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Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park

stouset
61 replies
21h51m

Every time I see videos like this I’m astonished by how blasé onlookers are about the whole thing.

I know it’s armchair quarterbacking but please don’t be like the people in the video. If the Earth is erupting in front of you: turn and run. Don’t stay there filming. Don’t gently jog while constantly checking over your shoulder. Turn. And run.

I’m not saying panic. I’m not saying trample anyone in front of you. But get to a safe distance with alacrity. You have no idea if the situation will rapidly escalate, and you may only have one opportunity to put enough distance between you and the unfolding situation. Assume the worst until you know better.

In this scenario, falling rocks are a concern. Superheated steam is a concern. Poisonous gases could have been a concern. Corrosive liquids could have been a concern. Lava could have been a concern. Further eruptions could have been a concern. For all of these your odds are improved with distance. In the moment you have no idea of the full extent of the dangers and in many cases by the time you realize it’s too late.

That said I’m very thankful nobody was hurt in this incident.

swatcoder
13 replies
21h21m

It's a big boardwalk feature at a high-profile park and sees hundreds of visitors a day with vanishingly rare incident. It triggers the same kind of passive trust that people bring with them to Disneyland or a dinner theater, where guests default to thinking everything is part of the show and needn't warrant actual concern. It's the same reason people get too close to the wildlife there.

It's thoughtful of you to encourage people here to be more vigilant, but the lack of that vigilance is a direct outcome of the park trying to culture an experience of safety and wonder instead of danger and awe (in its traditional meaning).

mindslight
4 replies
20h19m

At least when I last visited Yellowstone, the place was full of signs and stories about how people have died (and IIRC, their bodies were never recovered) from trying to swim in the colorful fun-looking pools of water, or from kids and pets wandering off. I don't know what else they could do to add more "danger and awe" apart from planning on having some sacrificial tourists every day. People are just generally bad at perceiving or respecting abstract danger.

krisoft
1 replies
10h57m

But that also adds to the same effect! Their moral is to stay on the boardwalk and don’t stray off from it. Their morale is to look out for your kids and pets that they do the same. Which equates boardwalks with safety. Which, as an approximation is kinda true. But then something like this happens which undermines the assumptions under that approximation and if you are still using it as a heuristics you can be in trouble.

People are just generally bad at perceiving or respecting abstract danger.

Maybe? But also, all the yellowstones hydrothermal features look like the gods have cursed the land. If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around. The park cultivates a sense of safety otherwise it wouldn’t be a park.

mindslight
0 replies
2h49m

If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around

I think you're assuming much more individualism in the primitive dynamic than actually existed. As I said, individual humans are terrible at judging danger. There was an article posted a few days back about collapses while trenching for construction, and the difficulties of getting people to take that risk seriously until it actually happens.

So at the state you're envisioning, I'd say it's more like others in your tribe telling you to stay away from those weird holes in the ground, because some tribe members had already been killed by them. And the contemporary dynamic is more like an extreme scaling up of that, with a much more nuanced understanding of the dangerous mechanisms.

datavirtue
1 replies
18h38m

Never walk alone.

mindslight
0 replies
17h31m

I'm not sure if you're commenting on Yellowstone specifically, national parks and wild areas in general, or simply the everpresent risk from our heads being ~6ft above the ground and kept aloft by one hell of an inverted pendulum problem.

freedomben
4 replies
21h9m

Exactly. It's very well developed and seems an incredibly "safe" environment. People aren't in the mindset that there could be danger (even if they should be).

It takes processing time before people even realize that this isn't normal. Also there's social proof all over. When it goes off people look around, see that nobody else is bailing, so they assume things are ok. It takes a little time to override that tendency and get people to start moving.

giantg2
3 replies
20h36m

"People aren't in the mindset that there could be danger (even if they should be)."

This could be said of life generally. It seems like very few people even have a minimal level of situational awareness while walking to the mailbox or walking through a store.

akira2501
1 replies
16h40m

minimal level of situational awareness

"People don't pay for things they don't plan on using."

while walking to the mailbox or walking through a store.

Traditionally _not_ dangerous activities.

giantg2
0 replies
7h33m

Being near, or crossing, streets are traditionally dangerous. There are plenty of lawsuits from people getting hurt in stores every year. People who think they don't need to pay attention to what's around them in those situations are just ignorant.

actionfromafar
0 replies
20h15m

And having that situational awareness at all times can easily result in exhaustion.

slg
0 replies
17h33m

It's a big boardwalk feature at a high-profile park and sees hundreds of visitors a day with vanishingly rare incident.

It is also important to consider the context of the park itself. Roughly half of the world's known geysers are in Yellowstone. One of the primary reasons to go there is to see all the hydrothermal features. It is easy to watch this video from your laptop and know it is dangerous, but if you saw this explosion an hour after seeing this[1], the danger would likely be much less obvious.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L5a0zinKGA8

jaza
0 replies
11h55m

Similar issue was at play in the 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption in New Zealand (which, sadly - unlike today's Yellowstone explosion - caused numerous deaths and serious injuries). The visitors were made to feel safer than they actually were. The tour operators were complacent, and were later found negligent of having an inadequate safety regimen in place. Too much trust, too little vigilance, human memory too woefully short compared to geological event timescales.

freitzkriesler2
0 replies
20h28m

Doesn't matter. People need to wake TF up. Even Disney world can be dangerous. I know the NPC meme is dehumanizing but FFS people make it so hard sometimes.

Murky3515
7 replies
21h44m

I don't understand the psychology of it either. It's like they think that appearing overly concerned about something potentially dangerous is more embarrassing than being killed by something actually dangerous. That or they have lived such safe and sheltered lives that they cannot identify real danger. I don't have any other explanation.

ordu
1 replies
20h32m

If you run in a panic when normal geyser erupts, it would be embarrassing, right? Now, what is a normal geyser eruption and what is not normal? If you never tried to research this, you do not know.

So we come to an uncertainty. This seems pretty big, and probably is not normal, isn't it? Or it is? So you are not sure, should you shake off social norms of behavior (being calm, not shouting, acting like a grown adult) and to switch to a survival behavior (running away, shouting commands "run" to others, dragging people with you by their limbs, or doing whatever you think is the adequate behavior for such a situation).

Looking at the video carefully, people in a few seconds come to a conclusion that this is dangerous and start moving away, but they didn't get away from norms of everyday behavior. These two different priorities (to act normal or go to the survival mode) are still there, and they are still fighting in minds of people for a dominance.

Their response was "gently jog while constantly checking over your shoulder", because they decided it is dangerous and you need at least jog away, but they are feel that they may be underestimating (or overestimating) the danger, and they keep themself aware of the events to be able to change their behavior accordingly to them.

The very situation prompts for rapid change from a normal mode of existence to a survival mode, and there is no clear unambiguous signal that it is the case. The geyser erupts? Didn't we come here to watch geysers? Wouldn't it be embarrassing to run from the geyser? There are a lot of questions, and System 2 is a slow one. People are educated to keep System 1 in a check and to think things through. They are educated to know some dangerous situations and they can react to them immediately, but this is something unusual, they are not trained for it, and their minds become overwhelmed by a massive visual stimulus and by all the thoughts and ideas that may be relevant, but only System 2 could decide and to prioritize them properly.

When I was watching the video I instantly saw that it is dangerous, but I was prompted about it by the article, so I was ready to see something impressive AND dangerous. Therefore I'm not sure would I be better in that situation if I was watching it in real life without any prompting.

> they have lived such safe and sheltered lives that they cannot identify real danger.

