RedHanded - ShortHand: What If Yellowstone Erupted?

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

Any moment now, we might experience an explosion that emits the power of 1,000 atomic bombs every second. An explosion so fierce that it would reduce the world’s most powerful country to an ash-covered wasteland – and, if it was feeling particularly gnarly, could lead to the extinction of the entire human race.This week we take a look at just how royally f***ed we’d be if the world’s largest above-ground supervolcano blew its top. How likely is it? When could it happen? And is there anything we can do?--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. Hello. And welcome to Shorthand. Doom edition. Boom. We do quite a lot of Doom on Shorthand. We do, but the people like it. Do you know what I was thinking about on my bike this morning?

Uh-huh. We recently had a sales meeting where we were told, rather disappointingly, that true crime, even though we've been doing this for nearly 10 years, is still quite a hard sell. And they were talking about something other top secret, not allowed to talk about it. And they're like, you know, and that's not true. true crime, so it's an easier sell because it's, you know, popular host, it's talking about not true crime. And what I should have said is, yeah, like shorthand. Because that's what this show is.

So hopefully, you know, keep listening and prove Hannah and us, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys like to listen to us, talk about things that aren't true crime? We already are. Maybe. I'm so annoyed. I didn't connect those dots in that. Anyway, never mind.

Never mind. Humanity, like true crime, sales, are doomed. Absolutely. Forever and ever and always. Between the endless grinding warfare, increasing political polarization and environmental decline pushing the doomsday clock ever closer to midnight. It is absolutely no wonder that we feel so hopeless.

But it's okay. Good news is, none of it matters because any moment now we might experience an explosion that emits the power of over 1,000 atomic bombs every second. Oh, thank God. My Russian friend texts me this morning after Centralia went out. She was like, do you know about that time Russia put out a massive fire with a nuclear bomb? I was like, no. They kept that one quiet. No, Gatio, I don't know about that one.

She was like, overall bad, but it worked. Just a man appears in her room to silence her. What am I talking about? I'm talking about an explosion so fierce that it would reduce the world's most powerful country to an ash-covered wasteland, which spiritually it already is. An explosion that would cover our entire planet in a thick black cloud, sending temperatures plummeting and all but eliminating the food supply of the entire northern hemisphere. This explosion, if it was feeling particularly gnarly, could lead to the,

the extinction of the entire human race in a matter of months. I always think that in zombie films. I'm like, I don't think I'd try to survive. I'd give it a go for a while. Yeah, no, I'd be like, oh, thank God. It's over. Done, thank God. Don't have to do this anymore.

I think I did tell you this, but during COVID, my friends and I were like, hanging out, socially distancing, in the park, one day on one of our government-allowed walks. You were smoking weed, it's what you were doing. And we were... And your mum walked past. If you could have one drug When the world ends What would it be?

And then we're like, what would be more fun Is if you had a bag full of all different types of drugs And everyone lucky dips Whatever you get, you get, you got to take it And we're still hanging out together How's that going to go? Might make it more fun. Heroin, straight up heroin, obviously.

Obviously. But you don't get to pick is the lucky dip. Oh, right. It's the only correct answer. God, I'd better get something awful, like fucking... What'd be the worst? Methadrone. Duh.

Duh. Hideous. Oh, that's really sent shivers down my spine. Anyway, if all of that happened, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. And that might not make a lot of people feel better, but I feel much better. It's like when you have a big argument and then you look at a mountain, you're like, oh, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter, does it?

Doesn't matter, really, does it? Now, the particular ticking time bomb that has a little, time bomb that Hannah is talking about is sitting in the northeast corner of Wyoming within the Yellowstone National Park. You love Yellowstone. I fucking love Yellowstone. I haven't been to the actual

place, Yellowstone. I would love to go. It looks fucking amazing. But I am obsessed with the TV show. It was great. Watch it. So today Yellowstone, other than my favorite TV show for a short part of this year, is one of the U.S.'s most visited national

parks. Famous for the very beautiful Yellowstone Caldera, Plus, its famously reliable Giza, Old Faithful. The park covers 9,000 square kilometres, mostly from the northwestern part of Wyoming, plus a bit of Idaho and Montana. And it contains the largest above-sea-level volcano, supervolcano at that, on the planet.

