want to use the bomb analogy, it's a bomb that's not primed.

[Ben Bradley]

I think he hates the bomb analogy.

[Michael Poland]

It's not really ready to go. And prior to any sort of big event there, we would start to see changes. Volcanoes give warnings before they erupt. Right. To get a lot of magma close to the surface and then up to the surface to erupt, you've got to accumulate it. That creates a lot of stress pressure that causes the ground to deform. You get lots of earthquakes and, and we just aren't seeing that right now.

[Ben Bradley]

We are fine because supervolcanoes do not strike with the speed of a comic book hero. How long do you think that sort of loading period, if you will, would take?

[Michael Poland]

It's really difficult to say. Melting rock is not an instantaneous process. Just because you add some heat doesn't mean suddenly the entire magma chamber turns molten. There is some speculation that it's at least decades. It's much more likely that it's centuries to millennia to really prime this system and get it going for an eruption.

[Ben Bradley]

With big eruptions come big signs. So if Yellowstone were about to blow in the cataclysmic way it has in the past, we would know. And the evidence is we would have a lot of time to plan generations even. Instead, though, if anything, signs point away from another eruption. Michael says Yellowstone may actually be hanging it up, finally outgrowing its biggest tantrums.

[Michael Poland]

It's possible that Yellowstone really won't do that much anymore. The plate is moving over the Yellowstone hotspot and it's bringing an area of very thick crust over the top of the hotspot. And we don't know whether or not the hotspot will really have the oomph to burn its way through that thicker crust. So it's possible we may go into an extended period with not a whole lot of activity. We're talking several million years from now really.

[Ben Bradley]

So Yellowstone is not going to explode in a continent ending volcanic eruption, certainly not now, maybe not for millions of years, at which point you'll probably be dead and possibly not ever again. So we are fine. And how we know we're fine seems like really simple. But none of this has stopped the hysteria. We've got no food and we've got no power. The breathless documentaries.

[Shanika Da Silva]

That whole area is a ticking bomb.

[Ben Bradley]

Where did this come from? Michael traces it back to the early 2000s.

[Michael Poland]

There was a documentary that was called Super Volcano and that brought that term sort of back to the forefront. It really wasn't around much prior to then. And it coincided with a docudrama movie, Super Volcano.

[Ben Bradley]

The movie and the documentary came out as scientists reported a plateau at Yellowstone getting taller starting to bulge. A theory emerged that this meant magma was surging, which meant the bomb was priming. It wasn't.

[Michael Poland]

The ground at Yellowstone is always rising and falling. And that's the same thing we see all over the place really, that volcanoes everywhere like to move up and down.

[Ben Bradley]

But now hype and rumors had settled in and from there it became a game of whack. A mole. To this day, Michael, this scientist exploring this huge, wondrous national park, spends a lot of his time batting down Internet conspiracy theories.

[Michael Poland]

It seems like every now and then there'll be some random rumor that pops up that just takes hold.

[Ben Bradley]

Like a recent one. A flurry of YouTube videos suggested all the animals in the park were checking out the subtext because a super eruption was coming.

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Bison, elk, wolves, they're leaving the park in numbers now no one's ever seen.

[Michael Poland]

And the videos were all phony. I mean the one video. So here are all the bears leaving the park and it was filmed at a bear zoo in South Dakota and someone just claimed it was Yellowstone and millions of people believed that. And you know, now think there's something going on.

[Ben Bradley]

Michael understandably hates this.

[Michael Poland]

It's a needless distraction from reality, really.

[Ben Bradley]

You could argue that the main danger of Yellowstone is not the volcano underneath it, but how it's long been another kind of hotspot for the kind of panic and hysteria and wild rumors that spread so easily across the Internet today. So Yellowstone offers a cautionary tale for all of us to watch. Our information diets to be wary of stuff that sounds like there's going to be an eruption. Okay, we know that.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Now.

[Ben Bradley]

This is not a doomed by disinformation episode. We will have that at some point. But I just needed to note it here. It's a key part of the Yellowstone supervolcano story. Sticky hype and swirling rumors that say we're doomed and we're not. Not by this, we're fine. It really bothers Michael, the hysteria, and not just because he has to debunk clearly fake videos.

[Michael Poland]

Look, Yellowstone is incredible. It's an iconic American landscape. It's the first national park in the world. It has boiling water shooting out of the ground. It's shocking, right? Half the geysers in the world are in that little corner of northwestern Wyoming. Just because it's not going to erupt and kill us all anytime soon doesn't make it any less spectacular.

[Ben Bradley]

Well, speaking of things that annoy you, how do you feel about the term supervolcano?

[Michael Poland]

Pushing my buttons right now. Not a fan. And I will say that my opinion is mine.

[Ben Bradley]

I know Michael hates this word.

[Michael Poland]

I think, first of all, it's kind of trite. I think it's a bit misleading because it implies that these things only have massive explosive eruptions. And that's not true at all. And I think it's misapplied. There are a lot of volcanoes that have never had super eruptions, which is probably the defining characteristic of the supervolcano.

[Ben Bradley]

Right?