I wrote about it above, but I want to stress it out:

1. we are conditioned to think before acting,

2. most of us have no experience with geysers and we cannot access the hazard level of a geyser at the first glance, and we know that we can't, so... goto 1.

creer
0 replies
18h59m

There is also the imperative to get the video. Which for once was well done.

xeromal
0 replies
21h29m

It's not that. I was on a plane where a guy tried to break open the door to the outside mid flight and it takes a good 30-60 seconds for people to comprehend reality and make a decision. It's easy to judge from a screen but when an actual disaster hits, the brain does weird things

prewett
0 replies
16h53m

Having been there recently, it definitely would not have been immediately clear to me that there would be a problem. The boardwalk is next to the pools but clearly not in structural danger. The videos show the eruption being basically vertical, so if you aren't directly next to it, it isn't obvious that the ejecta will spread out a little, and that doesn't happen for a couple of seconds. So if you aren't right next to it, it initially doesn't seem unsafe.

Also, you are likely to visit this area before Old Faithful, so the most you will have seen is some steam going up. My visit was the first time I'd ever seen a geyser, so I would have had no idea what to expect, and presumably the boardwalk is in a safe location. If it were unsafe, they wouldn't have built the boardwalk there, right? (And it doesn't seem like anyone was injured, so...)

joemi
0 replies
21h36m

I would assume it's more due to them not realizing that this isn't just something that periodically happens at the park (like Old Faithful). It might seem unusual, but they don't know how unusual or dangerous it is. It might just be no more unusual than a low road near a body of water that gets a tiny bit flooded in one spot after a heavy rain -- the kind where locals who know about it just drive through because it's only an inch or two deep but visitors might be more hesitant about. In the case of this explosion, the aftermath video shows that it was indeed very unusual and dangerous.

highcountess
0 replies
21h28m

It is a combination of those factors along with what I call TV-Brain, a subconscious assumption that it’s not real, it’s just like when I see it in the rectangle.

Remember, most people in the western and especially American world, simply do not experience real world risks and dangers, everything is so sanitized and cleaned and protected and safe, that they simply do not connect reality with their own demise or even a risk to it. On a related note, it is alway why I believe there are so many and increasing numbers of injurious contacts with bisons, moose, elk, bears, etc in Yellowstone, because they think they’re cuddly animals that they saw in wildlife documentaries and know from cartoons and tv stories of the child that is friends with the talking bear, etc. most people are simply so detached from reality that they simply have no reference for what they are doing that is extremely dangerous to their continued state of being alive.

JoshTriplett
0 replies
20h16m

It's like they think that appearing overly concerned about something potentially dangerous is more embarrassing than being killed by something actually dangerous.

This is a real psychological phenomenon. Most people don't want to be the first person to yell "fire!", or to appear to take a situation more seriously than it warrants, because they might be wrong and they'd stand out as being wrong and feel embarrassed. That feeling can "stick" shockingly long after you'd think the situation was obvious.

We have not socially normalized and trained the concept that it's better for people to occasionally be understandably wrong than to delay reacting to problems. The right reaction to quick reactions that turn out to be incorrect should be "Thanks for calling attention to what might have been a problem!", not an array of signals that all convey "what a weirdo".

metadat
6 replies
20h53m

If you check out the video (https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z64etOuLZDQ), most people did in fact immediately begin running and urging others to do the same.

I appreciate your concern for folks' safety, though I'm not sure how the criticism applies to this instance. The bystanders behaved reasonably.

y-c-o-m-b
5 replies
19h59m

Did you watch the whole thing? Skip to the 1:15 mark where people go back. The criticism is absolutely warranted here. I guarantee none of those people are capable of predicting what comes next after an explosion like that. I certainly don't. What if the next one is beneath where they're standing at the 1:15 mark and beyond?

I'm not sure how OP's comment doesn't reflect HN's standard of quality. It's exactly the type of quality response that's appropriate for this instance. I'd say your response isn't quite up to it if anything because you're making an argument against someone that is encouraging safety and well-being; and for no apparent reason at all but to point out someone is flawed? I don't get it.

metadat
3 replies
19h54m

After it stopped and no additional material was being expelled, they do go back to look. Not recommended, but how often are big eruptions followed by even bigger eruptions?

Are you saying they should've run away from the park for the entire rest of the day or trip?

See @Saurik's sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41051381

y-c-o-m-b
0 replies
19h15m

Three simple facts here: 1) This is obviously abnormal enough for the people in the video to flee 2) the aftermath - (1:15+) - clearly demonstrates it was unsafe to be there and 3) there is no way to predict if the next eruption would be equally abnormal or worse unless one were trained in this field

There is no arguing those facts, it's 100% clear from that video you linked. Am I going to stay away from the park the rest of the day? I don't know, maybe. It really depends on the circumstances. I am not a volcanologist. I'm not even a scientist. I don't understand the specifics involved here. If it were me, and I can clearly see something abnormal happened, I would NOT risk going back unless I can somehow verify it was safe to do so. That's common sense. It might involve finding a park ranger to speak with or calling the ranger station to get more information. I've been to the geyser at Iceland where they have signs that explicitly tell you about the unpredictable nature of it and how people have been badly burned. This is not a no-risk situation, especially when the situation is not the norm.

I've been to the big island of Hawaii during volcanic activity and they explicitly tell you to stay away from it due to the gasses, rocks, lava, etc. Maybe that elevates my skepticism over the safety here, but it seems that's for good reason.

EDIT: here you go mate, you don't need to look at Hacker News comments. Take it from the Park itself:

https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/news/240723.htm

Biscuit Basin, including the parking lot and boardwalks, are temporarily closed for safety reasons. The Grand Loop Road remains open.

Park staff and staff from USGS will monitor conditions and reopen the area once deemed safe.
oxygen_crisis
0 replies
17h35m

how often are big eruptions followed by even bigger eruptions?

Quite often, I'd say.

Disruptions in the stability of geological processes frequently have a compounding domino effect... a volcanic eruption is often preceded by the opening of smaller vents, small landslides can trigger large landslides, small sinkholes can suddenly develop large ones, a trickle over a levee can turn into a total breach, most M>7.0 earthquakes have foreshocks...

You can't tell where the peak severity will be in a cluster of geological events except in hindsight after the entire cluster is passed.

jquery
0 replies
13h57m

how often are big eruptions followed by even bigger eruptions?

Extremely often. Just like earthquakes, the #1 predictor of a big quake is a smaller quake shortly before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=993wlZ6XFSs (not an eruption, but eruptions are a type of explosion)

Another - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNJ2Z6hrCPc

There's no way to know if you're dealing with that until after the fact. A lot of the gawkers taking video ended up with serious injuries (not sure they all survived, some of those videos are quite close in retrospect)

aaron695
0 replies
17h46m

What if the next one is beneath where they're standing at the 1:15 mark and beyond?

Looks to me like they are forced to walk back to get home. A couple of people are dawdling, otherwise it's an exit. Do you want to disagree and OSINT it?

Map to get started - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Biscuit+Basin+Geyser/@44.4...

I don't want to argue with dumb nerds flipping out brain farts. Have you thought about it from the safety of your own home and felt like they actually went back in that video or is this thread a waste of time?

Under your "anywhere could explode" "theory" you'd be getting angry if they sheltered in place and waited for helicopters.

HN is why women don't like men anymore, sitting around circle jerking about being irrationally afraid of stuff that hasn't and won't happen to them. How will they ever do... public speaking?

beejiu
2 replies
21h32m

Most people are familiar with "fight or flight", but there's a third response which is "freeze". That's probably what you are seeing in the video.

datavirtue
0 replies
18h42m

The default is freeze, or trip and fall.

bloopernova
0 replies
21h24m

There's also "Fawn". i.e. play along in the hope you don't get hurt.

whyenot
1 replies
19h49m

Are we watching the same video? The people in the video I saw turned and started running almost immediately.