And below this supervolcano is a vast magma chamber with the potential to blow. And there are those that say the volcano could be nearing an eruption for the first time in over 640,000 years. Kind of sounds like it's due one, doesn't it? And judging on its previous performance, things could get pretty dicey. So join us, if you will, for a little look at exactly how royally fucked we would be as a species if the Yellowstone volcano blew its top.

How likely is it? When could it happen? And is there anything we can do about it? This is the shorthand. For centuries, people quite understandably thought that volcanoes were supernatural in some way, like in Moana. We can't even imagine what the olden days would have made of a vast exploding mountain that at any moment could start spewing red-hot molten lava, fire and acid rain. Some civilizations started to describe volcanoes as the expression of some earthly fury, some sense of divine, justice or impending doom. And others, like the Greeks and the Romans, believed them to be the

fires and forges of the gods. But eventually, we started to do science and we wised up a bit. Which brings us to the inevitable question of, what is a volcano? I don't know. I just had a realization that I don't know. But it's okay. It's like one of those dreams. You're sat in your geography GCSE exam and you're like, oh, what's a volcano? Honestly.

I didn't think I even did geography, GCCI. I was like, I'm out this bitch. No. I want to learn about the Nazis and the Nazis only. Anyway, it doesn't matter that I don't know because Sirius brought her revision guide. I loved, I loved a revision guide. I did too. CGP in particular, top tier.

I found a one of my old school report because I didn't know I had ADHD in school. And in my defence, the medical community didn't know that girls had ADHD when I was at school. And I definitely remember feeling like, I know I'm not stupid. I just can't function in the way I'm being asked to function, which now obviously makes sense.

But in my school report, it was like, because I never have thought myself of being a particularly naughty person. Hannah is very disruptive. Hannah does not sit still. Hannah interrupts everybody. Hannah shows absolutely no interest in trying. Volcanoes. Literally that.

And I was like, huh. Like so many different teachers are like, Hannah is going to have to revise a lot because I just didn't listen. Oh, wow. And now we know why. Now we know. That's the main thing. Executive dysfunction, my friends.

Okay, I'm going to try really hard. I might have to make some flashcards. Okay. So the boring definition is that a volcano is any place on any planet when material from the inside of said planet makes its way through to the outside. Now, the middle of our planet is really, really, really, really hot because A, it's still hot from when it was formed and B, from the decay of radioactive elements,

and C, it's really hot because gravity and pressure keep pulling dense material to the center. The core stays hot because it's covered in so much stuff that it's really hard for heat to escape. So it stays at around a steady 6,000 degrees Celsius. That's 10,000 Fahrenheit for all you Americans. Now between that core and the outer crust is the mantle, the biggest layer. It's still hot, but still mostly stays solid because the pressure on it is so great that it can't melt.

But when it does melt, it makes it. its way up through the next bit, the outer crust. And the movements of the outer crust are ruled by Plectectonics. I love Plectonics at school. Of course you did. I know. It's nice to say, like precipice. Yeah, tectonic, it's a nice word to say.

Between the mantle and outer crust of the earth is a hard layer of something called the lithosphere. Sounds made up. This is divided into seven huge plates and a few smaller ones. And these plates slip and slide over the mantle lubricated by a soft layer of the anethosphere. And there are reasons for that, but that's not my problem. Not today. Not today.

