Supervolcano!
5/5/202641 min
A supervolcano burbles under Yellowstone National Park. Enormous. Real. According to the internet’s most excitable corners, just itching to turn America into charcoal any minute now.
Ben Bradford investigates what supervolcanoes can actually do, why Yellowstone is almost certainly not about to blow its top, and how scientists tell when a volcano is really waking up. Panic over a national park may be distracting us from another, sneakier, more critical volcanic threat.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Ben Bradford· Host0:23
It sounds like something out of National Treasure, Thomas Jefferson, mysterious maps, and a dangerous secret buried beneath a famed national park. The first hint to the secret showed up in 1805. A map sketched on a bison pelt showed the Yellowstone River, and next to it, a picture of a volcano. President Thomas Jefferson hung this map in the entry hall of Monticello, his estate. Then, famed explorer William Clark of Lewis and Clark jotted down Native American accounts of a sound like thunder that makes the earth tremble coming from Yellowstone. The Indigenous people already knew something about the secret. In 1870, an expedition arrived at Yellowstone to chart the area. They named the famous geyser Old Faithful. And while there, a soldier guarding the expedition looked out from a high peak and remarked, "The park sure looks like a big old volcano crater." It took almost another 100 years