Keyframe
0 replies
19h28m

Yeah, even away from (their own) kid. I am judging, but I haven't been in the situation. What I know is I couldn't live with that.

odyssey7
1 replies
21h24m

Agreed: don’t end up like Lot’s wife.

sebastiennight
0 replies
12h3m

Someday close to the Dead Sea we'll find Edith's clay tablet with what would have been the ultimate TikTok video of an epic rain of fire

nashashmi
1 replies
21h5m

There is a funny meme About this: cameraman never dies.

sebastiennight
0 replies
12h2m

Disaster movie directors hate this one simple trick!

lofaszvanitt
1 replies
21h3m

People are overly comfy and out of touch with reality.

ren_engineer
0 replies
20h35m

this, I feel like a lot of people are just so abstracted away from harsh reality in the modern world that many don't take things seriously. Massive normalcy bias and enhanced bystander effect. A lot of people's first instinct is to pull out their phone and record something as well

gensym
1 replies
20h27m

About a year ago, I was in the United Club at O'Hare, and the fire alarm went off. I was getting a Bloody Mary when it happened, so I left my drink on the bar, went to the table where my family was, and said "let's go". Other than the sound of the alarm, you wouldn't know anything was happening. People were still getting food from the buffet, sitting at their tables, like nothing was going on.

A minute after we left the area, everyone else came out - not all willingly, it seems. Fortunately, the fire turned out to be nothing (flare up in the kitchen, I heard) and we were let back into the club after a bit. I learned quite a bit about human nature that day.

AmericanChopper
0 replies
8h12m

A life time of fire drills teaches everybody that a fire alarm is just some box tickers way of pointlessly interrupting your day to confirm that nobody has forgotten how to walk out of a fire exit. You can pretty safely bet your life that nothing bad is happening.

doe_eyes
1 replies
20h27m

It's really easy to offer advice like that on the internet, but having found myself in a couple of unexpectedly dangerous situations in real life... it just happens. You're not as rational as you think you are. I keep going back to these situations and thinking how I should have acted differently, but it's not how your brain works at the time - not unless you train for it beforehand.

Even on a conscious level, this advice just doesn't work. If you duck for cover because a nearby car misfires, you're gonna get mocked or worse. Modern life gives as far more opportunities to overreact than to underreact to risk, so to appear rational and function in a society, we learn not to be too jumpy.

stouset
0 replies
29m

This isn’t a car misfiring. This is a large eruption of tens of feet in front of you. Even primed to anticipate geysers, this needs be setting off alarm bells. The quicker you can assess danger and override your social instincts that minimize your response in a situation like this, the more likely you are to survive.

Yes it’s easy to armchair quarterback. I have no idea if I would perform any better than those in the video. But we should all aim to respond more accurately when in actual danger.

dheera
1 replies
19h31m

Unfortunately we have created a reward system that gives a huge number of "followers" to the one who records. Followers are capital that translate to money (cf. cougar guy, hawk tuah, etc.) Someone could be the next to monetize their following as the "yellowstone lava dude".

Can we somehow instead create an socioeconomic system that instead rewards those that turn and run?

Like if you can prove that you turned and ran, you don't have to pay taxes that year to the IRS.

The government in turn saves money on rescue efforts of sorts. It all works out.

thaumasiotes
0 replies
14h37m

Unfortunately we have created a reward system that gives a huge number of "followers" to the one who records.

What's unfortunate about that? Everyone else benefits from the recording.

beardedwizard
1 replies
19h17m

They had to go that way to get back to the parking lot. The alternative would be walking on the ground, which is even more dangerous and why the boardwalk exists.

Every time I see posts like this admonishing people I am astonished by the apparent ego of the authors and the power of assumptions.

stouset
0 replies
15h34m

Nowhere in my post do I criticize the direction in which onlookers left the scene. My concern was the lack of urgency in their response.

xyst
0 replies
21h17m

If it erupted as per your hypothetical, then they wouldn’t have stood a chance anyways. Video wouldn’t exist because the headline would read as “Dozen of tourists died at Yellowstone due to sudden eruption”

I think we underestimate people’s reaction to dangerous events. Surprisingly, most people will appropriately respond.

Millions of years of evolution, right?

xattt
0 replies
18h15m

In a similar vein, I’ve heard an old priest say that if you start seeing a supernatural phenomenon, including the second coming of Jesus, don’t stick around.

voisin
0 replies
21h13m

The same could be said of how many people barely reacted to the shooting in the Trump assassination attempt. For god’s sake, if someone is firing, hit the deck!

saurik
0 replies
20h36m

I honestly can't tell which part you think wasn't normal. Other people have kind of poked back at what you are saying, but I feel without really questioning which part of this you don't like, as it kind of sounds as if you are just saying "don't hang around near geysers... and, thereby, don't go to visit Yellowstone".

If you saw this same video but without the black color, would you have run? Because that would feel a bit silly to me: these kinds of explosions are happening all around you the entire time you are there. Some are even larger than this one, and you don't just stay as they happen: you sit on a bench and wait for an hour or two hoping to see it while you are there, and there are giant clocks trying to estimate when the next eruption will be.

Now like, what if the color were grey and there was mud? Some of the geysers have mud. Most of these are not a concern. What was a concern here was the black color... but as someone who has spent a bunch of time filming these geysers I found the black color so confusing that it really took me a moment to go "oh shit those are rocks". I could easily see myself having that pause we see from the other people before they all start running.

But, again: I don't feel like you are saying "these people should know rocks are dangerous" or "this was obviously different and you should be informed and on your toes ready to run"... you seem to be saying that, if you were standing somewhere and the ground suddenly exploded that you'd of course run; and, maybe that would be the absolute safest thing you could do, but then... why are you even there in the first place, if not to see an explosion of superheated steam?

Also, remember that the entire region seriously smells like sulfur and other strange gases... this is an area of terrain that people have long ago artistically (maybe even mythologically) described as the doorway to hell, between the smells, the color, the explosions, and the regions of trees that are either scorched, petrified, or merely poisoned. It honestly does make sense to question why people visit such an area in the first place, but once you decide to be there... well, it seems strange to question why you don't see everyone panicking about the explosion.

pants2
0 replies
20h1m

Looks like it would be difficult to run in this scenario where you’re confined to a narrow wooden platform. You’d either have to start shoving people off or risk burning your feet in the ground below.

orthecreedence
0 replies
20h34m

I've seen people at Yellowstone pet bison and surround grizzly moms walking with their cubs for a quick photo op. I don't think a lot of these people have a real concept of nature and the unlimited ways it can kill or permanently injure you.

nilamo
0 replies
4h55m

We will all die. But if a historic event can be captured on film, the event can be studied in greater detail. I'm all for people choosing to place their very lives at risk in order to further our scientific understanding of the universe.

mycodendral
0 replies
21h31m

I felt the same way when watching the Trump Assn. attempt. The number of people in the stands who just remained standing and gawking with no self preservation instinct (duck!) was eerie.

jayknight
0 replies
20h27m

You see all kinds of things splashing and shooting out of the ground at Yellowstone. It would be easy to initially assume this is just another splashy thing you normally see. From the videos it seems people figure out this isn't the norm in about the right amount of time.

jarsin
0 replies
20h54m

Ever since I watched that documentary on the steam volcano eruption that killed all those tourist in New Zealand I would never go near anything steam related coming out of the ground.

compiler-devel
0 replies
19h50m

Adding this to my copypasta collection

0x1ceb00da
0 replies
16h14m

Or it wasn't that big. It's hard to tell the actual scale of the explosion from a phone video.

