Supervolano on DSC

[HeeBGBz]

It's coming up next on the Discovery Channel. It's about Yellowstone. Might be an interesting watch.

[donco6]

1. I saw that.

My hubby just rolls his eyes. I'm the one watching Storm Stories and Stargate; he's into Judge Judy and Law and Order.

We TIVO a lot.

[alittlelark]

3. I'm Tivoing it tonight.

If you like Stargate - you must love Battlestar Galactica.

[donco6]

4. I haven't been able to get into that!

Yeah, you would think it would be up my alley.

I think I get bored of storylines where EVERY EPISODE could mean life or death for the entire fleet. I mean, really, what are the odds they could actually make it away from the Cylons? They have, like, a Giggledy-Zillion ships against one starship. No frickin' way.

(Nerd mode off).

[cynatnite]

5. Not much into Stargate

But Battlestar is much better than the mini-series was. Love it.

[NMDemDist2]

2. thanks! I'll give it a look. n/t

[cynatnite]

6. Recording it

It's old stomping grounds and we still have a lot of family in the area.

[HeeBGBz]

7. It's keeping my interest

I'm a disaster movie freak. What can I say?

[cynatnite]

8. Same here

The bigger the disaster, the better :smoke:

[Liberty Belle]

9. Great. Guess where we're going this summer?

Won a week's free lodging at Yellowstone--hopefully the volcano will wait to blow 'til we're gone.

[Boomer]

10. Pretty good storyline, but weak finish

This was a cut above most of the other disaster films I've seen over the last few years. Tightly paced, decent dialogue, solid grounding of science for the flight of fancy, and fun (although not spectacular) special effects.

My only quibble is that they wimped out with the ending. The true disaster of a super volcano is not the eruption, it's the affects of nuclear winter that follow. There was a very brief allusion to failed crops at the very end of the film, but the focus was on the millions of lives saved from the ash.

Sorry, but those millions would probably have starved to death within the following year. The true drama is the hard scrabble fight for survival in a world without enough food to feed 4.5 billion people.

The last time a super volcano blew (Toba), the human race was very nearly extinguished. This next time around -- if there is a next time -- may well be worse since our agricultural business has become so centralized and dependent on sophisticated distribution systems. Your average citizen living in an urban area wouldn't know how to grow a carrot, or have the ground to do it even if they did have the knowledge.

If Yellowstone blows, the lucky ones will die in the first few days.

[Boomer]

11. PS: Talking about survival...

Here's a link to a discussion of the genetic bottleneck which may well have been a result of the Toba explosion.

http://www.andaman.org/book/app-r/ch5_bottleneck/textr5.htm

<snip>

Species normally develop over long periods of time and in that time they accumulate genetic variations in their population. If a substantial part of a population is killed, there is an inevitable loss of genetic diversity among the survivors. The smaller the surviving population that comes through a bottleneck, the smaller the diversity among the survivors. That is why it is fairly certain that Homo sapiens has gone through a rather severe bottleneck: the species has not yet had the time to restore its depleted diversity.

While a bottleneck can be identified in the genome of a populaton, it is difficult to determine its intensity and duration: a severe bottleneck cannot be differentiated from a longer, less severe one (ref. Relethford et al., 1994). Still more difficult is it to identify when a bottleneck has taken place. The latter is largely a question of searching through time for a possible cause of a bottleneck and then trying to determine whether the available evidence fits the suspected cause. This is largely what has been done with the Toba YTT event which actually fits surprisingly well and so has a relatively high probability of actually being true. There is no other possible cause in sight but of course, there cannot ever be absolute certainty - there never is in studies of the past.

<snip>

Estimating how low the number of members of the species Homo sapiens could have been to account for today's uniformity involves a number of variables that are anything but clear-cut. It has been estimated that only 40-600 females (which translates into a total population of less than 3,000 persons; Harpending H.C. et al. 1993) came through the bottleneck. Another estimate arrived at 500-3,000 females (ref. Rogers A.R. 1993) and yet another at 1,000 to 4,300 individuals (Ayala F.J. 1996; Takahata N. at al. 1995). The highest estimate so far has 10,000 females of reproductive age as the minimum (ref. Ambrose S.H.. 1998). Even if the highest estimate is accepted, we are talking about the entire human race numbering no more than the population of a small country town today.