The geysers, hot springs, mudpots, and fumaroles of Yellowstone National Park are the visible face of a vast, seething ocean of molten magma six miles deep. The supervolcano beneath Yellowstone has so far erupted three times: 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago. By the crude math of those who have a fearful cast of mind, this means that a fourth eruption is now due.
Yesterday, a team of scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey issued the most comprehensive study yet performed on the supervolcano, using sophisticated computer models to estimate the likelihood of another eruption and the devastation it would cause. For months before their findings were known, however, fears of another Big One had already gone viral, thanks to a cascade of social-media “news” stories of a kind that have become more frequent and less easy for the casual reader to distinguish them from the real thing.
Lee Whittlesey has worked at Yellowstone since 1969 and now serves as the park’s official historian. “There’s always been some level of concern about the supervolcano,” he told me. “But I’ve never seen anything like the spiral of misinformation we had this summer.” Whittlesey’s colleague Al Nash, the park’s chief of public affairs, agreed. “We got lots of e-mails and phone calls about it, way above the normal background level. But what was interesting, in my mind, was that all the rumors were fuelled and disseminated by social media. It was all over Facebook and Twitter, not the mainstream media.”
The whole thing seems to have started back in February, when B944, one of the many seismometers installed in the park, malfunctioned and began sending zany data to a public viewer, or “webicorder,” at the University of Utah’s seismographic station, which has a following among amateur volcano buffs as well as those who are looking for signs of the coming apocalypse.
Soon, a Web site called the End Times Forecaster was predicting the exact date of an imminent supervolcano eruption. It claimed to have detected an disarming pattern of events that began with the movie-theatre massacre in Aurora, Colorado, in July, 2012, and continued with the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, five months later. Both events happened on a Friday when there was a crescent moon. Using Bible-derived algorithms, the site found that the next date in the “Friday crescent moon death day cycle” was March 28, 2014. And, according to something called the Batman Map Strike Zone (don’t ask), the next location would be the big one: Yellowstone.
It’s easy to laugh. Doomsday predictions like this have been around for millennia. But their purveyors have never had social media before, and this time their prediction—at least of something significant, if not of a supervolcano eruption—almost came true. At dawn on March 30th, Yellowstone had a 4.8-magnitude earthquake, its biggest in thirty-four years.
The earthquake triggered the most important link in the viral chain. Right after the quake, a survivalist named Tom Lupshu, who runs a site called the Bunker Report, posted a video on YouTube of “herds of bison running for their lives” because “they detect something vast and deadly.” Many others reposted the video. It popped up several times on my own Facebook feed, sometimes shared by reputable journalists asking if there was anything to the story. When I checked this week, the different versions of the video had been viewed almost 1.5 million times.
Upon review, the video lasts a minute and nine seconds. By my count it shows twenty-six bison, loping amiably along Yellowstone’s Grand Loop Road. It’s kind of cute. Actually, that was the whole point, because it was shot by a staffer at the nonprofit Yellowstone Association; he posted it on his Facebook page a couple of weeks before the earthquake, with the caption “Yellowstone bison on the run for the joy of spring.” (They do this every year around this time, looking for feeding areas at lower altitudes.)
Another YouTube video upped the ante. This time, Lupshu passed on reports from “confidential sources” that the U.S.G.S. was deliberately suppressing seismic data, that FEMA had ordered secret shipments of coffins and was planning for millions of refugees, and that nukes were being moved out of areas of Texas at risk in the coming ash storm.
Things escalated further over the July 4th weekend, the peak of the tourist season. Yellowstone experienced one of its periodic earthquake “swarms”—a flurry of small and generally inconsequential tremors—with around fifty near the lower geyser basin on the fifth and sixth of July. These eruptions happen all the time—there are between a thousand to three thousand such quakes in any given year, almost never registering more than a 3.0 and thus imperceptible to humans (not to mention bison). But, this year, they attracted an unusual amount of social-media attention—especially when they were followed, a few days later, by the temperature on a section of the three-mile-long Firehole Lake Drive rising to 160 degrees, enough to bubble and blister the asphalt. By then, park officials were getting a bit tired of all the e-mails and phone calls and the need to keep issuing statements to reassure the public that nothing was amiss. “It’s a thermal area,” Whittlesey said, wearily. “It’s always hot to the touch, and the heat shifts all the time. It can come one day and it’s gone the next.” The road was closed for a couple of days, repaired, and reopened. Business as usual, except that the end-times crowd was now operating at full throttle. After all, if scientists are not to be trusted and government officials are engaged in a coverup, why believe anything they say?
The climax came in early August. The ur-text appears to have been a “news report” on a Web site called Civic Tribune (“Dedicated to the Truth”) saying that the supervolcano eruption was imminent and that the U.S.G.S. had ordered the evacuation of the national park. Within hours, the story was endlessly shared, reposted, and tweeted, and was picked up by innumerable other sites with names like TheExtinctionProtocol, NowTheEndBegins, HeavenAwaits, and GodsHopeManifested. The fact that the report referred to the park as “yellow stone” appeared to do nothing to dent the story’s credibility.
Again, it’s easy to laugh at this silliness. But the part that concerned me the most was that the Civic Tribune report introduced one of the favorite tropes of “real” journalism—the “some scientists believe X while other scientists believe Y” frame that has wasted so much of our time on, for example, false debates about the reality of global warming. In this case, the reporter said, “The scientific community is split on when exactly the volcano will erupt. Some say weeks, while other camps suggest that it could be several months.”
Of course, there’s no such belief and no such split. And the only scientists who know what they’re talking about when it comes to the Yellowstone supervolcano are the kind who wrote the report issued yesterday by the U.S.G.S. (To be fair, their projections of what an eruption would do are almost as grisly as the doomsday types might imagine—most of the United States blanketed in ash, weather patterns disrupted, air transportation and electronic communications shut down, and “major climate effects.”)
But the likelihood of it actually happening in the twenty-first century remains about one in a thousand, according to the U.S.G.S. So, while there’s little need to worry about drowning in burning lava during your trip to Yellowstone, there might be a need to watch what you read before you leave for vacation.