It will be when we do a shorthand on that. Yeah. No promises. Anyway, the point is the boundaries between these two. spheres is where magma happens. If plates are moving away from each other, the molten mantle comes up to fill the gap between the plates and quickly cools to form a new crust. And that's a form of volcanism, but a very slow and boring kind that doesn't have anything to do with world-ruining explosions. But if plates are moving towards each other and they collide, that's when the cool

shit happens. Very slowly. One plate usually wins and pushes the other plate underneath it in a process called subduction. And as the loser plate is pushed down into the hot, dense, pressurised, molten mantle, it heats up. And that whole process causes the mantle rock to melt into magma, which is less dense than the rest of the mantle around it. Imagine I'm holding a football under water. Okay. The air in the ball is less dense than the water,

so it shoots up and out to the water. Yes. Delighting everyone and hopefully starting some sort of spontaneous game of volleyball. Can confirm that is what happens. The less dense molten magma wants to move up with a lot of force. It's fucking hot and it melts more rock as it goes, building more and more magma, collecting in huge magma chambers below the earth.

surface. And if the pressure gets high enough and or a crack opens up, it explodes out the ground, just like your little model one when you add a baking soda. As well as magma, the real ones can spit out fiery clouds, which race down mountain sides destroying almost everything in their path. Ash is also blown high into the air and falls back on earth like powdery poison snow. The blankets of ash cover everything in the surrounding. surrounding area and can suffocate all living things nearby. When hot volcanic materials mix with water from streams or melted snow and ice and form mud flows, which can also bury entire communities.

Before we get to Big Daddy Yellowstone, we're going to start with a few famous modern eruptions to give you some context. Volcanic power is measured on the volcanic explosivity index, the VEI. and that is measured on how much stuff volcanoes spew out and how frequently they do it. So it's important to keep in mind this is a logarithmic scale, which means each step up increases tenfold. Forty-five years ago in Washington State, the Mount St. Helen's eruption of 1980 was the most disastrous volcanic eruption in US history,

with the thermal energy equivalent to 26 megatons of TNT. The eruption shot 80,000 feet into the air covering a 22,000 square mile radius with 540 million tonnes of ash. Mudslides reached as far as 50 miles away. 57 people were killed plus thousands of animals. Hundreds of square miles were reduced to wasteland, and it costs the US government over a billion dollarie-dus in damage,

which is just under four billion in today's money. Since it's about the same size, we'll lump Mount St. Helens in with probably the most famous blast in history and namesake of many as it, the Vesuvian eruption that wiped out Pompeii. That one released 100,000 times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima Nagasaki bombings and buried a whole town under 20 feet of ash and pumice. And I've been there. Have you been?

I haven't been. Haven't you? No. It's worth it. Herculaneum also worth a wishes next door, but no one talks about it because it wasn't preserved as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was, like, battered with, like, actual rock rather than pumice. Anyway, all in, both Vesuvius and Mount St. Helen spewed out 0.25 cubic kilometers of material,

You're giving them both a VEI score of five. Then, in 1883, we have the volcanic island of Krakatoa, in what's now Indonesia, but back then belonged to the Dutch. The volcano experience repeated months-long eruptions, with the worst one so violent that the entire island collapsed, forming what's known as a caldera. Isn't that Mexican restaurant we sometimes go to called Caldera? Yes, it is.

What does it mean in Spanish? Cauldron? I think so. Something like that. Yeah. Okay, yeah. In Latin American Spanish cauldron. Okay, cool.

Quick explanation of a caldera, and we're not talking about the cauldron. And we will need this later, so listen up. When a volcanic eruption is powerful enough, it expels so much material that when the vast magma chamber below it empties, the ground above sinks into it. Oh my God, that's horrifying.

That's like popping a zit. And then there was so much pus underneath it that part of your face collapses into the hole that was under the zit. Everyone visualising that? Great. It basically forms an enormous bowl-shaped landform around where the summit used to be. The Krakatawa explosion was so violent it was heard almost 5,000 miles away.

That's like from here to Pakistan. And it didn't just spew out unbelievable levels of fiery volcanic stuff. It also caused a series of epic tsunamis, which fucked up a lot of surrounding coastlines. A whopping 36,417 people died. and for about a year after the eruption, huge floating sections of pumice were floating up as far away as Africa, sometimes carrying piles of human skeletons.

