Scientists seek to solve mystery of Piltdown Man

Scientists seek to solve mystery of Piltdown Man — It was an archaeological hoax that fooled scientists for decades. A century on, researchers are determined to find out who was responsible for Piltdown Man, the missing link that never was.

In December 1912, it was announced that a lawyer and amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson had made an astonishing discovery in a gravel pit in southern England — prehistoric remains, up to 1 million years old, that combined the skull of a human and the jaw of an ape.

Piltdown Man — named for the village where the remains were found — set the scientific world ablaze. It was hailed as the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans, and proof that humans' enlarged brains had evolved earlier than had been supposed.

It was 40 years before the find was definitively exposed as a hoax, and speculation about who did it rages to this day. Now scientists at London's Natural History Museum — whose predecessors trumpeted the Piltdown find and may be suspects in the fraud— are marking the 100th anniversary with a new push to settle the argument for good.

The goal, lead scientist Chris Stringer wrote in a comment piece published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is to find out "who did it and what drove them" — whether scientific ambition, humor or malice.

Stringer heads a team of 15 researchers — including experts in ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating and isotope studies — examining the remains with the latest techniques and equipment and combing the museum's archives for overlooked evidence about the evidence unearthed at sites around Piltdown.

"Although Charles Dawson is the prime suspect, it's a complex story," Stringer, the museum's research leader in human origins, told The Associated Press. "The amount of material planted at two different sites makes some people — and that includes me — wonder whether there were at least two people involved."

Doubts grew about Piltdown Man's authenticity in the years after 1912, as more remains were found around the world that contradicted its evidence. In 1953, scientists from London's Natural History Museum and Oxford University conducted tests that showed the find was a cleverly assembled fake, combining a human skull a few hundred years old with the jaw of an orangutan, stained to make it look ancient.

Ever since, speculation had swirled about possible perpetrators. Many people think the evidence points to Dawson, who died in 1916.

Other long-dead suspects identified by researchers include Arthur Smith Woodward, the museum's keeper of geology, who championed Dawson's discoveries and gave them vital scientific credibility. The finger has also been pointed at museum zoologist Martin Hinton; Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; and even "Sherlock Holmes" author Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown.

Stringer said the key may lie in a later find nearby — a slab of elephant bone nicknamed the "cricket bat" — that seemed to back up the first Piltdown discovery. It was revealed as a clumsy fake, carved with a steel knife from a fossilized elephant femur.

One theory is that Hinton — skeptical but afraid to openly question Woodward, his boss at the museum — might have planted it thinking it would be spotted as a hoax and discredit the whole find. A trunk with Hinton's initials found in a loft at the museum a decade after his death in 1961 contained animal bones stained the same way as the Piltdown fossils.

Miles Russell, senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University, thinks the museum's work may shed new light on how the forgery was done. But he thinks there is little doubt Dawson was the perpetrator.

"He is the only person who is always on site every time a find is made," Russell said. "And when he died in 1916, Piltdown Man died with him."

Russell is author of the new book "The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed" — though he doubts speculation about the century-old fraud will stop.

"People love conspiracy theories," he said. "And this is one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of all time."

Whoever was behind it, the hoax delayed consensus on human origins, leading some scientists to question the authenticity of later finds because they did not fit with Piltdown Man.

Stringer said Piltdown Man stands as a warning to scientists always to be on their guard — especially when evidence seems to back up their theories.

"There was a huge gap in evidence and Piltdown at the time neatly filled that gap," he said. "It was what people expected to be found. In a sense you could say it was manufactured to fit the scientific agenda.

"That lesson of Piltdown is always worth learning — when something seems too good to be true, maybe it is." ( Associated Press )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | Scientists seek to solve mystery of Piltdown Man

READ MORE - Scientists seek to solve mystery of Piltdown Man

Thousands of spiders blanket Australian farm after escaping flood

Thousands of spiders blanket Australian farm after escaping flood - Thousands of normally solitary wolf spiders have blanketed an Australian farm after fleeing a rising flood.

