Jonah Golberg has been the lone voice crying in the wilderness on behalf of proper funding levels for research into airborne-laser volcano lancing.
The only thing I can do at this dire moment is to add my small voice to Jonah’s and beg for more funding of this important project before it is too late. Faster please.
from New Scientist here is more on the possibly impending threat.
If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park.
Every few hundred thousand years, such chambers can erupt as so-called supervolcanoes – the Yellowstone one did so about 640,000 years ago. These enormous eruptions can spew enough sunlight-blocking ash into the atmosphere to cool the climate by several degrees Celsius.
Could Mount St Helens erupt like this? “A really big, big eruption is possible if it is one of those big systems like Yellowstone,” Hill says. “I don’t think it will be tomorrow, but I couldn’t try to predict when it would happen.”