The other day, the talented Leslie Eastman posted about the return of an acid geyser at Yellowstone and some of the subsurface activity going on. It’s a good article over there at Legal Insurrection, and touches on the fact that Yellowstone was and still is a supervolcano site. Go read the article, it is time well spent.
I will just add this, given that the activity seems to have some of the doomsayer guild members hyperventilating.
First up, from what has been determined of past activity, IF Yellowstone does anything it will likely to be volcanic rather than supervolcanic (if I am understanding things correctly). Volcanic will not be fun (especially if you are in the region) but survivable for most. It could be like Mount St. Helens, or it could be more towards a Krakatoa with worldwide weather and other effects. Key is, not pleasant, not fun. but survivable for most species including humanity.
Second up, if it does build and go off as a supervolcano, your best bet is to be south of the equator. Given that we should have some warning, I plan to suck up to Milei on X, flee to Argentina, and then bunker up. A supervolcanic eruption can be a true Extinction Level Event (ELE) for the world, and in particular for the northern hemisphere. Not much you can do in terms of individual preparation other than prayer (highly recommended) and maybe having travel options to get as far into the southern hemisphere as possible.
Fact is, odds of anything happening right now, or even anytime soon, seem to be pretty low. That said, this is 2026 and given how things are going, who knows. Me, I’m going to ignore the doomsayers guild members and enjoy the many blessings that are present in 2026. There are a lot of them, may even go over some of them in the days ahead. That’s a far better use of time than worrying about something over which you really can’t prepare for and is not likely to happen.
Just some thoughts. Before I go, some more thoughts on Iran and other things from The Scuttlebutt. Well worth the read.
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Praying for it to be real nothing.
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Geological time is mind bogglingly different from human time. Be cool.
your best bet is to be south of the equator
Going to live On The Beach?
That (with a nuclear war bent) was the concept in that book. 😉
I did think of that book as I wrote that. Nihilistic dreck, but…
Living here in NW Wyoming gives you a somewhat different perspective on it. As a magpie flies we’re about 60 miles away from the center of the last eruption leaving the Yellowstone caldera. In the almost unbelievably unlikely event of another “super-volcanic” eruption, and assuming a ground-shock speed of about 4 miles/second we’d be around 15 seconds before getting the initial earthquake-like shock.
Given a sonic shock wave moving at Mach 1, around 1000 ft/sec (depending on air temperature) that’s roughly a 1/5th of a mile/second (or about 5 seconds/mile). Let’s see, do the math, carry the zero, and that’s about 300 seconds or 5 minutes between the ground shock and the arrival of the air shock wave.
Heck, that’s plenty of time to get outside and watch the multi-thousand-degree pyroclastic flow roll over the mountains to the west of us and totally obliterate pretty much everything in the state of Wyoming. As a start.
But we get silly garbage “news” like this all the time. The last time that “acid geyser” let loose was something like 2017; the more curious question is why it stopped in the first place. We get small variations in which geysers are letting go and which ones are firing up all the time. Heck, we get huge variations in reservoir levels that aren’t attributable to snow run-off/rainfalls, but are probably minor reactions to the micro-quakes that are almost continuous around here. We’re not worried.
There just isn’t enough molten magma in the chamber for it to blow, right now. It’s fun to get excited about it, but the likelihood is that we’ll see lots of really crazy evidence beforehand. That volcano isn’t going to be the “SURPRISE!” sort of splodey.