CorpOverreach
44 replies
17h22m

It saddens me that we've normalized the recording of vertical videos. There'll be so many more historical events caught on video... but it's now so much more likely that it'll be a vertical video. :(

tamimio
20 replies
17h13m

To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context. Also, the fact that the recorder held the camera steady and kept the content within the frame is great by itself. A lot of times, you end up with shaky, useless footage.

usefulcat
19 replies
15h19m

To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context.

Briefly, near the beginning. But not for the rest of the video.

If you're watching a video on a phone, it's trivial to rotate the phone 90 degrees. On a TV or computer, not so much, so you end up with a ridiculous amount of wasted screen real estate and objectively inferior image resolution.

xvector
16 replies
13h51m

The primary modality through which most people experience media today is their phones, so vertical video is just fine.

archerx
13 replies
12h13m

Vertical video is never fine.

ddalex
5 replies
10h25m

Isn't this a technological choice though? Cameras are sufficiently advanced nowadays so it's possible to take horizontal video while keeping the phone vertical, so it's just a software feature away (at the expense of horizontal resolution), or hw feature away (at the expense of a device internal gimbal)

rhplus
2 replies
8h57m

You’d need square sensors, not an internal moving gimbal, so manufacturers would be left with a choice: should the square fit the circle or the circle fit the square? The first would lower quality and the second would increase costs and add wasted pixels (vignette).

ddalex
1 replies
8h50m

Aren't all sensors square already (well 4:3, or 3:2) , and fitting the circle ?

TeMPOraL
1 replies
8h22m

It's not a technological choice, at least not at the level of camera design. It's trivial to record videos the right way; people just can't be arsed.

Suppose you implement horizontal recording while the phone is vertical; this would mean the video preview is now scaled and takes only a fraction of the screen (the same way watching horizontal video on YouTube while in "portrait mode"), which people would find annoying.

Alternatively, you could not scale the video; now the video preview displays only a vertical slice of the frame. It looks OK, but people would soon discover the actual video a screen's worth of image on each side of the preview, leading to anxiety and worry - people would have pay extra attention to not capture things that weren't intended to be on the video; they'd soon look for a way to turn this off.

The unfortunate reality is, it's a social problem partially caused by a technological one. Vertical videos are driven by the phone form-factor and because portraits and selfies actually need to be vertical, and people being people, shooting photos of themselves and other is what they care about the most.

ddalex
0 replies
4h53m

So this comment and the sibling mentioning square sensors raise some good points. Let me rephrase the technological challenge: Make all phone screens square. All phones are now squares. Use Generative AI to fill in the sides of non-square screens. Problem solved. I think I need to make this an AI photo startup.

baq
4 replies
8h9m

Vertical video is perfectly fine if the device on which it is played back on has a vertical screen. Never is very out of place here.

immibis
3 replies
4h56m

And that's the vast majority of devices that are used to watch videos. "Vertical video is never fine" stems from the good old days of PCs with monitors. In these phone days, according to the same logic, horizontal video is never fine.

ryankrage77
2 replies
4h38m

But the phone can easily be rotated to landscape, so landscape has wider compatability.

shadowgovt
0 replies
1h13m

For something you want to capture immediately, the amount of time it takes for the phone's accelerometer to decide you have rotated it is already too long.

falcolas
0 replies
4h15m

If, and only if, the application supports it. Frustratingly, not all do, so you're stuck with the biggest black bars framing a microscopic landscape video.

Contrast with a monitor, where it will at least be viewable vertically, even if it too only fills a portion of the monitor horizontally.

voidUpdate
0 replies
5h55m

Vertical video and picture is fine when the thing you're capturing is vertical, eg a person or something shooting into the air

esskay
0 replies
10h12m

For amateur footage it's absolutely fine, especially in this instance where it's actually a benefit. Nobodys advocating for vertical movies or tv shows.

There's far better things to focus false internet collective outrage at.

YurgenJurgensen
1 replies
9h39m

Rotating a phone 90 degrees is trivial and takes a fraction of a second. Rotating a computer monitor 90 degrees is a pain at the best of times. Rotating a laptop 90 degrees makes it unusable. Rotating a television 90 degrees probably requires a toolkit and an assistant. Which of these adaptations seems more reasonable?

KronisLV
0 replies
6h1m

For people who don’t use computers and TVs much, no adaptation probably makes the most sense. There’s a surprising amount of people out there who are mostly just on their phones nowadays, plus I’m pretty much sure large platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts and such also pander to that format.

lynx23
1 replies
10h14m

TVs and Computers are a boomer thing :-) Still alive, but almost dead...

greenish_shores
0 replies
6h5m

"Mainstream" (as opposed, to, say, amateur SSTV) video broadcasting, aka TV, is definitely very obsolete and too elitist in implementation to even get me "onboard". Not a second of interesting content per day for me there. But you know that you couldn't have written this comment without a computer? Regardless of its form-factor...

MattRix
9 replies
15h59m

I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of views also come from people viewing vertical screens, so it kind of makes sense? I personally have started to prefer the vertical format for certain kinds of videos, especially when viewing them on my phone… so I’ve also started taking more vertical videos with my phone.

avz
8 replies
14h9m

Phones can easily be oriented either way, unlike most laptop and workstation screens.

Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other and therefore whose field of view has a greater extent in the horizontal rather than vertical direction.

Admittedly I don't understand where the vertical recording fad comes from. Personally I take pictures and photos that are almost exclusively horizontal except in rare cases like taking a picture of a very tall building.

jaza
2 replies
12h13m

I assume that the vertical recording fad primarily comes from:

1. the people doing the recording being too lazy to rotate their phones, and/or the people doing the recording catering to the lowest common denominator of expecting viewers to be too lazy to rotate their phones;

2. so many "influencer" and related videos these days consisting solely of the narrator's face being right in front of the camera, which makes for vertical being the optimal orientation, due to the human face being taller than it is wide (hence the term "portrait orientation"!).

I also hate it, and I also still shoot almost all my photos and videos in horizontal / landscape orientation. I guess that makes me old.

lynx23
0 replies
10h8m

Well, I used to want to do photos/videos in landscape mode. Until I learnt the hard way that orientation detection is not very reliable on (at least the older) iPhones. Had my share of "come on, turn 90 degrees you useless thing" moments, until I gave up completely on wanting to reorient my phone. Since then, it has stayed in portray mode forever.

floating-io
0 replies
10h31m

IMO, it's also because vertical orientation is effectively the default on a phone.

Nobody expects to have to turn their video camera sideways to capture in the "correct" orientation... but you must on a phone.

xinayder
0 replies
10h2m

For social media, vertical pictures and videos is preferred. Instagram adds some borders around your media if it's in landscape mode, same with TikTok, so the idea is to use vertical recording to not have added black bars around your media.

wruza
0 replies
7h13m

I can't easily re-orient my phone when I'm laying (my main use circumstance) because then I have to hold it above my stomach awkwardly. Gets worse when it's charging. Can't put it because I'm fat enough for screen to "dive" and become obstructed. Vertical mode has no such issue.

When I'm sitting, holding vertical feels natural, holding horizontal feels awkward again. I can put my hand on a lap and basically rest in vertical. High risk of dropping it in horizontal (and while rotating). Same for walking.

I don't really see how you can do it "easily" apart from purely geometric considerations. I can rotate my PC display more easily cause it's arm-mounted (which is one of the PC life changers).

where the vertical recording fad comes from

Most popular content today is "person focus". People are vertical.

notachatbot1234
0 replies
11h30m

Watching videos on phones, which "natively" have a vertical orientation, is pretty popular. I expect the majority of videos watched this way.

bregma
0 replies
8h3m

When you're taking a self-portrait it's easier to hold a phone vertically one-handed, your self image fits the screen better, and your followers are going to view it in portrait mode on TikTok anyway.

