According to New Scientist:

The magma inside the volcano did not reach the surface and erupt as a fountain of lava – instead, it was diverted into the continental rift underground. The magma cooled into a wedge-shaped "dike" that was then uplifted, rupturing the surface and creating a 500-metre-long, 60-metre-deep crack . . . Eventually it could reach the east coast of Ethiopia and fill up with seawater. "At some point, if that spreading and rifting continues, then that area will be flooded," says Ken Macdonald, a marine geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study.

Ebinger says this won't happen any time soon – it would take around 4 million years for the crack to reach the size of the Red Sea.

[via New Scientist]

By the time Jimina hit Mexico, it was no longer technically a hurricane, though it still did huge amounts of damage. Image 1 shows Jimena at full category 4 hurricane strength in late August, and the other two satellite photos show the diminished tropical storm as it lashed out at Mexico in early September. The picture of the storm on the ground is in Baja California.

Hurricane Jimena News at Huffington Post

Satellite photos by NOAA/Getty Images. Photo of the storm in Baja California by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images.

National Geographic explains:

Yellowstone is a volcano, and not just any volcano. The oldest, most famous national park in the United States sits squarely atop one of the biggest volcanoes on Earth . . . The last three super-eruptions have been in Yellowstone itself. The most recent, 640,000 years ago, was a thousand times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, which killed 57 people in Washington. But numbers do not capture the full scope of the mayhem. Scientists calculate that the pillar of ash from the Yellowstone explosion rose some 100,000 feet, leaving a layer of debris across the West all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Pyroclastic flows-dense, lethal fogs of ash, rocks, and gas, superheated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit-rolled across the landscape in towering gray clouds. The clouds filled entire valleys with hundreds of feet of material so hot and heavy that it welded itself like asphalt across the once verdant landscape. And this wasn't even Yellowstone's most violent moment. An eruption 2.1 million years ago was more than twice as strong, leaving a hole in the ground the size of Rhode Island.

It's worth reading the rest of this article - it beautifully captures the pyrotechnic scientific mystery that is Yellowstone Park. Photographer Mark Thiessen captured the blowholes where Yellowstone lets off scalding, mineral-rich water.

via National Geographic (Thanks Marilyn Terrell!)

Over at Discovery News, io9 pal Michael Reilly reports on a study about the exact ingredients required to whip up a mass extinction event like the one in the Permian-Triassic, which destroyed 90 percent of life on the planet. Researchers Nan Arens and Ian West argue that a mass extinction is caused by a combination of "pulse" events - short, sharp shocks like meteor strikes - and "press" events like millennia-long climate change from constantly-erupting volcanoes. Arens and West base their assertions on intensive study of mass extinction events in Earth's past.

Asks Reilly:

Can researchers come up with a "Grand Unified Theory" of ancient apocalypse?

West and Arens think so. They combed the last 300 million years of geologic record, noting impact craters, massive eruptions, periods of ancient climate change, and then comparing them to extinctions. The rate at which species die off spiked dramatically, they found, when a "pulse"-type event occurred within a million years or so of a "press."

The theory fits well for the dinosaurs. Around the time of their demise 65 million years ago, a comet slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula and a huge volcano, the Deccan Traps, was erupting in what is today India.

But other extinctions are problematic. The greatest dying in geologic history, the Permian-Triassic extinction, killed 90 percent of all life on Earth, but there is no record of an impact. Instead, all signs point to a 200,000-year-long volcanic eruption in Siberia as the murder weapon.

Arens and West's work also suggests that Earth may be headed for a new mass extinction, because climate change is a common form of press event, and all we really need is one big pulse event to reach the total apocalypse tipping point.

SOURCES:
Discovery News

Paleobiology

This photo was taken by Carsten Peter for National Geographic. The magazine explains:

[In the Afar Depression,] spreading mid-ocean ridges forming the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden emerge on land and meet the East African Rift.

Those circular structures around the pool are made of travertine, which is "a volcanically heated, calcium-rich flow from hot springs." Want to see a bigger version of this photo, plus several more images of what happens to the land at the edges of tectonic plates? Check out the photo essay at National Geographic.

Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Don't expect giant machines that can purify the atmosphere or nanotech that can reverse global warming just yet. The U.S. government has yet to approve the fledgling agency which would unify several independent researchers and university labs with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Basically, it would be an Earth-monitoring super-group whose goals are to research and solve humanity's crimes against the biosphere.

USGS director Charles Grote, who is helping to put the group together, isn't quite as grandiose when explaining the ESSA's mission:

The USGS, in bringing not only its geologic, biologic, hydrologic and geospatial expertise to the understanding of natural systems, but also its research capabilities in energy, mineral, water, and biologic resources, gives the new organization a comprehensive perspective on both environmental and resource systems. If we effectively link these capabilities with those of NOAA, we will have a powerful research institution

But David Rejeski, former member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is thinking bigger:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has demonstrated the value of funding high-risk, high-reward research and development. ESSA should foster similar ventures in the environmental arena.

Given the kinds of projects that have come out of DARPA, including the internet and swarm robots, Rejeski is clearly hoping for giant robots who can cool down the oceans or clean up chemical spills. That's what we're hoping for too.

Earth Systems Science Agency, we have a planetary emergency! Help us before it's too late!

Image from Earth Sons.

Organizing an Earth Systems Science Agency [Nature via Eurekalert]