How don't I know about that? I know. Krakatawa blew out 25 cubic kilometres of stuff, which is 10 times as much as Pompeii, giving it a solid and very respectable six on the VEI. then in the same kind of era about 50 years earlier was the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia again fuck yeah ring of fire baby

and that was the most powerful eruption in recorded human history here's what happened lava flows killed basically all plant and animal life on the island and out of 26,000 residents just 12 survived black clouds of dust brought the entire area into total darkness geologist Charles Yell said The darkness occasioned in the daytime by the ashes in Java was so profound that nothing equal to it was ever witnessed in the darkest night

I didn't know geologists were allowed to be poets Do you have a jewel oners do you Charles The Tambora volcano spewed 150 cubic kilometres of ash pumice and other rot into the air and that is a VEI of seven So that's over 600 times as big as Pompeii, whose 0.25 square kilometres starting to look pretty measly now. Mm-hmm.

With Tambora, it didn't just affect the island. It wasn't even limited to Southeast Asia. It literally rocked the world. 1816 became known as the year without a summer. The big black clouds spread across the globe, bringing with them massive amounts of sulphur diopsylop. and other aerosols. And these aerosols and all of this gas that was being released by these clouds reflected sunlight back away from the earth and caused global temperatures to plummet. North America

and Europe saw temperatures drop beyond belief. The Thames froze over in the middle of summer and New England had snow in July. Across the northern hemisphere crops failed, sparking famines across the world. And where there weren't full on famines, There were huge food shortages and massive price spikes. Fun fact about Tambora, it's why we have Frankenstein. While all of that was bubbling away, 18-year-old Mary Shelley travelled to Geneva, Switzerland, with her sister and her famous poet lover, Percy Shelley.

He was still married, so he and young Mary were skipping town for a few years, whilst the heat died down. And in Geneva, they met the poet, and arch fuck boy Lord Byron. And outside of their stupid little lives, the entire world was going full apocalyptic. And while all of them were holed up in a little villa in Geneva,

Mary wrote, The thunderstorms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before. And one night in the height of summer, Gale force winds and beating rain trapped them in that villa for days. So they challenge each other to write a ghost story. And the story is that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in one night. She didn't. I wish, because it's a lovely story, she started it.

She finished it in... That house we wanted to buy around here. Yeah, Hannah and I saw on... I don't remember. It was in the Daily Mail or something. Yeah, and it was just like the house that Mary Sherley. had lived and came up for sale and we were like, oh my god, shall we just buy it and say it's our office and live there forever?

It was beautiful. It was beautiful. All these eruptions we've mentioned so far are among the worst in recorded history. But see, recorded history is not really a very long time, geologically speaking at least. And boy, oh boy, do eruptions get a lot worse than that. especially if we circle back to our old friend Yellowstone, whose biggest explosion produced 2,000 square kilometres of matter, earning it a solid 8 on the VEI,

and placing it among the most powerful volcanoes in history. Yes, Yellowstone is part of a very exclusive club known as the Supervolcanoes. And you get your Supervolcano badge if you have an eruption with a VEI of And it's a pretty elite group there for you. Only 20 volcanoes have ever made the great. And Yellowstone has done it twice. Oh no. Yeah.

And these supervolcano eruptions happen about once every 100,000 years. And there's only been two since Homo sapiens have been kicking around. The most recent one, Taupo in New Zealand, erupted 26,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. Taupo. That was where an old mustachioed man, cricket umpire man got a chucked into the river. What's his name? You wrote it. I can't remember. Peter Plumley Walker. Well done.

So, Yellowstone's largest eruption was 2.1 million years ago. And that reached a very tasty 2,450 cubic kilometre. of expelled matter. Another eruption came 1.3 million years ago, and that was 230 kilometers of expelled stuff, which is still less, but still double Tambora. And then it came back with a bang. More recently, just over 1,000 kilometers spewed out

630,000 years ago. And that one left a 55 kilometre depression, in the earth, forming the caldera that we see today, which is why it's more craggy crater than nice, neat, mountain shape. And back then, homo sapiens still hadn't evolved. We were still sort of at the monkey man ancestor stage of our development. Maybe. If Graham Hancock is right, which he is, that's what did it.