When you go yo take a selfie of something other than your face, you just keep the habit.

basil-rash
0 replies
12h36m

Or… a geyser? Kinda the one thing absolutely known for going up and down.

m463
2 replies
12h44m

aren't our eyes spherical?

jaza
0 replies
12h22m

Yes, but there are two of them, and they're to the left and right of each other, not above and below each other.

DaoVeles
0 replies
12h23m

Yes this is true, but we tend to favor horizontal information over height. Thus our eyes are horizontal. A decent rational would be because that would favor our survival since most things are pinned to this plane via gravity.

thanatos519
1 replies
8h45m

Even worse this video appears to have been padded to 16:9 so I can't fullscreen it properly on my phone on YouTube web or app.

wruza
0 replies
7h34m

Can't you pinch in? Double tap? Something like that should work, afair.

amw-zero
1 replies
5h1m

What a weird thing to care about

gosub100
0 replies
3h13m

It's a redditism

whycome
0 replies
3h12m

I mean, the action was happen vertically.

notachatbot1234
0 replies
11h33m

The subject is in a vertical orientation, so it is perfect and desirable that the original video has all its resolution dedicated to capturing the phenomenon in the best quality possible. A horizontal video would mean that there are less pixels on the subject matter.

metadat
0 replies
14h54m

Being "saddened" by the dimensions of a recording of a potentially life changing scenario comes across as excessively pendantic.

Your comment history demonstrates you are an exceptional human being who cares about human beings and the has humanities best interests at heart - which is inspiring and a really good sign. Cheers and best wishes @CorpOverreach.

VeejayRampay
0 replies
7h12m

it's really sad that videos are recorded in the exact format that fits the medium used to read them :(

JaggedJax
0 replies
13h22m

To be fair, a geyser is one of the better situations to film in vertical.

laweijfmvo
1 replies
18h50m

this one shows the explosion as well!

metadat
0 replies
17h7m

Thanks for pointing this out, else I might not have seen it! Really cool.

pimlottc
0 replies
16h41m

You can actually see the person filming the FB video you posted in the YouTube video!

laweijfmvo
0 replies
18h50m

warning for the annoying screaming you're about to endure. there's not much sound for the geyser so you may as well just mute.

Aeroi
35 replies
22h2m

Used to guide in Yellowstone. This has no bearing on the greater Yellowstone Caldera (supervolcano) which spans nearly 30miles by 40miles. In my time there I never saw anything like this. If you're ever in a situation similar to this, run as fast and as far as you can.

The interesting thing about geysers and pools is how relatively predictable they are... until they are not. A mathematical and statistical person would have a lot of fun building prediction models for all the different geysers.

ethbr1
6 replies
16h54m

If you're ever in a situation similar to this, run as fast and as far as you can.

Yellowstone tourists have a proud tradition of not running from things they should be.

johnla
4 replies
4h22m

I think most of them are new to this type of nature so you're stuck in "is this normal? Am I in danger? If I run, will I look like a fool?" So you're standing there and looking for other people's reactions before making your own. So it's a bunch of people frozen and looking at each other before 1 person makes a run for it and everyone else does too.

jsbg
3 replies
4h0m

They're presumably referring to people e.g. taking selfies with bison.

chrisco255
1 replies
3h12m

Yeah, lots of folks think they have a similar demeanor to cows and don't realize they are in danger while doing so.

jimmaswell
0 replies
2h44m

Even cows can be dangerous if you make them mad.

1659447091
0 replies
2h7m

..and the big cute deer (elk or moose) and calves. Let's go feed them...

aargh_aargh
0 replies
6h54m

Oh yeah, bring it, mama bear...

animal531
4 replies
8h49m

Another tip, if you're running away from rocks falling out of the sky (or extremely big hailstones) then at least put an arm over your head.

It might just save your life.

toss1
3 replies
3h6m

Another tip for falling objects (although this applies only on the descent phase, so more for objects falling from cliffs or building above you):

If when looking up, the object has an apparent motion (left/right/back), it won't hit you, and certainly don't move in the direction it appears to be moving. If it appears stationary in the sky, it WILL hit you or very close, so move fast. Best default strategy with limited time & options is to hug the rock face, especially under an overhang.

toss1
0 replies
1h20m

Yup! Also applies to cars on intersecting roads especially at odd angles; if it's staying in the same spot in the windshield/side window, one of you needs to change speeds or you'll have an unscheduled rapid disassembly at the intersection.

It's also a real problem for certain intersection angles where vehicles or bicycles with unfortunate timing will be obscured behind the A-Pillar until nearly too late. There was an article (iirc) on HN years ago about just such an intersection repeatedly injuring/killing bicyclists. I once had to seriously threshold brake at an off-angle intersection to avoid a fire truck running a red light, when the timing/speed/distance/angle all lined up to hide the entire truck behind the A-Pillar for a few seconds approaching the intersection.

syngrog66
0 replies
1h43m

and certainly don't move in the direction it appears to be moving.

I hereby dub this the Ridley Scott's Prometheus Rule

firewolf34
1 replies
11h17m

If ya can't sleep, ya might as well learn something. Thanks for the link! Sincerely, ~also can't sleep.

LeonB
0 replies
6h44m

Hmmm — isn’t it possible that too much awareness of our pending apocalyptic peril at the mercy of the Yellowstone Caldera is what’s arresting your slumbers in the first place?

adamredwoods
3 replies
19h39m

Very exciting time for a geologist! Once every few hundred years I'm guessing?

glennon
1 replies
17h23m

Over 60 observations of this hot spring erupting in some fashion over the last 18 years. https://geysertimes.org/geyser.php?id=Black+Diamond Many of the reports mention black water and rocks and "big" -- so not particularly rare. This eruption appears to be larger though -- typically the rocks and debris do not make it to the boardwalk.

glennon
0 replies
16h57m

A geyser gazer friend of mine shared the following image pair: a "before" Google Earth image and a USGS overhead image captured today after the event. The debris field surrounding the spring is evident -- including the damaged boardwalk. (links to a png) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dcd55YX7oF8KPrHsog75vPS_Mc9...

bandyaboot
0 replies
18h41m

They’re not that rare. The USGS statement references a few examples of similar events including one from 2009 in this same basin, one from 1989 in the Norris basin, and another (small) event in the Norris basin earlier this year.

burtonator
2 replies
1h25m

If you're ever in a situation similar to this, run as fast and as far as you can.

I really really want to underscore this point.

You're literally standing on top of ground and under that is boiling water.

If that breaks and you fall in you're going to be in boiling water with no way to get out and you will die screaming.

Also NEVER walk on ground that has no vegetation. If you look around a geyser you will see that the ground is white and has no vegetation. That's because the temperature is too high and it has water under it that's heating the ground.

Walk on that and there's a chance you will fall in.

In the back country there are no fences so you can fall right through the crust.

sandworm101
1 replies
33m

> Also NEVER walk on ground that has no vegetation.

There are also places on this planet where toxicity issues preclude vegetation. If there are fumes coming through the soil so powerful that grass doesn't grow, take the hint.

sqeaky
0 replies
10m

They mean never in the context of fleeing from these explosions.

My sidewalk has no vegetation, but that is because I weedwhacked on Tuesday not because a geyser 10 meters away is flash boiling water in a pressure vessel made of stone and glass shrapnel-to-be.

