Yellowstone supervolcano: Are some disasters too huge to worry about?

In “Supervolcano,” a new television drama produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, a massive lake of magma churning under Yellowstone National Park suddenly comes to life, erupting with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima detonations a second and burying the United States west of St. Louis under thousands of tons of ash.

The film, which airs on the Discovery Channel on April 10, may be fiction, but the Yellowstone supervolcano is real. A plume of the earth’s mantle called a hot spot stretches into a chamber of superheated magma five miles beneath the park, powering its distinctive thermal geysers and building explosive pressure.

The ash from prehistoric eruptions wiped out animal life as far away as Nebraska, and researchers at the University of Wisconsin studying tiny crystals in Yellowstone rocks have concluded that another eruption is likely within the next 100,000 years.

“At some point in the future, it almost certainly will have some sort of eruption,” said Jake Lowenstern, the scientist in charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Despite scientists’ increased awareness of the continuing volcanic activity at Yellowstone, most Americans have reacted with a collective shrug. Just a handful of citizens have contacted the Federal Emergency Management Agency with concerns about a possible eruption at Yellowstone, said Barbara Ellis, a spokeswoman for the agency. A recent Harris Interactive poll found that only 22 percent of Americans have even heard of supervolcanos.

While British geologists fretted about a Yellowstone eruption following the BBC’s airing of “Supervolcano” in March, people in the states that border the park barely noticed. Residents of Bozeman, Mont., were wondering whether a fresh snowfall might alleviate an ongoing drought. The local newspaper in Cody, Wyo., ran a story about people who neglect to tuck in their shirttails.

Gina Taggart, a receptionist at the chamber of commerce in Cody, had heard about the supervolcano, but she wasn’t preoccupied with thoughts of fire and brimstone.

“If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ve got better things to worry about.”

For psychologists who study the perception of hazard and risk, Americans’ humdrum reaction to the news that they are living on a geologic powder keg is not surprising.

Paul Slovic, an expert on risk perception at the University of Oregon, says that natural disasters typically elicit less concern than other kinds of catastrophes. When Mt. St. Helens was preparing to erupt in 1980, he noted, authorities had to struggle to keep curious onlookers away.

“This was something that was equivalent to an atomic explosion about to happen,” he said. “And people wanted to be there.”

Natural disasters, including potentially cataclysmic events like a Yellowstone super-eruption, can’t be controlled and don’t create the same sense of dread as something like a terrorist threat, Slovic says.

“If there was evidence that a terrorist with a dirty bomb were lurking in Yellowstone, even if the resulting destruction is far smaller, you can bet there would be tremendous concern,” he said.

People aren’t likely to panic if they think there is nothing they can do about a potential disaster, according to Linda Aldoory, director of the Center for Risk Communication and Research at the University of Maryland. Someone is much more likely to pay attention to a threat if they are told that steps can be taken to avert it, she says.

“If it’s just, ‘this could happen and we’re all going to die,’ research has shown that people tend to tune the information out,” Aldoory said. “But if you tell me that my child’s stroller has a tiny chance of having a defect, even if it’s less than that of an asteroid hitting the earth, the first thing I’m going to do is to chuck that stroller.”

Still, the geologists who keep tabs on the Yellowstone supervolcano wonder if the new film will lead American viewers to overestimate the risk of a catastrophic eruption. Lowenstern, the research geologist who heads the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, noticed a tenfold increase in traffic to the observatory’s Web site after the BBC aired “Supervolcano.”

“By taking the most extreme case [of a super-eruption] and making it central to the film, it implies to the viewer that it is the only case,” said Robert Smith, a University of Utah geologist with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

Smith admits that the devastation depicted in the film is realistic based on the scale of previous eruptions. But he notes that Yellowstone has experienced about 80 smaller eruptions since the last major eruption, and that the next one could be so small that the park could remain open.

The supervolcano has had three catastrophic eruptions in the last 2.1 million years, Smith notes. The most recent, 640,000 years ago, blanketed more than half of the United States with toxic ash and formed the caldera, or crater, that covers nearly 1,500 square miles of the park.

For Hank Heasler, the National Park Service’s lead geologist at Yellowstone, the supervolcano’s age and colossal power, when compared with humankind’s fragile presence in the park, is what makes working at Yellowstone so exciting.

“To many individuals, it is a frightening thought that nature cannot always be controlled and that we are extremely insignificant on the scale of nature,” Heasler said. “But you cannot always build a bigger dam to stop a flood, and there is nothing you can do to stop a supervolcano.”

Email: dab2107@columbia.edu