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In the realm of of science-based clickbait, no topic is more reliable for delivering page views and social media shares than claims that the pool of magma sitting below Yellowstone National Park is about to erupt in a humanity-ending cataclysm. As we have repeatedly, exhaustingly, and redundantly reported, the likelihood of that mega-disaster's occurring in the next couple of thousand years is extremely low, and the region is monitored continuously for threatening activity which would provide ample warning if that situation were to change for some currently unknown reason. A perfect example of the pervasiveness of this claim (and, perhaps, the futility of fact-checking it), comes from the apocalypse-oriented website Breaking Israel News. Over the course of a few sentences, that website strung together multiple previously debunked Yellowstone claims into a meta-claim in need of a fresh debunking: While Breaking Israel News didn’t actually mention a year in their story, the 2,300 tremors recorded between June and September referred to a series of minor earthquakes breathlessly reported by the Daily Mail and other junk news purveyors back in 2017 as a sign of a coming cataclysm. As we noted in our debunking of those claims, thousands of detectable earthquakes occur in the Yellowstone region in any given year, and they in no way portend an imminent supereruption. The reference to a 100 ft.-wide fissure open[ing] up in nearby Grand Teton National park, as we reported in July 2018, refers to an unrelated crack in a cliff face which rangers feared could result in a large chunk of rock's crushing climbers and onlookers below, not a coming eruption. This newer iteration of a Yellowstone claim introduced viral fear by asserting that a NASA study published in 2015 (which received attention in a 2017 BBC Futures article) somehow proved NASA was not being honest about geologic events that post-dated their report. That BBC Future article, which Breaking Israel News and other sources cite extensively but without context, presented commentary from an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brian Wilcox, who served on a NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense. That body did conclude in 2015 that a risk of a supervolcano was more likely than a large scale comet or asteroid impact, and they gamed out a variety of extremely theoretical and long-term solutions to mitigate such a risk: That brainstorming did not mean, however, that Wilcox or the other researchers concluded that a supereruption was more likely to occur in our lifetimes than previously thought, or that an urgent need existed to begin geoengineering solutions for it. Via email, Wilcox told us that Neither I nor, to my knowledge, any of the co-authors has commented on the seismic activity or possible danger of a near-term eruption. He referred to the geoengineering plans as a thought experiment revolving around the question is it possible for human civilization to prevent supervolcano eruptions that might threaten humanity? As described by BBC Future, the solution they proposed involved utilizing the heat from the magma for geothermal energy by drilling toward the hot earth and running water through the holes. This would have two benefits, the study argued: First, in the short term, it would provide a possible source of geothermal energy; and second, in the long term, it could (over thousands of years) reduce the overall risk of a caldera-level eruption: When Wilcox said long-term, he was not talking about years or decades. In the study, the team made it clear they were speaking in terms of tens of thousands of years: No plans are afoot to begin such a forward-looking initiative, and the report itself stated that any work in that regard right now would be premature. There are a number of unknowns about the nature of supervolcanic eruptions and how they are supplied that need to be addressed before attempting any engineered solutions, the reported concluded. Therefore, no immediate plans to geoengineer a risk-reduction solution to the Yellowstone caldera are at hand, nor is new evidence suggesting an increased risk of eruption. The good news is that it does seem possible to achieve [such a risk reduction solution] on a timescale that is short compared to the average time between eruptions of a given supervolcano, Wilcox told us. The bad news is that humans would have to make a concerted effort for thousands of years to defang a volcano like Yellowstone, and it would have essentially no effect if the eruption were going to happen anyway within a few human lifetimes.
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