InDubioProRubio
2 replies
10h16m

Is a geyser not inherently self-destructive? As in its a load-bearing pressure test-run on a random set of connection in stone. Meaning the rock fracks itself, and only the valve to above ground allows for repeated runs? Or do they fix fractures with minerals?

pfdietz
1 replies
6h46m

There's nothing about a geyser that requires rock to be fractured during an eruption. Geysers occur due to positive feedback as liquid water is removed, reducing the pressure on underlying heated water, allowing it to boil.

sqeaky
0 replies
8m

Sort of a temporary equilibrium of boiling temperatures as long as water keeps coming out? but because water supply is finite that will only be a few second or ms?

lostlogin
1 replies
9m

White Island exploded and killed 22 visitors here in New Zealand in 2019 [1]. As you say, if an eruption starts, run. Video from that day is chilling, with comment made about how different to normal the pools looked.

Those with uncovered skin suffered horribly, and it’s quite surprisingly how little covering was helpful.

There is a good documentary on it [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island...

[2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21439528/

HeyLaughingBoy
0 replies
1m

I saw that movie. Not much scares me, but that did!

consf
1 replies
8h56m

The complexity and variability of geothermal features

bnug
0 replies
2h9m

Anyone know how apparent bot posts like this wind up here? Third one I've seen today, now easy to notice after someone pointed it out on another topic.

billsmithaustin
1 replies
4h48m

Just playing back what you said because it's surprising. You're saying that explosion was not caused by water that was superheated by the supervolcano below the greater Yellowstone Caldera? It was heated by some other source?

Interested because I was there a few weeks ago.

mapt
0 replies
3h45m

A defined hydrothermal basin like this is heated by a very local pocket of magma or more properly magma-that-has-mostly-solidified-into-hot-rock, only a kilometer or so deep in this case, that has leaked up from multiple layers of deeper basins creeping up through faultlines, and which is being gradually cooled by water seepage in a dynamically stable way. Depending on the area, there may or may not be an intermediary superheated brine functioning as a heat transport mechanism, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_areas_of_Yellowston...

Local explosions like this are not very indicative of movements in the county-sized reservoir of magma ten times deeper down that underlies the entire caldera.

Local hydrothermal basin, upper magma chamber, lower magma chamber, mantle plume: https://www.yellowstonepark.com/news/supervolcano-magma-cham...

0xdde
1 replies
20h43m

A mathematical and statistical person would have a lot of fun building prediction models for all the different geysers.

It's so popular that one of the datasets immediately available in base R is the set of waiting times between eruptions for a Yellowstone geyser [1].

[1] https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/datasets/versions/3....

verandaguy
0 replies
1h42m

In fairness, the geyser in question is Old Faithful, among the best-known geysers in the world, renowned for its regularity.

I’m not sure that it’s particularly more regular than most other geysers, but that’s what is known for.

Aeroi
0 replies
15h50m

A great followup for someone looking to dive into the statistical side of this would be the Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone. [1] (Worlds tallest active geyser)

It has a pretty irregular major eruption pattern. What people often forget, is that geysers don't wait for the day time, so many events occur at night when nobody is around to witness the beauty. When a geyser like this only erupts a handful of times a year and for approximately 3 minutes, you have to get very very very lucky to witness it. Especially when you take into account how enormous YNP is.

[1] https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/steamboat-geyser.htm#:....

mikeodds
32 replies
22h13m

Yellowstone supervolcano eruption https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/yellowstone-vol...

pros:

- band aid on global temperatures

- interested in any others commenters may know of

cons:

- several states getting reset

- volcanic ash covering the North American bread basket

- pretty long list really

readthenotes1
11 replies
21h53m

If Yellowstone blew up like it has before, human civilization would end as would our contribution to global warming. More than a band-aid!

fullstackchris
9 replies
21h39m

As far as I remember, the caldera erupting is not an extinction level event (for humans at least)... would be bad for sure, but southern hemisphere would manage I think

Filligree
7 replies
21h8m

Depending on size, duration and prevailing winds, there's a pretty good chance the EU would be fine. Even parts of the USA could survive!

BirAdam
6 replies
16h3m

I wouldn’t say “fine”. It would be a year without summer, and the loss of life due to starvation would be rather severe.

Kostic
5 replies
13h37m

Would starvation be a problem? Don't most countries have food reserves for these cases? At least enough food for one season?

southwesterly
3 replies
11h29m

Ha ha ha ha ha where is the profit in that?

throwaway290
1 replies
9h36m

You are unsure where is profit in having alive workers/military/etc?

bregma
0 replies
7h49m

Leftist radical.

0xBDB
0 replies
4h20m

Having a supply of something that is suddenly supply constrained is pretty much a literal definition of how to make a profit. No need for a ??? step on that one. Of course you will take a storage cost loss for potentially thousands of years first.

abofh
0 replies
2h24m

We didn't have toilet paper because some people freaked out, you think there's a maintained warehouse of perishable supplies? Or just a big vault of cans somewhere?

No, nations do not have the means to feed their constituents in a nation ending disaster. It's easy to move food from Florida to California in a state sized crises, but the logistics of maintaining a just in case food supply for hundreds of millions distributed around the country? It's a safer bet to assume you'd die in the disaster than to convince people to plan for the future.

StimDeck
0 replies
20h54m

Ok, but it did just blow up a little.

solardev
2 replies
17h31m

Hey, I live right there, and just hiked it a couple months ago! I didn't realize it was still active (dormant?). Kinda cool to think about.

If it goes boom, I'll try to take pics and report back.

lukan
1 replies
11h24m

"If it goes boom, I'll try to take pics and report back."

Better do a livestream then, in case we cannot recover your camera/mobile.

solardev
0 replies
3h34m

2124 Show HN: I found a GoPro buried in lava from the GPT era

redleggedfrog
0 replies
19h14m

I go to Paulina Lake every year. It's a glorious place, even with all the geological activity.

LinuxBender
5 replies
22h8m

I do not have links for you, but the last time I checked there was a general consensus among the majority of scientists that given the low percentage of molten lava in the upper chamber and low percentage of molten magma in the lower chamber we would have at least 10K years of low probability of a VEI 8 eruption. An eruption currently may damage part of the park from low basaltic flows and part of the park would be shut down. Should that happen it may impact the park's tourist revenue but the governor is working on diversifying the states income. The risk level of eruption was a decision making factor in my moving so close to Yellowstone.

mikeodds
3 replies
21h50m

Thanks, it does look a great part of the world to live in.

I’ve taken liquefaction maps into account previously when finding places to live, but not had to look up magma chamber reports yet.

SoftTalker
2 replies
18h21m

My only concern is flood plains. I had 8' of water in my basement at the first house I lived in. Technically not in a flood plain but close enough to a river. Never again.

robocat
0 replies
9h30m

Yeah: common risks across a neighbourhood will usually lead to severe problems trying to claim your cover. And subsequent property resale issues: if insurance is unavailable, a mortgage is unavailable; if a home can't get a mortgage then you can only sell for cash at extreme discounts.

Avoid risky areas unless you can afford to lose your home.

Lots of people in Australia got caught out during floods, in part due to unobvious exclusions. https://mdlaw.com.au/news-insights/flood-insurance-australia...

In my city Christchurch, an earthquake led to problems for many many people.

FredPret
0 replies
16h49m

8 '!

How high were your basement ceilings - was there any breathing room at all?

moralestapia
0 replies
47m

Should that happen it may impact the park's tourist revenue but the governor is working on diversifying the states income.

Oh no! Wyoming might lose 0.007% of their GDP. I hope the governor can save them in time!

sliken
3 replies
13h20m

A fair bit of the rich soil in the mid west, west, and north west are from previous volcanic eruptions. Substantial areas have 1 meter or more of high quality soil, which we are squandering by over watering, overly intense agriculture, not preventing erosion, and using too much fertilizer.

