Wednesday, November 18, 2020

What If Yellowstone's Supervolcano Erupted? | RealClearScience

Yellowstone super volcano eruptions are rare and one is not predicted to happen in the next few thousand years. I read that smaller eruptions are more likely than bigger ones.

I suspect that in the event of a big eruption, the safest place to be (or head to) would be Florida. It might be safer to stay indoors. According to one site, the ash fallout in Indiana would be just a few millimeters, and extend down to the southern states like Georgia.

However, the ash contains silicates that can damage your lungs. You would want to have protective breathing gear.

A major eruption would severely damage the environment, causing crop failures worldwide.

There would be massive loss of life in the western states. The last major eruption, around 700,000 years ago, wiped out all the animal life in the neighboring states. The entire western half of the country would be in danger, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

We’ll Need More Than One Vaccine to Beat the Pandemic

But this is the first mRNA vaccine, and it turns out to be a precious little snowflake. Pfizer's vaccine has to be stored and shipped at ultracold temperatures, less than 80 degrees below zero—it'll keep for a few days at higher but still very cold conditions. And it needs vials made of a special glass that's able to tolerate the freezing temperatures.  

All that shipping and freezing requires a level of technical sophistication that, for now at least, mostly exists in hospitals and labs—posing significant logistical challenges in rural areas and in the developing world. These are the "cold chain" problems that Koff mentioned, the problem of refrigerated shipping. (A critical Ebola vaccine needs the same deep freeze, and engineers stepped up to create specialized coolers to transport it across western Africa—but that was a pandemic that affected tens of thousands of people, not billions, and the people who made the coolers have since gotten out of the cold-chain innovation game.)