Reuters reports that the flooding has forced more than 8,000 Australian (human) residents from their homes in the city of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. But for every temporarily displaced person, it appears several spiders have moved in to fill the void.

A dog casually walks through the ballooning spider webs (Daniel Munoz/Reuters)

"What we've seen here is a type of wolf spider," Owen Seeman, an arachnid expert at Queensland Museum, told Reuters. "They are trying to hide away (from the waters)."

The Australian Museum's entomology collections manager Graham Milledge told Reuters that there's even a term for the phenomenon, "ballooning," and that it is typical behavior for spiders forced to escape rising waters.

Thankfully for local residents, the occupying arachnids are not likely to set up permanent residence, a la the 1977 William Shatner clunker "Kingdom of the Spiders." Weather reports say the flood waters in Wagga Wagga have begun receding, meaning that locals will soon be returning to their homes and the wolf spiders will also be returning to their natural underground habitats.

And it turns out the spiders are actually doing quite a bit of good while setting up shop above ground. The spiders are feasting on mosquitoes and other insect populations that have boomed with the increased moisture brought about by the rising waters.

"The amount of mosquitoes around would be incredible because of all this water," Taronga Zoo spider keeper Brett Finlayson told the Sydney Morning Herald. "The spiders don't pose any harm at all. They are doing us a favor. They are actually helping us out."

As amazing as this display may be, it's not the first time photographers have captured massive displaced spider migrations. One of the most famous pictures of 2011, above, showed millions of spiders and other insects in Pakistan that had formed massive web clusters in trees to escape rising floodwaters.

"It was largely spiders," Russell Watkins, U.K. Department for International Development, told National Geographic. "Certainly, when we were there working, if you stood under one of these trees, dozens of small, very, very tiny spiders would just be dropping down onto your head." ( The Sideshow )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | Thousands of spiders blanket Australian farm after escaping flood

READ MORE - Thousands of spiders blanket Australian farm after escaping flood

NASA finds oxygen around Saturn's icy moon Dione

NASA finds oxygen around Saturn's icy moon Dione - A NASA spacecraft circling Saturn has discovered a wispy oxygen atmosphere on the ringed planet's icy moon Dione, but you wouldn't want to live there. For one thing, you wouldn't be able to breathe — Dione's atmosphere is 5 trillion times less dense than the air at Earth's surface, scientists say.

This view highlights tectonic faults and craters on Saturn's moon, Dione, an icy world that has undoubtedly experienced geologic activity since its formation. It is based on images from the the Cassini spacecraft taken on Dec. 24, 2005. (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Dione's atmosphere was detected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which spotted an ultra-thin layer of oxygen ions so sparse that it is equivalent to conditions 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth. On Dione, there is just one oxygen ion one for every 0.67 cubic inches (or one ion for every 11 cubic centimeters) of space, but it's still enough to qualify as an atmosphere, Cassini mission scientists announced Friday (March 2).

"We now know that Dione, in addition to Saturn's rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules," Cassini team member Robert Tokar of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who led the new study, said in a statement. "This shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn't involve life."

Dione is one of Saturn's smaller moons and is about 698 miles (1,123 km) wide. It orbits Saturn once every 2.7 days at a distance of about 234,000 miles (377,400 km) — roughly the same as that between Earth and its moon, according to a NASA description.

The oxygen on Dione may potentially be created by solar photons or high-energy particles that bombard the Saturn moon's ice-covered surface, kicking up oxygen ions in the process, Tokar explained. Another idea suggests that geologic processes on Dione could feed the moon's atmosphere, researchers added.

The study is detailed in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Dione is by no means the only rocky body with an atmosphere in our solar system. Thick atmospheres cover the planets of Earth, Venus and Mars, as well as Saturn's largest moon Titan.

A thin atmosphere on Saturn's moon Rhea — one similar to that of Dione — was also detected in 2010, NASA officials said. That observation and the discovery of ozone on Dione by the Hubble Space Telescope led researchers to suspect it may host a thin atmosphere.