Not only is fertilizer very energy intensive to produce, it also contributes to de-oxygenation of lakes, rivers, and the ocean. It's no exaggeration that this might well end civilization on earth. If we lose the oceans (which are already becoming oxygen depleted) it's going to be that much harder to feed everyone.

So I'd consider volcanic ash a pro, not a con. Sure we might lose a single growing season, but could help us for centuries, if properly managed.

rocqua
1 replies
11h7m

Fertilizer isn't just energy intensive, the phosphorus part of it is non renewable. We get it from mining, there are limited deposits, the process of building the deposits happens on geological timescales. My hope is that the running out will be a slow process that comes with a slow price increase so people are eventually incentivized to find alternatives.

Also, the mining process leaves very toxic tailings, but that is true for most mining.

pfdietz
0 replies
6h37m

Eventually we'll be mining average crustal rock for phosphorus, at 0.1% concentration, as well as recycling phosphate-containing wastes back to soils. It could be the mineral that sets the minimum global annual mined volume after fossil fuels are done (those currently dominate, ignoring such things as gravel and ground water.)

On the positive side, I believe most phosphate fertilizer is not immediately absorbed by plants, but instead goes into forming relatively insoluble phosphates in the soil (phosphate fertilizer is formed by solubilizing phosphate minerals by treatment with large amounts of acid). This forms a phosphate bank in the soil. Over time, if I understand correctly the residual solubility of these minerals (especially under the influence of organic acids secreted by plant roots) will reduce the need for additional phosphate additions, assuming the soil doesn't erode away.

kmbfjr
0 replies
7h19m

Volcanic ash is extremely acidic, you will lose more than just a single growing season.

It also pulverized rock and volcanic glass, which causes all manner of hell when the wind blows.

hindsightbias
0 replies
21h20m

pros:

- volcanic ash would replenish the NA bread basket soil erosion

hanniabu
0 replies
21h21m

cons:

- would set back solar adoption

cyberax
0 replies
15h48m

Supervolcano for the president! Vote for TRUE destruction!

OutOfHere
22 replies
22h3m

Ideally we should be mining Yellowstone completely for its geothermal power, starting at its periphery, then digging inward gradually. If we don't, the only other eventual outcome is destruction of North America from its supervolcano eruption. Mining it kills two problems with one stone, the energy problem and the supervolcano problem. Of course no fracking chemicals should be used.

dredmorbius
7 replies
20h11m

I've made this suggestion myself in the past.

Via a flagged comment, a counterargument is deep geothermal, accessed via boreholes, and not strictly limited to extant surface geothermal fields:

<https://www.quaise.energy/>

Thomas Homer-Dixon is also an advocate that I'm aware of: <https://homerdixon.com/a-big-bet-on-geothermal-could-help-pr...>

I'm not sold on this (deep geothermal pilots such as the Geothermal Habanero project in Australia have proved expensive busts, and the productive lifespan of a given borehole is limited to a few decades). But it's worth consideration.

I've written on Habanero previously. The project consistently overran time and cost estimates, and delivered far less power than initially planned. That's not to say that the concept is fatally flawed, but it's also not the panacea first projected. By contrast, surface geothermal fields have been and are developed at commercial scale worldwide, and have been for years: The Geysers in California, in Iceland, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, and elsewhere. In fact most viable fields have already been tapped, with the largely untapped resources now existing in the African Rift Valley (largely within Kenya, where it could hugely bolster the country's fairly anemic generating capacity), and of course Yellowstone in the US, where there are significant environmental and political barriers. A USGS survey getting on two decades ago of US geothermal resources conspicuously excludes Yellowstone from any consideration at all. From 2007: <https://www.usgs.gov/publications/usgs-national-geothermal-r...>

See:

"Habanero Geothermal Project Field Development Plan". A largely sober summary of the project, noting that it's been concluded rather than expanded. <https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/habanero-geothermal-proj...>

My own 2014 summary: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230601073717/https://old.reddi...>

OutOfHere
6 replies
18h57m

In Yellowstone, if I am not mistaken, the energy is extractable at its land surface, or quite close to it. Drilling 4 km does not seem necessary at Yellowstone. Is this incorrect?

Secondly, there exist efficiencies of scale that come with drilling at ten or a hundred sites rather than just one or a few.

zamadatix
3 replies
18h37m

The top of the magma chamber starts ~5-17 km from the surface with another magma chamber ~20-50 km from the surface. Heat starts and goes well above that of course but if your goal is to meaningfully hook into and extract the heat of the chamber itself it's quite deep. Put from another perspective: if a significant amount of the energy of the chamber were imminently near the surface it would already fizzle itself out over thousands of years without the need of digging short holes to do it in a few.

Geothermal in Yellowstone is no better or more useful than geothermal at many other less important places. It isn't even the place with the most surface level geothermal energy in the first place. Overall geothermal technology advancement makes a lot of sense but starting said advancement via sandbagging for an outcome 1000 years after developing one of the best national parks to do so does not make sense.

Regardless of all of that, there are significantly more than the two possibilities of either starting drilling today or having catastrophe in an eruption.

dredmorbius
1 replies
11h26m

AFAIU the "last mile" (or last 5--17 km) transfer largely occurs through ground-water migration. Yellowstone combines extensive geothermal energy with ample surface water flow (e.g., Lake Yellowstone, which is itself a major geothermal zone). I'm really well beyond my depth here, though looking up soem background:

Geological diagram of Old Faithful: <https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/bd/06/bd0603df...>

From this Smithsonian article: <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/seeing-beneath-old...>

"Old Faithful's Geological Heart Revealed": <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005190243.h...>

Mostly addresses seismic activity, though there's some discussion of inferred structures from that. Based on the journal article by Sin-Mei Wu, Kevin M. Ward, Jamie Farrell, Fan-Chi Lin, Marianne Karplus, Robert B. Smith. "Anatomy of Old Faithful from subsurface seismic imaging of the Yellowstone Upper Geyser Basin". Geophysical Research Letters, 2017; DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075255 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075255>

(The Smithsonian piece is based on the same article.)

OutOfHere
0 replies
3h2m

Exactly. I am not convinced that drilling 5 km is necessary at Yellowstone. I suspect the energy is ripe for the taking much closer to the surface due to this water migration.

OutOfHere
0 replies
17h26m

The reason why I noted a thousand year period is because Yellowstone is said to have a lot more energy than we can use right now.

Regarding the investment, if a 5 km well is dug, I don't expect it to exhaust its energy without a significant payback.

dredmorbius
0 replies
7h41m

Efficiencies of scale from multiple drilling operations likely pale in comparison to the costs of each well. Keep in mind that some factors, such as well casings, drilling mud, drill bits, labour, and support costs remain high on a per-well basis. A 10% savings evaporates quickly if 100 wells are required to match the energy return of 1 or 10. Well depth and diameter are major determinants of drilling costs in both petroleum and geothermal operations.

The ability to achieve a high, long-term return on relatively shallow drilling operations probably trumps any learning-curve efficiency improvements in drilling itself. Sites such as Yellowstone (based on some former research I'd made) contribute significantly to US baseload electrical generation, should the US choose to exploit them.

It's also worth noting that there already is considerable expertise in drilling generally, with over 160 years of experience over millions of individual wells, and that the efficiency / improvement curve is likely fairly ... well ... exploited.

"Geothermal Drilling Costs" (2006) <https://www.thedriller.com/articles/84584-geothermal-drillin...>

"Cost analysis of oil, gas, and geothermal well drilling" (2014) <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092041051...>

dredmorbius
0 replies
15h55m

AFAIU yes, absolutely.

