Scary Yellowstone Supervolcano just got Scarier

Headnote: It's time to announce that our previous post was accurate in its skepticism, no more evidence for alien life has been found.

It has been well known for some years that Yellowstone National park, one of the biggest national tourist attractions in America, is the result of a giant supervolcano. A supervolcano is a type of volcano that, as it's name suggests, dwarfs all others. Supervolcanos build up huge reservoirs of magma over hundreds of thousands of years, then release it all in an enormus supereruption. Supereruptions spread ash over thousands of miles and can plunge the entire earth into a mini-ice age that can last a THOUSAND YEARS! Not only does Yellowstone rest on a supervolcano, but this supervolcano is one of the most powerful ones on earth.
And one more thing.
The eruption.
It's overdue.
The last Yellowstone eruption was 640,000 years ago.
Yellowstone is on a cycle of about 600,000 years between eruptions.

Have I sufficiently scared you yet? Good. Now I can get to the real discovery: It seems that the Yellowstone magma chamber is bigger than previously thought. New studies using electrical conductivity have given us this image



I can't be certain, but I think that red stuff is the magma. All that red stuff. I don't mean to sound alarmist, but this is sort of scary. If this chamber empties during an eruption, you could get much of north america uninhabitable, with millions of deaths. That's right, MILLIONS. Volcanic ash stops vehicle engines, and worse, chokes people to death. The ash enters your lungs and reacts with the moisture inside, creating a cement-like substance, which chokes you to death.
Fortunately, an eruption would almost certain be forecasted by scientists months, if not years, in advance. However, one might wonder what would happen to America if we found out that a supereruption was imminent. The law might break down. People might start rioting. The docks and airways would be full of people, wanting to get out before the supervolcanic apocalypse came.

If you really want to know what would happen if a supereruption occurred, try the BBC nonfiction movie Supervolcano.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110411/sc_livescience/yellowstonesupervolcanobiggerthanthought
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13061779

Additional Reading:
Supervolcano, a docufiction movie by the BBC and the Discovery Channel
Mystery of the Megaeruption, a PBS Nova episode about supervolcanos, primarily the one under Lake Toba.

Alien Life!? Mabye.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, a NASA astrobiologist, has come out with a discovery that has the power to shake the world of science - or just make him look stupid. Hoover believes that he has found a small fossil worm in a CI1 carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, a very rare meteorite of which only nine exist on Earth. According to Hoover, he has found small fossils, many resembling life on Earth. He uses this evidence to make a case for his theory that life evolved in space or on other planets.
Many scientests doubt Hoover's claim. According to The Journal of Cosmology, "no other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting". However, many scientests are doubting the validity of The Journal of Cosmology. The most aggressive, PZ Meyers, says this in ScienceBlogs:

[The Journal of Cosmology] isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth.

However, the author has investigated Meyers post in ScienceBlogs (And he invites the reader to see for himself), and has decided that Meyers is a bit to Zealotical and critical, sometimes t the extent of being just plain rude. He says this:

It [The Journal of Cosmology] doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.

He also calls the people at the Cosmology "single-minded lunatics". Although some would argue that I sometimnes act similarly, I've never called anyone a "lunatic"(Although I'd be happy to describe both Old-Earth and New-Earth creationists using that term and more).

So let's wrap this up: Richard Hoover discovered what may be an alien fossil, but most scientists are skeptical. PZ Meyers attacks this point and uses some very rude language.
So what should we think? Hoover works for NASA, so he shouldn't be treated lightly, but on the whole, I think that TIME magazine says it best: "Scientist Claims to Have Found Evidence of ET, But Don't Phone Home Just Yet"


One thing's for sure: if more develops, you'll read about it here, at the Pokiphlanon Science Blog!


Sources:


Time Magazine: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/07/scientist-claims-to-have-found-evidence-of-et-but-dont-phone-home-just-yet/

Yahoo News: http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife

ScienceBlogs: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php

Sorry for the Absence

We are sorry for our long absence, but we've just found a GREAT article to write about. As the situation develops, we'll be giving it to you right here, on the Pokiphlanon Science Blog!

What's the article about? It's too good a secret to tell right away, but we'll tell you this: It's about out favorite subject: alien life!