But it wasn't established for sure until the Cassini spacecraft used an instrument called a plasma spectrometer to detect the ionized oxygen on Dione during a close flyby in April 2011, when the probe flew within 313 miles (503 km) of the icy moon. The spacecraft detected an atmosphere made up of about 2,550 oxygen ions per cubic foot (or about 90,000 per cubic meter), researchers said.

"Scientists weren't even sure Dione would be big enough to hang on to an exosphere, but this new research shows that Dione is even more interesting than we previously thought," said Amanda Hendrix, the deputy project scientist for Cassini at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who did not participate in Tokar's study. "Scientists are now digging through Cassini data on Dione to look at this moon in more detail."

Dione was discovered in 1684 by astronomer Giovanni Cassini, after whom the Cassini spacecraft is named. The moon is named after the Greek goddess Dione, who the ancient Greek poet Homer described as the mother of the goddess Aphrodite, NASA officials explained.

NASA launched the Cassini mission in 1997 and it has been orbiting Saturn since its arrival at the ringed planet in 2004. The mission, which is a joint effort by NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Italy, has been extended several times, most recently until 2017. ( space.com )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | NASA finds oxygen around Saturn's icy moon Dione

READ MORE - NASA finds oxygen around Saturn's icy moon Dione

How does warfare affect the environment?

How does warfare affect the environment? - I just finished reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in which Steven Pinker argues that violence in all forms has diminished over the past few centuries. That's good for people, of course, but it got me thinking about the environment. How does war affect the planet?

The destruction of war, Afghanistan

Research on this issue is pretty thin. The human and financial costs of armed conflict are so vast that few people have stopped to consider what war does to rivers, trees, and elephants. In recent years, academics have been much more interested in how environmental degradation contributes to war than in how wars degrade the environment. In addition, no two wars affect the planet in the same way. The environmental devastation from a nuclear war, for example, would be difficult to estimate in advance.

Sticking to nonnuclear conflict, there are a few general points that can be made. Some of the more environmentally damaging military tactics have been banned. For example, destroying the forest canopy with chemical defoliants—a tactic the U.S. military used extensively in Vietnam—is now a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Conventional weapons don’t pose as direct a threat to ecosystems. They contain some scary chemicals, including ammonium nitrate, ethylene oxide, white phosphorous, and TNT. But, when a bomb detonates, those substances don’t travel very far. A United Nations study following the conflict in Bosnia found little evidence of crop and groundwater contamination by depleted uranium, which is common in armor-piercing munitions. At 50 or 60 yards from the site of impact, the chemical had become so diluted that it posed no serious danger to humans or animals.

The real risk that conventional weapons pose to the environment is through indirect effects. In May 1943, for example, Royal Air Force pilots blew up a pair of German dams. The resulting flood destroyed more than 7,000 acres of farmland, inundated 125 factories, and sent water rushing through several coal mines. U.S. forces used a similar tactic in the Korean War. In 1977, the Geneva Conventions were amended to ban the intentional breaching of dams in wartime, but only if the attack would cause “severe losses among the civilian population.” Environmental impacts are not mentioned.

Another major concern is the potential destruction of chemical facilities. Chemical plants today hold far larger volumes of dangerous substances than they used to. According to Czech toxicologist Jiri Matousek, the average sulfuric acid production plant in the 1950s generated around 10 tons of the chemical per day. By 1990, the average production had increased 200-fold, to 2,000 tons daily. The trains, trucks, and pipelines that carry our dangerous chemicals have also increased their capacities.

One need only observe peacetime accidents to see what terror a bomb could unleash if dropped on a modern chemical factory. At the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, water infiltrated into a tank holding methyl isocyanate. The mixture caused an explosion that contaminated the surrounding area, killing thousands. Attacks on chemical plants are entirely possible. President Clinton ordered the bombing of a Sudanese factory in 1998 precisely because he thought it was stocked with dangerous chemicals.

