Yellowstone is rumbling.

Plume’s Path
(Alan Sullivan, Fresh Bilge, 2 Jan 2009)

If Yellowstone volcano produced a major eruption plume — a very remote possibility, but one worth considering at the moment — where would it go? A really big eruption could drop ash thousands of miles from the source, but upper winds at the time of the eruption would determine which way the plume might track. Here is the GFS 16-day time-lapse model of winds at the 250 mb level — roughly the boundary between troposphere and stratosphere. It might prove useful. Even Florida will be downwind of Yellowstone at times during the next two weeks, as the jet stream flexes and pulses.

(via Instapundit)

More recent stuff from Sullivan here.

Chances of a major eruption are or course actually very remote, but Yellowstone is worth watching because it is one of those “supervolcanos” that have a habit of every few hundred thousand years erupting in a way that dwarfs “normal” volcanic eruptions and sometimes effect continent sized areas. The last time Yellowstone erupted was 640,000 years ago or so.

Anyway, Yellowstone is rumbling right now, with a “swarm” of Earthquakes indicating movement of the subterranean magma. Fun!

Another something I’ve been meaning to post for a long time but never got around to:

The Real Great Depression
(Scott Reynolds Nelson, Chronicle Review, 17 Oct 2008)

As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany’s inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls “the real Great Depression.” She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

(via The Daily Dish)

(from DShort via Calculated Risk)