Yellowstone has accessible thermal gradients. Even if a remote approach is made, say, outside the National Park boundaries and intended to minimise surface impacts, necessary drilling should be minimal, and a small number of wells should provide far more energy return than a large number of deep boreholes.

That said, I'm, ahem, well out of my depth here ;-)

notaustinpowers
6 replies
21h53m

National Parks (and the ADA) are some of the few great things that America has going for it and turning Yellowstone National Park into a power plant would not be one of them.

SoftTalker
3 replies
18h13m

Norway doesn't seem to have a problem with it.

dboreham
2 replies
17h18m

Iceland.

SoftTalker
1 replies
16h58m

Indeed, thank you for the correction.

iSnow
0 replies
7h16m

In Iceland, they don't drill into the geysir park, they have some hydrothermal plants, but in other areas.

OutOfHere
1 replies
21h1m

You are not even trying to understand. Aesthetics is not more important than existence. If Yellowstone is not mined, then when it blows, there will be no Americans left to appreciate it.

Secondly, the mining stations will be limited. Yellowstone is a vast land. There is expected to be no diminishing of the forest.

altgoogler
3 replies
21h0m

Mining yellowstone for its geothermal power in order to prevent a volcanic eruption would be a Kardashev Scale Type I accomplishment.

In other words, such a thing is completely infeasible given our current understanding of science and technology.

The time required to develop such a capability would span so many lifetimes that is it effectively science fiction.

SoftTalker
1 replies
18h12m

Extracting geothermal power for its own sake would not be, and probably should be done.

akira2501
0 replies
16h39m

And you're going to transmit it.. where?

OutOfHere
0 replies
20h58m

It is not that big a deal. It is in fact a lot easier than mining deeper geothermal which we can also do, but at much greater expense. Yellowstone aside, exploitation of resources is one thing America is profoundly good at. If we start now, we can finish it in say one thousand years and fully eliminate the supervolcano risk, also enjoying much green energy in the process.

dboreham
0 replies
17h19m

I live about 40 miles from the edge of the caldera. I've wondered about drilling down to get heat. Nobody else has done it though, with the exception of the various hot springs around here. There is a hot-ish spring on our property, in that it stays snow free through the winter. That said, if there was a bunch of heat near the surface presumably our well water would be hot. It isn't.

FergusArgyll
0 replies
19h9m

I am probably one of the most free-market leaning ppl on HN. National Parks are a very good place to curb the free market. It's a classic Tragedy of the commons, the value is huge and would not exist without the government. There is no incentive structure where privatization would leave millions of acres open for a token fee.

I quite often think how people should be encouraged more to go to the natl. parks, they really take your breath away and are something to cherish. Buffalo running wild, Grey wolves if you're lucky, crazy weird geysers, go!

willy_k
5 replies
22h17m

Is this a potential sign of the fault shifting or whatever the correct terminology is? A warning shot before a massive earthquake? Or just a geyser-like phenomenon?

swatcoder
1 replies
22h11m

From https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/science/hydrother...

These very large and violent hydrothermal explosions are independent of associated volcanism. None of the large hydrothermal events of the past 16,000 years has been followed by an eruption of magma. The deeper magma system appears to be unaffected even by spectacular steam explosions and crater excavations within the overlying hydrothermal system.
pfdietz
0 replies
2h29m

Note, however, that much larger hydrothermal explosions have occurred than the one that just happened. There are some large craters in Yellowstone Lake from hydrothermal explosions. These would certainly kill people who were nearby if they happened again.

ofalkaed
0 replies
21h48m

If it was a sign of something larger it probably would not be so isolated, all the geysers in the area would have gone off. I would guess this is either the formation of a new geyser or an old one which has a long duration between eruptions or just a one off.

DaoVeles
0 replies
21h17m

Arm chair take here. Probably means nothing. On the scale of earthquakes and larger geology, this is insignificant.

Look at the White Island eruption a few years back. If you are on the island it was an awful event. But in terms of eruption scale it was so small it barely registered.

sharpshadow
2 replies
10h33m

I’ve heard that a very big explosion ontop of the Yellowstone expanding magma bubble could burst it with devastating consequences.

Is something like this realistic and considered in national security?

chx
0 replies
9h57m

At least for the next 2500 presidential cycles or so the chances of the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupting is considered quite low. We have some understanding of the physics involved, there's not enough lava and magma in the chambers currently for such an eruption. Even if a previously unseen phenomenon started to rapidly fill those, rapidly on a geological scale is still measured in thousands of years.

Also, similar things like "the Big One is due in the Northwest" are just sensational headlines. The Cascadia Subduction Zone indeed produces earthquakes every 3-500 years and the last one was in 1700 but that doesn't mean there's an equivalent of a hourglass. It just means there's a historical average of that.

And it's the concern of FEMA to act after something like this happens, not a matter of national security. National security concern, I imagine, would involve defusing these via some military ways and defusing such events are far beyond the capability of humankind at this time.

andrewflnr
0 replies
2h50m

As explosions go, especially volcanic explosions, this was pretty tiny. Also I don't know where you're getting this idea of an "expanding magma bubble" that could "burst". There's magma chamber that is not to my knowledge changing size, and it can't really erupt at all right now. There's certainly no air inside it, unless you want to count dissolved gas in the magma.

randomtoast
2 replies
4h8m

What is the estimated TNT equivalent of this explosion based on what we can see in this video?

tonetegeatinst
0 replies
1h59m

Expert scientist here. The estimated TNT equivalent is about tree fitty

gosub100
0 replies
1h0m

5 millitons

bugbuddy
2 replies
21h15m

Yellowstone mass extinction event is exactly the curve ball no one expects for 2024.

jaza
0 replies
12h11m

Don't look down!

anthk
0 replies
20h17m

Nah, the UFO comes first. As an European, Go, Nevada, Go!!!

buescher
2 replies
18h37m

I grew up in the surrounding area. Tourists, and some locals, died every year, frequently at Yellowstone. Relevant Baudrillard quote:

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
buescher
0 replies
26m

If you’ve been socialized not to really believe anything is really real, and your life is mostly spent in social modulation, physical danger that doesn’t register immediately with the hindbrain can really trip you up.

I know of a scenic overlook someone falls off every couple of years, going well back before the smartphone selfie era.

jandrewrogers
1 replies
22h37m

From the US Geological Survey:

"At around 10:00 AM MST on July 23, 2024, a small hydrothermal explosion occurred in Yellowstone National Park in the Biscuit Basin thermal area, about 2.1 miles (3.5 km) northwest of Old Faithful. Numerous videos of the event were recorded by visitors. The boardwalk was damaged, but there were no reports of injury. The explosion appears to have originated near Black Diamond Pool.

Biscuit Basin, including the parking lot and boardwalks, are temporary closed for visitor safety. The Grand Loop road remains open. Yellowstone National Park geologists are investigating the event."

m_a_g
0 replies
6h39m

no reports of injury

I feel like that’s pure luck. Things could’ve gone way worse

hnthrowaway0315
1 replies
22h5m

Are the tourists lucky to not get hit? Since the bridge goes through the pool maybe it could erupt right under their feet?

kzrdude
0 replies
11h23m

See the second video of the broken bridge and the rocks thrown around. Clearly someone could have been badly injured if they were there. I don't think it goes through the pool, just close to it.

racl101
0 replies
21h44m

I think I would've just ran and not kept looking back. Screw the chance to get a video from my phone.

istjohn
0 replies
17h52m

Thanks for the reminder to check out the book Death in Yellowstone. According to Randall Munroe it's quite a read.

consf
0 replies
8h54m

The importance of respecting and understanding the natural forces at work in geothermal areas

Bluescreenbuddy
0 replies
5h50m

The survival instincts of a bag of rocks.