Then there are the truly unfortunate incidents in which a desperate leader uses environmental terrorism as a military tactic. The most famous example is Saddam Hussein, who set fire to hundreds of oil wells on his way out of Kuwait in the first Persian Gulf War. He also dumped 11 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, the largest oil spill in history at the time. Oil lakes and thick deposits of tarcrete covered the area, and scientists found traces of oil in ants and sand lizards more than a decade later.

Warfare can have more subtle effects on the land than huge plumes of smoke. When Iraqi and American forces took turns crossing Kuwait in the early 1990s, they upset the natural gravel that holds the underlying soil in place. The result was accelerated wind erosion, a tenfold increase in sand dune formation, and consequent loss of vegetation that sustained the animals that occupied Kuwait’s desert and semi-desert regions.

Some of war’s impacts are even less direct. Many conservationists have noted that civil wars in Africa excluded park rangers and researchers from the field, leaving the already vulnerable gorilla populations exposed to poachers.

All of which brings us back to Steven Pinker’s book. Armies used to defeat each other by killing huge numbers of enemies in direct battle. Today, military strategists try to undermine the enemy’s war machine with less bloodshed. That usually means occupying huge swaths of land and destroying the industrial infrastructure. In other words, as war becomes safer for humans, it may be increasingly dangerous for the planet. ( slate.com )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | How does warfare affect the environment?

READ MORE - How does warfare affect the environment?

Why life begins and ends on Earth

Why life begins and ends on Earth - Advanced life is unique to our planet - despite Stephen Hawking and SETI’s best hopes, argues Steve Jones.

Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday reminds us of his celebrated claim that, given the thousands of Earth-like planets outside the solar system, on purely statistical grounds life almost certainly exists somewhere else. The celebrated SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) programme assumes that living things will inevitably evolve to get smarter and smarter and may be sending out signals to be picked up by their distant fellows. So far, alas, it has heard nothing but noise.

Dead and alive: Schrödinger’s cat enraged Stephen Hawking

At 1.15 today in a public lecture at University College London, the biochemist Nick Lane will pour a dash of metaphorical cold water on that notion. He argues that advanced life (and that stretches from amoeba to us) is unique: that the chance of its origin is so remote that it happened only once, and almost certainly has no equivalent anywhere else.

Stephen Hawking once said: “When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.” Whatever the reality of that simultaneously dead and alive feline, in 1943 the German scientist gave a series of talks in Dublin entitled What is Life?, which set out to define just what that state means to a physicist. He saw that what unites all living things is that they have an inside and an outside. They need energy to keep the two apart; without it, they die. Within their walls they make their own environment, safe from the random chemical noise all around. Life is no more than a local patch of order.

To keep the cruel and chaotic world at bay needs a rampart. Simple membranes can be made in the laboratory in conditions like those of four billion years ago, and will form globules that can trap other chemicals within. Other experiments hint that small molecules able to copy themselves, albeit inefficiently, can also be made – and many of their raw materials are floating around in the universe, occasionally falling to Earth in objects like the Murchison Meteorite. Such steps to the earliest life must have been slow indeed as natural selection, that series of successful mistakes, fashioned the first simple cells.

However, that earliest existence stagnated for a billion years – and their descendants, today’s bacteria, are still pretty torpid. They went nowhere because they could not generate enough energy to impose a decent dose of order on their internal being. Evolution proper did not really get going until the appearance of proper cells, with nuclei. These “eukaryotes” at once set off down a variety of paths, culminating in ourselves. Even the least elaborate versions are far more sophisticated than what had gone before.

The Entry of the Eukaryotes seems to have been a one-off, an overture to the opera of advanced existence. It depended not on the gradual trudge of natural selection (which does no more than tinker with the imperfect to make it slightly less so) but on one spectacular, unique and unexpected event. It involved a coalition: an agreement between early cells and bacteria, which were welcomed as collaborators. That, as in many coalitions, ended with one party in charge and the other a reluctant servant. The bacterial labourers now act only as power stations for their hosts. Their efforts led to a massive leap in cell size and in productivity, with many more genes at work than before, a hundred thousandfold increase in efficiency, and an explosion of innovation.

