Doomsday: 10 Ways the World Will End (2016) s01e06 Episode Script

- It's a volcanic eruption like no other in the history of mankind.
- We're talking complete devastation.
We're talking erasing things.
- An explosion so huge that it's unimaginable.
- The entire planet is suddenly a killing field.
- You would have to wonder, "Is this the end? Is this the apocalypse?" - It's a dangerous universe.
There's a lot of ways the human race can go extinct.
- Will you be ready when Doomsday strikes? Can any of us survive? 640,000 years ago, a supervolcano erupted in what is now Yellowstone National Park.
If it happened again today, millions would die.
But the Earth can produce volcanic blasts even more deadly.
Could you survive a hyper-eruption? - It's pretty much the worst day that the Earth has had for 60 million years.
- There's very little that we could do to sustain ourselves.
- Imagine people dying all around the world.
- There aren't enough people left alive to bury all the dead bodies.
- It's possible that no one survives.
- It's a beautiful day in America's oldest national park, Yellowstone, where its famous hot springs bubble and steam.
It's been a tourist attraction for nearly 150 years.
Old Faithful is the biggest draw.
It has erupted more than a million times in the park's history.
- C'est magnifique, ca.
- 200-degree water shoots 185 feet into the air.
It's heated by magma, the molten rock from the Earth's interior, which is unusually close to the surface here.
It's a volcanic hot spot and it's the force driving all the geysers and hot springs at Yellowstone.
- The way it works is you have water slowly heating up underground in sort of a cavity underground.
And eventually, that water starts to boil.
And the boiling process causes kind of a water and steam explosion to go shooting up a crevice and whoo blowing out into the air in a big fountain that goes about 100 feet up.
The underground processes that power Old Faithful can grow to massive scales.
Super-eruptions, like the one 640 million years ago, can eject 10,000 times the amount of ash and rock than more common volcanic eruptions like Mount Saint Helens.
- Past super-eruptions in Yellowstone have broken through the surface in places where the Earth's crust is relatively thin.
But in this region, there are also parts of the crust that are a hundred miles thick.
And this allows for an even more dangerous situation to take shape deep underground.
- Directly over the hot spot of the thickest part of the crust gases will start to migrate up into the crust until they get trapped at around 50 miles deep.
And they'll build up there and build up there based on the physics until eventually, the force of all that dissolved gas overwhelms the strength of the rock over top.
And then it'll fail.
And what does that mean when an enormous section of the Earth's crust fails? Think, uh, like a cork coming out of a champagne bottle, but this one has a slug that's 50 miles tall.
- It could be the most devastating volcanic event of all.
Not a super-eruption, but a hyper-eruption.
- A hyper-eruption is at a whole other order of magnitude.
Hyper-eruption, in comparison to a super-eruption, is a bit like comparing a stick of dynamite to a firecracker.
- A tourist from Mexico City live-streams his friends back home as he hikes around Yellowstone Lake.
Little does he know, he's 75 miles from the epicenter of what will be a cataclysmic blast.
- Pressure is building up for centuries, up until a point in time where all the gas comes out of the molten rock.
Creating a hyper-eruption, an explosion so huge that it's unimaginable.
It projects tons of rock up into the sky.
- It would look like a laser beam of rock being fired from the Earth towards space.
- So imagine this huge column of molten rock.
It's 1,500 feet across and 50 mile high.
That amount of molten rock is shot into the sky, into sub-orbital height.
It's almost like a, like a missile.
- In one brief moment, the hyper-eruption sets in motion a series of devastating events, threatening all of life as we know it.
Will anyone survive? - What would happen if a volcanic hyper-eruption 100 billion times more powerful than the 1980 Mount St.
Helens blast exploded in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park, triggering a worldwide disaster? Would you survive? A Boeing 737 cruises past Yellowstone National Park on a routine flight to Atlanta.
In an instant, a giant pillar of red-hot rock reaches the plane's altitude of 35,000 feet.
- It would be hit by a A fist of material.
- As it shoots molten rock skyward, the hyper-eruption produces an explosive release of energy That generates a seismic shock wave unlike anything in human history.
- It's likely to be equivalent to a magnitude-11 earthquake.
- Survival depends on your location.
10,000 people live in nearby Cody, Wyoming.
Most of them are killed in two seconds, victims of the powerful shock wave.
Inside the park itself, the shock wave reaches Yellowstone's Old Faithful And its historic inn, built in 1903.
Hundreds of people inside are crushed or trapped.
- Whoa.
- What the heck? - Come on, come on! - Imagine blowing up all the nuclear arsenal of the earth all together.