[Michael Poland]

But they get this name supervolcano.

[Ben Bradley]

To recap, our volcanologist Michael does not like the word supervolcano. He does not like bomb analogies. He does not like Grand Canyon analogies. You might think the scientist in charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory is just a big grump about volcano threats. And you would be wrong. One reason Michael is so frustrated by the hype around supervolcanoes, and Yellowstone especially, is that it is not going to go off. And it's drawing attention away from volcano threats that actually might.

[Michael Poland]

Other volcanoes that are much more hazardous, that are showing more signs of unrest, are more likely to, erupt, when we

[Ben Bradley]

come back, the real volcano threats, where our angry earth, fires, rocks, bleeding fissures of lava and water at us, sort

[Michael Poland]

of like a pressure cooker gone horribly wrong.

[Ben Bradley]

And as usual, we're going to solve it.

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Every episode, if it's been a minute, NPR's what's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it at npr. We stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow it's been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts and we'll break down the zeitgeist y topics that are filling your feed.

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[Ben Bradley]

learned, let's do the doom meter. The risk of a supervolcano under Yellowstone spewing up from the ground, turning the United States into charcoal, and hurling the rest of the world into volcanic winter. We are fine. So it sounds like we don't need to be particularly worried about Yellowstone erupting and wiping us off the map at the moment.

[Michael Poland]

Yeah, I'm not worried about a volcanic eruption in Yellowstone.

[Ben Bradley]

Now, that doesn't mean Michael Poland, scientist in charge, sleeps blissfully on a pillow of angel feathers each night. Hosting a supervolcano under your national park, even if it's not going to erupt, comes with some complications, like earthquakes.

[Michael Poland]

So there was a magnitude 7.3 in 1959 just west of the planet park, the largest recorded earthquake in the intermountain West. It caused a landslide that killed over two dozen people. It blocked a river, created a new

[Ben Bradley]

lake, hot springs exploding, sort of like

[Michael Poland]

a pressure cooker gone horribly wrong.

[Ben Bradley]

Steam and hot water build underground until boom.

[Michael Poland]

There is a hydrothermal explosion crater in Yellowstone. It's a mile and a half across. That's massive if that were to happen in summertime in the next few years, they would be absolutely devastating.

[Ben Bradley]

So there are dangers. Earthquakes, geysers, bison charge a few people each year who get too close, which is probably not the supervolcano's fault. These are not dooms though. The bison can't get all of us, not yet. But we've heard there are at least nine supervolcano sites already identified around the world. Maybe one of these could go off and then we could have supervolcano. I asked Michael. I mean we know that we have these massive world changing eruptions that happened throughout Earth's history. So if Yellowstone is not a threat, do we have a sense of whether other places are dangerous to have super eruptions?

[Michael Poland]

Well, there's probably a couple of dozen volcanoes on Earth that have this capability, but those sorts of things are pretty rare in the geologic record. One every 100,000 years or 50,000 years or so. They just don't happen that often.

[Ben Bradley]

He says like Yellowstone, none of those sites are showing the signs of imminent eruption, the precursors, the bombs being primed, you know, the earthquakes, the rumbling, etc. Which suggests once again that we're fine for decades, centuries, maybe millennia. So congratulations to you because you are not doomed by supervolcano. We did it. The problem, Michael thinks, is that all this focus on supervolcanoes, maybe because of that attention grabbing word he hates, super, has made it a struggle to get public focus on real volcanic threats. There are real volcanic threats that could change your and my and his lives.

[Michael Poland]

What I'm worried about are not quite so super eruptions, but still really, really big.

[Ben Bradley]

He's talking about volcanoes akin to Tambora of Frankenstein fame.

[Michael Poland]

And they're much, much, much more likely. Maybe you're getting one every thousand years or so.

[Ben Bradley]

Remember, Tambora caused crop die offs, a worldwide winter the year of 1800 and froze to death. And poetry.

[Michael Poland]

Yeah, these eruptions are big enough to put a huge amount of material into the atmosphere. It would have an impact on global climate. It would have a devastating impact on the immediate area.

[Ben Bradley]

Now add that to our complex interconnected society today. The airspace closures that even a small volcano like Ajafakayoko got it caused in Iceland. We don't need a supervolcano to cause us headaches.

[Michael Poland]

Those sorts of things I think are underappreciated by folks that don't really study volcanoes. They focus on the really, really extreme.

[Ben Bradley]

And because a Tambora is smaller, it's also sneakier. It takes less time to prime its Bomb less rumbling and earthquakes less advanced. Notice there are more possible locations it could go off. This is the urgent risk we face from volcanoes. Michael says, not a world ending risk, but deeply inconvenient. And so Michael thinks instead of panicking about supervolcanoes, we need to be aggressive against the possible tamboras. We need to gather a posse and hunt them down.

[Michael Poland]

Volcanoes give warnings, but in order to receive those warnings, you gotta be listening.

[Ben Bradley]

Volcanoes need monitoring equipment that can be done by satellite.