Without those cellular generators – mitochondria, as they are called – life would still be in the slow lane. All non-bacterial creatures share mitochondria, sex and the cell nucleus, each of which seems to have evolved only once (unlike, for example, eyes, which have appeared dozens of times) as a further hint that a single moment sparked off an evolutionary race which in the end led to Stephen Hawking’s talents.

Natural selection may well be grinding away on all those Earth-like satellites out there, and might even have generated some primitive forms of living creature. But the call for a single unique shift to a high-powered economy able to impose order upon itself happened just once in four billion years on our own planet, and is unlikely to have been answered anywhere else. That much reduces Hawking’s estimate of the chances of a brain like his being at work in a distant galaxy.

He, like many of his colleagues, has been critical of governmental attempts to foster junk science by insisting that physics researchers predict what the impact of their discoveries will be before they have made them. Nobody who believes that could occupy the same planet as any scientist – so perhaps it is not intelligence that we should be looking for in the void. ( telegraph.co.uk )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | Why life begins and ends on Earth

READ MORE - Why life begins and ends on Earth

Fossil Footprints Reveal Oldest Elephant Herd

Fossil Footprints Reveal Oldest Elephant Herd - The world's oldest elephant tracks have now been revealed, 7-million-year-old footprints in the Arabian Desert, researchers say.

These prehistoric footsteps, likely the work of some 13 four-tusked elephant ancestors, are the earliest direct evidence of how the ancestors of modern elephants interacted socially, and the oldest evidence of an elephant herd.

"Basically, this is fossilized behavior," said researcher Faysal Bibi, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin. "This is an absolutely unique site, a really rare opportunity in the fossil record that lets you see animal behavior in a way you couldn't otherwise do with bones or teeth."

The site, known as Mleisa 1, is in the United Arab Emirates. The region then was home to a great diversity of animals, including elephants, hippopotamuses, antelopes, giraffes, pigs, monkeys, rodents, small and large carnivores, ostriches, turtles, crocodiles and fish. These were sustained by a very large river flowing slowly through the area, along which flourished vegetation, including large trees. The animals resembled those from Africa during the same time, though there are also similarities with Asian and European species of that period.

Fossil trackways in the region have been long known to locals, and were taken to be the prints of dinosaurs or giants of ancient myth. It was not until January 2011, when researchers mapped the area from the air for the first time, "that we realized what we had and how we could go about studying it," Bibi said.

"Once we saw it aerially, it became a much different and clearer story," said researcher Brian Kraatz at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif. "Seeing the whole site in one shot meant we could finally understand what was happening."

The footprints cover an area of 12.3 acres (5 hectares). This is about equal to nine U.S. football fields, seven soccer fields, or the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

"The trackways are visually stunning," said researcher Andrew Hill at the University of Poitiers in France. "It is quite obvious to anyone, without any technical knowledge, that these are the footprints of very large animals, and to learn that they are over 6 million years old presents a visitor with the sensation of walking back in time."

The researchers noted that while these prehistoric titans were proboscideans like modern elephants, they likely looked quite different. Of the three kinds of fossil proboscidean species in the area at that time, the one that most likely made the trackways was Stegotetrabelodon syrticus, the earliest known member of the elephant family, "which carried tusks in both its upper and lower jaws," Bibi told LiveScience.

The trackways stretch up to about 850 feet (260 meters) long, making them "the most extensive ever recorded for mammals, and to view them is to be transported 7 million years back in time when herds of four-tusked primitive elephants and other related behemoths roamed a wetter and more vegetated Arabian Peninsula," said paleontologist William Sanders at the University of Michigan, who did not take part in the study. [Photos of Elephant Trackways]

Actually mapping these footsteps proved challenging, since the individual tracks are each only about 15 inches (40 centimeters) wide, too small to show up in satellite imagery. To do so, researchers mounted a pocket digital camera onto a kite, stitching the hundreds of pictures it took into a single large mosaic image that gave a broad overview of the site.