Now, imagine that 500 times stronger.
That's the kind of explosion that we're imagining here.
From above the shores of Yellowstone Lake, 75 miles away, it's easy to see the eruption's bizarre pillar of light.
- The rod of light would be going essentially as high as you could see.
It would be 100 miles above you.
As high as you could see, to the To the top of the sky.
- The Mexican hiker above the lake streams video to the web.
- No one has seen anything like this before.
For all intents and purposes this looks exactly like an asteroid impact happening in reverse.
It's as though the Earth has projected an enormous amount of itself out into space at blinding speeds.
- Another five seconds later the shock wave hits.
[Umbling.]
Travelling at 18,000 miles per hour, the blast wave reaches Salt Lake City 260 miles away in less than one minute.
- The great Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City was reinforced against earthquake at roughly Richter 8.
The building would collapse.
The spires would crumble as if there were no reinforcement whatsoever.
The difference between the magnitude of this shaking and the magnitude of the shaking from a Richter-8 earthquake is roughly a thousand fold.
- And this is just the beginning of the disaster.
In less than a minute, 25,000 people are dead.
The survivors are the lucky ones who avoid debris from collapsing buildings.
The shock wave's killer strength will extend 500 miles in all directions.
But that's just the beginning.
What follows could be the greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind.
- 640,000 years ago, a supervolcano erupted, killing millions of prehistoric creatures, roaming the ancient landscape.
What if an even bigger explosion, a volcanic hyper-eruption, happened today? Could you survive? Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
The most powerful volcanic event ever witnessed by mankind has just rocked the Earth.
A massive shock wave, equivalent to a magnitude-11 earthquake, now radiates out in all directions.
25,000 people are already dead, most of them in the falling buildings of Salt Lake City, 260 miles away.
- 400 miles to the northeast, in Trenton, North Dakota, oil tanker trains 118-cars-long come and go at a shipping terminal.
When the shock wave hits The terminal storage tanks rupture, and with the first random spark, 550,000 gallons of oil explode.
- These are no ordinary fires.
These are fires of black crude oil, which is spewing carbon smoke into the atmosphere.
Completely black.
Completely opaque.
Completely toxic.
- Dozens of terminal workers are burned to death in the explosions.
And the thick smoke cloud reaches a mile in height.
- 400 miles south of Yellowstone, campers at Utah's Arches National Park suspect nothing as they gaze at the spectacular sandstone landmarks.
- Arches National Park is a majestic collection of somewhere around 2,000 sandstone arches that have been eroded by wind to leave a gap underneath.
- Created after the sandstone was exposed to the elements, the arches have taken 15 million years to form.
Delicate Arch, 65 feet tall, is the most popular and famous the world over.
Landscape Arch is the longest, stretching 290 feet end to end.
And Balanced Rock, weighing 3,500 tons, is an improbable oddity few photographers can resist.
- Sandstone is not the best building material.
And so when you experience a strong seismic shock like this, these arches, which have lasted for millennia and which were patiently carved by rain and floodwater, will come tumbling down.
- Oh, my God.
Come on.
[Creeching.]
- Oh wow.
- Video and pictures from both Arches and Yellowstone race around the internet.
And as the world gets wind of what's happening in America, the devastation near the eruption site only gets worse.
Around Yellowstone's glowing pillar of molten rock, a mushroom cloud forms.
- This mushroom cloud is being propelled by so much heat that's been generated, it can move higher through the atmosphere than anything we've ever seen like it before.
We're talking 40, 50, 60, higher, miles into the sky to the edge of space.
- 75 miles away, a blast of air traveling at the speed of sound reaches the waters of Lake Yellowstone, creating a deadly tsunami.
150 people drown in the onrushing wave.
- The only survivors are those who make it to high ground.
The air blast also generates a deafening sound.
It's a phenomenon seen on a much smaller scale in 2014, when the Mount Tavurvur volcano became active in Papua, New Guinea.
- Watch out for the shock, it's coming.
- The sound of the eruption took about 13 seconds to reach the boat, just under three miles away.
- Oh! - Holy smokin' Toledos! - The Yellowstone hyper-eruption is thousands of times more powerful.
The explosive sound doesn't reach Salt Lake City until long after the initial jolt.
That's because the seismic waves travel much faster than sound waves.
- The Earth is much stiffer than the air, and so disturbances travel much faster through the stiff material.
So the seismic waves reach Salt Lake City well before the sound waves do.
It takes about 22 minutes before the sound of the explosion is heard in Salt Lake City.
- The sound of the blast is so loud that even as far as 2,000 miles away, it measures more than 150 decibels.