[Michael Poland]

Not everything, but satellites can do a lot of it. But you also need on the ground instrumentation like seismometers. And that way you'll detect when a volcano may be waking up.

[Ben Bradley]

How are we doing on that? You know, how are we on monitoring around the world?

[Michael Poland]

We're doing okay. I mean, it's gotten a lot better in the last few decades, thanks in large part to satellites and to decreases in the cost of a lot of equipment. But there's still maybe half the volcanoes on Earth that have been active in, in the last, you know, several thousand years don't have any ground based monitoring or don't have sufficient ground based monitoring. So yeah, we're definitely getting better, but it's not perfect. We definitely need more monitoring on volcanoes worldwide in order to be able to say we've got all of these bases covered.

[Ben Bradley]

So we do the monitoring, we get that first part solved and then what do you think is the next step there to mitigate them? What do you think the options are? Are there options?

[Michael Poland]

Well, the best way to mitigate loss from a volcanic eruption is to not be there when it happens. In this sense, it's very similar to hurricanes. We don't try to stop a hurricane from hitting a coastline. You tell people to get out of the way, you evacuate an area. And that's what we do for volcanoes as well.

[Ben Bradley]

We can't stop eruptions, so we mitigate loss by evacuating. And to know where to evacuate, we need good monitoring. That is the reasonable and probably best current solution. It still leaves damage and disruption behind from Earth's tantrums. So what if we want to go further, not just mitigate loss, but just skip the whole eruption. You're in luck because this is. Are we doomed? Solves volcanoes. Think about it. We have to worry about these tambora sized blasts causing ugh. And eventually, if humanity manages to survive long enough, we will ultimately, maybe thousands of years from now, need to contend with another supervolcano and all that entails. So let's get ambitious. Occasionally someone suggests a technological Solution to defuse volcanoes before they go off. Idea we tunnel down into the earth next to a volcano, make a right turn and then drill into the side of its magma chamber, put a giant hose into the hole and pump cold water in to cool it down for thousands of years. This idea comes from no less than NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. What do we think? What does our volcanologist Michael think?

[Michael Poland]

I mean, it's like trying to use an eyedropper of cold water to cool a pot of boiling water on the stove. It just, you know, it's not really going to work all that well.

[Ben Bradley]

Alright, idea two. We drill into the volcano itself, lancing the zit before it can burst. You might even be able to capture the heat for energy purposes. Clean energy, broken volcano, all in one step. Perfect, right? I asked our other volcanologist who we heard from earlier, Shanika Da Silva.

[Shanika Da Silva]

He says if you have an overheating radiator in a car, the last thing you want to do is drill into that radiator because this is not a good thing to do.

[Michael Poland]

That would be bad.

[Shanika Da Silva]

Yes.

[Ben Bradley]

All right, fine. I got a whole bunch of other volcano fixes. We heap huge amounts of more earth over their calderas, smother them like a campfire. We design an enormous catcher's mitt that can contain a blast. Or we provoke smaller eruptions so we never get the big one. Eight New Zealand mechanical engineering professor proposed these among 60, 64 ways we might take down even a supervolcano. How about that, huh?

[Shanika Da Silva]

All of them give me concern, I guess. Let's take provoking a smaller eruption. What you never know is does a smaller eruption destabilize the system and then drive it to a much larger eruption?

[Ben Bradley]

Okay, maybe we don't have a way to stop a volcano, much less a supervolcano. Yet the scientists I spoke to say the power involved just dwarfs anything we can build. And that's okay, because for now we're safe. I wouldn't rule out our great, great, great gazillion great grandchildren coming up with a better solution though. Supervolcano antidote. The whole history of this incredible phenomenon, how we found them, how we figured out what they've done, and how we learn to predict them is really a story of curiosity turning into knowledge. From the first indigenous map of Yellowstone to the scientists today listening for the planet's tantrums. That's pretty rapid progress. And if we keep it up and don't destroy ourselves some other way, first think about how much more capable of we might be by the time the next Supervolcano does begin priming its bomb. Next time on Are We Doomed? The mosquito. Should we wipe it out? We have the counterintuitive technology picturing kind of like a mosquito. Jurassic Park. Maybe that's not right.

[Shanika Da Silva]

No, that is pretty much right.

[Ben Bradley]

If you're a fan of the show, I just want to ask you to consider becoming a supporter by going to doompod.com support. It directly funds these pretty arduously reported and highly produced episodes and you get extras like bonus episodes and priority when we ask you what Doom we should cover, which we're gonna do soon. Thank you to everyone who already is a supporter. Other ways to help us are to send the show along to friends and family and co workers. Everyone you know. It really does help. Are We Doomed Is a production of Nuanced Tales. Our producer is Lucky Lindsay Kilbride, who wrote this episode. Our editor is Tracy Samuelson, engineer and sound designer Jay Sebold. Our fully animated YouTube episodes are by Alboris Kamalazad. Theme music composed by Dylan Deschenet. The show is distributed by the NPR Network. Big thanks to Dan McCoy, Kalia Ali and the rest of the team at NPR for all they do. And most of all, thank you. We are so grateful that you're spending time with us.

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