Analysis of the footsteps suggests they belonged to a herd of at least 13 elephants of different sizes and ages that walked through mud, leaving behind tracks that hardened, were buried, and then re-exposed by erosion.

The researchers also discovered tracks from a solitary male traveling in a different direction from the herd. These suggest the extinct giants divided into solitary and social groups, just as elephants do today. Also, these ancient pachyderms might have structured themselves along lines of sex just as their modern relatives do, with the males leaving the herd to live alone.

"Like the human handprints in Paleolithic caves, animal trackways crystallize in time [the] identity and behavior of the organisms that made them, and yield rare insights about these organisms, which fossil bones alone cannot provide," Sanders said. ( LiveScience.com )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | Fossil Footprints Reveal Oldest Elephant Herd

READ MORE - Fossil Footprints Reveal Oldest Elephant Herd

Wind Blew Mountains Away

Wind Blew Mountains Away - The planet huffed and puffed and blew away rock that could have formed mighty mountains, according to new research.

Bedrock in Central Asia that would have formed mountains over the past 3 million years was sandblasted into dust instead, suggesting that winds may be much more powerful in the evolution of mountains than previously thought, said Paul Kapp, a geologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. As this dust was blown away, a weight was lifted off the bedrock, speeding its crumbling.

"No one had ever thought that wind could be this effective," Kapp said. "You won't read in a textbook that wind is a major process in terms of breaking down rock material."

Powerful force

Wind can be just as powerful as rivers and glaciers — the textbook examples of forces that wear down mountains and shape their evolution — Kapp said.

Kapp and his team discovered wind's rock-sculpting abilities by studying huge wind-formed ridges of rock in Central Asia's Qaidam Basin. Fields of these ridges, called yardangs, look like corduroy from space. Wind had scoured long gouges out of the Qaidam Basin bedrock during glacial periods, leaving the ridges behind. Kapp and his team found the missing material on a nearby plateau.

"What we're proposing is that during the glacials [periods when glaciers advance], when it's colder and drier, there's severe wind erosion in the Qaidam basin and the dust gets blown out and deposited downwind in the Loess Plateau," Kapp said. "Loess" is a word for wind-blown silt deposits.

The Loess Plateau is the largest accumulation of dust on Earth. Scientists thought most of the dust came from the Gobi Desert, but Kapp and his colleagues suggest that more than half of the dust came from the Qaidam Basin.

The scientists used a computer model to show that dust from the basin could have formed the plateau. During the last Ice Age, which ended 11,000 years ago, the winds blew from the Gobi Desert toward the Loess Plateau. During glacial periods, the winds blew from the Qaidam Basin toward the Loess Plateau. (The wind is not having such effects now because the climate is different, Kapp said.)

"During the interglacials [warmer periods between glacials], the basin fills up with lakes. When it goes back to a glacial period, lake sediments blow away," Knapp said. "Our hypothesis is that you have lake development, then wind erosion, lake development, wind erosion, lake development — and so on."

Speedier folding

The team suggests wind erosion also sped the bedrock folding in the basin, which folds and crumples as the Indian plate collides with the Asian plate.

"The folding accelerated 3 million years ago," Kapp said. "That's when the wind erosion turned on. I don't think it's a coincidence."

When the winds whisked sediment out of the basin during the glacial periods, the bedrock deformed faster because it was no longer weighed down by all the sediment, a process Knapp called "wind-enhanced tectonics." ( LiveScience.com )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | Wind Blew Mountains Away

READ MORE - Wind Blew Mountains Away

Is the world's largest super-volcano set to erupt for the first time in 600,000 years, wiping out two-thirds of the U.S.?

Is the world's largest super-volcano set to erupt for the first time in 600,000 years, wiping out two-thirds of the U.S.? - The super-volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has been rising at a record rate since 2004

It would explode with a force a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980.