That's what wiped him out. Believe it. Okay, so the big question. in the words of the greatest poet of all time, Pit bull. Two's company, but three's a party. What would happen if Yellowstone erupted today? Nothing good.

If Yellowstone released another super eruption, first would be the earthquakes. As magma started to surge upwards, rock would be broken up and pressure would build, causing devastating earthquakes. for weeks or even months. Then, one day, the volcano itself would start to blow, with an energy output equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima bombs every second.

Even just the shockwaves from this could kill 90,000 people straight off the bat. Thousands of square kilometres of rock, ash and gas would be shot up to 30 miles into the air. A black cloud would spread out in all directions. darkening skies over pretty much the entire continent of North America and raining down volcanic ash over the entire mainland US. Everything in a hundred mile radius would be covered in molten lava and pyroclastic flows, which is a fast-moving avalanche of gas and rock debris

that moves at 400 miles an hour and reaches around 1,000 degrees Celsius. Hot, dense clouds of ash would spread, read further at about 50 miles per hour, scolding, suffocating and knocking down anyone it catches up to. It just feels so bonkers that it's like, I feel like it's funny as I'm reading it. Yeah, that's why I was laughing. Yeah. Pyroclastic, fucking hell. It's the pyroclastic flow. Fucking hell. But it moves at 400 miles an hour. God, whatever. Fuck.

Pass me the bag of heroin. I wouldn't even have time. You'd just be explaining the rules of the lucky dip and everyone would be like, come on! No, it's not your turn. Oh, fuck. Anyway. If you, listener, live in Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Montana or Utah, you are especially out of luck.

Those states, in their entirety, would be totally buried with a thick layer of hot volcanic Ash a meter and a half deep. If you live in Denver, Salt Lake City or Boise, which is in Idaho, you're going to get fully Pompeyed. Imagine some later race pompaying Salt Lake City and being like, this is how they all lived. Practice of multiple wives was very common. These two young boys seem to be tethered together. We're not entirely sure why.

Some sort of sexual kink, perhaps. They all truly believed that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri. So I'll stop. That's the only thing from our entire culture that's preserved. Wow. Someone should write that book. Anyway. Then 10 metres of hot ash and debris would cover Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, the whole of Utah and Nevada,

killing plants and animals eliminating entire ecosystems, crushing buildings and destroying infrastructure. And so on and so forth. With the exception of the very southern tips of Florida and Texas, the entire continental US would be covered in a layer of ash. Everyone outside of the immediate death zone would experience serious respiratory problems, plus contaminated water and destroyed power grid.

The farmland in all of the country's most important agricultural centres would be poisoned for decades afterwards. Food production would plumbing, and the US would have to rely on food imports and their tariffs to survive. So yes, the US would be absolutely comprehensively fucked. But it wouldn't be pretty for the rest of us either. The volcano would keep pumping out volcanic ash, gas, magma and debris into the air for weeks or even months. The world would be plunged into a volcanic winter.

Remember that year without a summer back in 1816 that we told you about when it snowed in July? Well, time's out by 100. And it could last for a decade. That means shorter growing seasons and disrupted food supply chains across pretty much the whole northern hemisphere. It would lead to a global food crisis affecting hundreds of millions of people. Oh, and the air quality would be absolute dog shit too. So yes, the US would be toast

But frankly, the entire human race would be in very real trouble Right. So some of you may be freshening up your The End is nigh, black odds, I have a collection But just before you do, let's have a look at the odds. How likely is it that everything we just told you is going to happen? Well, firstly, we sneakily preface that whole section with the caveat. if Yellowstone released another super eruption.

