Report over at the Online Journal (via MetaFilter): apparantly there’s something brewing underneath the Yellowstone park: geologists suspect that a masssive supervolcano is lurking and possibly about to erupt. The vulcano is long overdue too: its regular eruption cycle is 600,000 years. It has already been 640,000 years since the last erruption.
Pessimistic stories too. Apparantly the situation is pretty critical:
“There’s nowhere to hide from the effects of a supervolcano. One day – perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in fifty years, perhaps in 10,000 – it will erupt; once again wreaking devastation across the North American continent and bringing the bitter cold of Volcanic Winter to Planet Earth. Mankind may become extinct.”
The last supervolcano eruption was 74,000 years ago, when the Toba blasted that much ashes and sulphur in the air that the temperature on Earth plummeted drastically, reducing population to a few thousand.