Only a journalist truly committed to the ancient art of panic-clickbait could squeeze all the world’s existential dread into a headline like, “A Giant, Destructive Volcanic Eruption Is Set to Shake the World in the Coming Months, Bringing About the End of Mankind, Scientists Warn.” They’ve accompanied it with the following graphic, in case you weren’t adequately terrified.
The dead giveaway? “Scientists Warn.” Whenever you see those two words sandwiched together above the fold, you know you’re about to step into a wonderland of wild extrapolation, qualified maybes, and models run so far into the future they boomerang back with “robots take over” as the y-axis.
They start out as follows:
A detailed geophysical study published in Nature in by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has refined our understanding of the Yellowstone supervolcano, uncovering new insights into its subsurface magma dynamics. Concurrently, climatological assessments by researchers such as Markus Stoffel (University of Geneva) have renewed discourse around the global systemic risks posed by a potential super-eruption — not only at Yellowstone, but at several other active volcanic complexes worldwide.
There’s an oddity here to start with. They’ve pushed together into one paragraph an actual scientific study of the Yellowstone caldera, and a paywalled puff piece by some random guy trying to frighten people about future eruptions. Unless you’re watching very closely to see which walnut the pea is under, it’s likely to be successful in making you think “Wow, a predicted super-eruption at Yellowstone, and the odds are high in other locations as well”.
Which does sound scary. So keep that thought in mind while we look at the first of the two parts they’ve pushed into one paragraph—the actual Yellowstone scientific study.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member