But that's not the only thing that could happen. Pressure from the magma chamber can also be relieved little by little, with boring hypothermal eruptions, which just fart out a little steam and hot water. Much, much smaller scale, very little impact. But still, there are those that say Yellowstone is due a proper super heavy-duty volcanic eruption, and because the magma chamber is so big,

it's likely it could be a biggie and those saying were overdue tend to cite the timeline of past eruptions which were 1.2 million years ago and then 1.3 million years ago and then 630,000 years ago so it's currently been quite a lot longer

since the last eruption than the gap between the previous two so it does sound like it's just a matter of time but sound is wrong that's incorrect Firstly, the first gap was 200,000 years longer than that. So it's not like we're just sitting around expecting it to blow,

especially since that's not how magma chambers work. They don't just fill and fill and fill, getting more and more pressurized until they're ready to pop. No, magma flows in and out of the chamber. So saying it's more likely because it's been X amount of time is kind of nonsense. The probability of a super eruption at Yellowstone is one in 100,000 per year.

That means that every year there's a 0.0014% chance of it going off, which is lower than the odds of us all being wiped out by an asteroid, which at least we would see coming. While we're myth-busting, though, there are people who are worried that earthquakes or even a nearby nuclear blast deviously planned by the sneaky Russians

could trigger the volcano interurrupting, But that's also just not going to happen. If you drop the biggest bomb ever detonated right now onto the Yellowstone Caldera, it wouldn't even flinch. And the same goes for earthquakes. And we know that because they happen all the time. A magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit Yellowstone in 1975, which released more energy than a two megaton nuclear weapon. So no, the Yellowstone Supervolcano can't just be set off anymore than doing burpees could send the planet out of orbit. The other question is, will we know it's coming?

Well, geological processes are pretty slow, like millimeters a millennium slow. But recent research by students at Arizona State University shows that we might not get that much of a warning. It was always assumed that the process is building up to such an eruption would take place over thousands of years. But by analysing trace crystals in the volcanic rock, left over from the last eruption, these students found that it may have just taken a few decades

to set off, which for a geologist is nothing. The rocks don't lie. So the science is still out, but the boffins hope that they will soon be able to spot future supervolcanoes in the making. There's even some very exciting work happening at NASA on how to prevent super eruptions by pumping water near magma chambers to ease the pressure, which is good, because most science and disagree that we're woefully under-prepared. They also agreed that a very large eruption,

somewhere in the world, is pretty certain to hit in the next few centuries, even if it's not Yellowstone. So fingers crossed, I guess. Still, the consensus is mostly quite chill. Yellowstone is currently dormant, and an eruption is theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely, especially not in the next 10,000 years. And in fact, it might just be done forever.

What's more likely than another eruption is that Yellowstone hands in its volcano badge for good and spends the rest of its days watching over the park as a nice quiet mountain. How dull. There you go, that's what would happen. It's just one of those things. Yeah, in the grand scheme of things. Big Bang natural disaster that you don't know is happening or coming. Not the worst way to go out in my opinion.

No. I think if it's going to happen, I don't want it to happen. But if it's going to happen, I'd rather not know. Bam, done. Booth, we're out. 100%. I don't want fucking months and months and years and years a fucking drudgery on the news where we're all panicking.

But then I think we'd go full black death and we'd all just fucking start partying real hard. Maybe, maybe. I think it would be the worst of everything. It would be the hedonists going, the hardest. It would be the religious nuts going the most mental. It would be all the fucking, you know, the fingers. a wagging people out.

Oh, just bring out the worst in everybody. That's my fear. So let's just go out like a fly being swatted with an electric fly swatter that it doesn't see coming. I don't know. Great. Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. Beautiful.

So that's it, guys. So don't worry too much. It'll probably be fine. And if it's not, it's nothing you do about it anyway. Or inverse, if you're really worried about something. I hope it doesn't matter, it's going to explode. Love it. I'll be dead next week.

Exactly. That's it, guys. We will see you next week for another short hand. Goodbye. Bye.