Spewing lava far into the sky, a cloud of plant-killing ash would fan out and dump a layer 10ft deep up to 1,000 miles away.

Two-thirds of the U.S. could become uninhabitable as toxic air sweeps through it, grounding thousands of flights and forcing millions to leave their homes.

On the verge of a catastrophe? Yellowstone National Park's caldera has erupted three times in the last 2.1million years and scientists monitoring it say we could be in for another eruption (file picture)

This is the nightmare that scientists are predicting could happen if the world’s largest super-volcano erupts for the first time in 600,000 years, as it could do in the near future.

Yellowstone National Park’s caldera has erupted three times in the last 2.1million years and researchers monitoring it say we could be in for another eruption.

They said that the super-volcano underneath the Wyoming park has been rising at a record rate since 2004 - its floor has gone up three inches per year for the last three years alone, the fastest rate since records began in 1923.

But hampered by a lack of data they have stopped short of an all-out warning and they are unable to put a date on when the next disaster might take place.

When the eruption finally happens it will dwarf the effect of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which erupted in April last year, causing travel chaos around the world.

The University of Utah's Bob Smith, an expert in Yellowstone's volcanism told National Geographic: ‘It's an extraordinary uplift, because it covers such a large area and the rates are so high.

‘At the beginning we were concerned it could be leading up to an eruption.’

Area of outstanding natural beauty: The Yellowstone caldera (circled in red) in Wyoming is the world's largest super-volcano

Scorched earth: An artist's interpretation of how the Midway Basin in the park might look after an eruption

But he added: ‘Once we saw the magma was at a depth of ten kilometres, we weren't so concerned.

‘If it had been at depths of two or three kilometre we'd have been a lot more concerned.’

Robert B. Smith, professor of geophysics at the University of Utah, who has led a recent study into the volcano, added: ‘Our best evidence is that the crustal magma chamber is filling with molten rock.

‘But we have no idea how long this process goes on before there either is an eruption or the inflow of molten rock stops and the caldera deflates again’.

The Yellowstone Caldera is one of nature’s most awesome creations and sits atop North America’s largest volcanic field.

Its name means ‘cooking pot’ or ‘cauldron’ and it is formed when land collapses following a volcanic explosion.

In Yellowstone, some 400 miles beneath the Earth’s surface is a magma ‘hotspot’ which rises to 30 miles underground before spreading out over an area of 300 miles across.

Atop this, but still beneath the surface, sits the slumbering volcano.

July 22, 1980: Mount St Helens in Washington erupts. A Yellowstone caldera eruption would explode with a force a thousand times more powerful

Scientists monitoring it believe that a swelling magma reservoir six miles underground may be causing the recent uplifts.

They have also been keeping an eye on a ‘pancake-shaped blob’ of molten rock he size of Los Angeles which was pressed into the volcano some time ago.

But due the extreme conditions it has been hard to work out what exactly is going on down below, leading researchers unable to say with certainty what will happen - or when.

Since the most recent blast 640,000 years ago there have been around 30 smaller eruptions, the most recent of which was 70,000 years ago.

They filled the caldera with ash and lava and made the flat landscape that draws thousands of tourists to Yellowstone National Park every year.

‘Clearly some deep source of magma feeds Yellowstone, and since Yellowstone has erupted in the recent geological past, we know that there is magma at shallower depths too,’ said Dan Dzurisin, a Yellowstone expert with the U.S. Geological Survey at Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington State.

‘There has to be magma in the crust, or we wouldn't have all the hydrothermal activity that we have.

‘There is so much heat coming out of Yellowstone right now that if it wasn't being reheated by magma, the whole system would have gone stone cold since the time of the last eruption 70,000 years ago.’ ( dailymail.co.uk )

Blog : Shadow Of Death | Is the world's largest super-volcano set to erupt for the first time in 600,000 years, wiping out two-thirds of the U.S.?

READ MORE - Is the world's largest super-volcano set to erupt for the first time in 600,000 years, wiping out two-thirds of the U.S.?