It's like standing next to a jet at takeoff, and is easily enough to rupture people's eardrums.
Then the eruption ends, almost as suddenly as it began.
- A hyper-eruption takes place much faster than an ordinary volcanic eruption.
It's over within ten minutes or so.
After the eruption, after the smoke and dust has cleared, there's a crater that's several miles wide.
- The western United States has been hit hard.
From Yellowstone to Salt Lake City and beyond, 35,000 are dead.
Survivors are left to sort through the wreckage in the 500-mile circle of destruction.
But this catastrophic event is about to go global.
37 billion tons of volcanic debris, heated up to more than 3,000 degrees, is flying through space more than 200 miles up.
When it comes crashing down, it will be more powerful than a nuclear bomb.
- The most powerful volcanic eruption in human history has just rocked Yellowstone National Park.
Could you survive? - 50,000 people are dead.
And cities are in ruin across the American and Canadian west from the powerful seismic shock of the hyper-eruption.
- In the wreckage, a traumatized population struggles as water, power, and other essentials are cut off.
Those who have stockpiles of supplies will survive.
Those without are in peril.
Emergency relief is rushed to Salt Lake City and other devastated communities within hundreds of miles of the eruption.
But they are unable to cope with the magnitude of the destruction.
- Some people would think the end of the world had come.
No one is prepared for a disaster of this magnitude.
- Meanwhile, the force of the hyper-eruption is about to wreak more havoc.
The volcano's 50-mile-high column of molten rock is flying through the atmosphere.
- It's a little bit like a shotgun blast that peppers an area, that spreads out a little bit, but it doesn't spread out to cover the entire Earth.
- The salvo of debris spans the border of the United States and Canada.
Millions of red-hot projectiles slam down on Seattle and Vancouver.
- It's like if you've ever been in a hailstorm with thick balls of hail, except these are even heavier, coming down with a lot of momentum Smashing into cars, breaking windows, going through the roofs of houses.
- The calculations show that a hyper-eruption would push out about three cubic miles of material.
Three cubic miles of material is like about 12,000 Empire State Buildings all landing in one region.
The only way to survive the onslaught is to be lucky enough for the projectiles to miss you.
Deep underground shelter may help, but not if it's hit by something really big.
- Of the stuff that's raining down on the area, you'd expect a range of sizes, everything from gravel or, uh, pebbles all the way up to large buildings or even stadium sizes.
- Vancouver's art deco city hall, with its distinctive 12-story tower, was built in 1936 and is only 250 feet wide.
- Vancouver City Hall would simply disappear.
It's important to keep in mind that the ejecta coming back down is very similar to an asteroid striking from space.
So where Vancouver City Hall used to be, you'd now have a crater that's more than a mile wide.
Two hours after the eruption, people around the world start literally hearing the massive volcanic explosion as its sound waves circle the globe at 767 miles per hour.
In Mexico City, 1,800 miles from the site of the blast, it sounds like thunder.
- It would be the shot heard around the world several times around.
- And within six hours The eerie noise hits Europe Africa And Asia.
- The sound that it makes, like a ripple, will travel all the way around the world once every 32 hours or so and keep going maybe three times before eventually the intensity of that sound dropped below the limit of human hearing.
- Across the world, the sound of the blast is merely a sign of things to come.
The far-reaching effects of the eruption will be more disastrous than anyone realizes.
- There's actually another killing mechanism lurking behind all of this.
And it's one that could actually threaten the entire human civilization across the globe.
- 640,000 years ago, a supervolcano erupted in what is now Yellowstone National Park.
What if an even more powerful and deadly blast Happened today? The Yellowstone hyper-eruption is the first of its kind in human history.
The sheer explosive force of the hyper-eruption, its mighty shock waves And the ensuing rain of volcanic debris that followed has toppled buildings, destroyed cities, and ignited fires up to 500 miles away.
Hundreds of thousands are dead or injured.
But a month after the blast, the worst is yet to come.
- Frightening conclusions tonight from scientists following last months so-called "hyper-eruption" in the United States.
The sulfuric gas it released threatens to plunge the entire planet into a prolonged winter.
- Sulfur dioxide is not a gas that you want put into the atmosphere in large quantities.
It does a couple things, none of which are particularly good for the environment.
Most importantly, the sulfur gas, sulfur dioxide, when it goes into the atmosphere is converted into sulfuric acid.
Tiny droplets or aerosol droplets of sulfuric acid, which form clouds, which cause the sunlight effectively to bounce off and dramatically cool down the ground below.
- The upper atmosphere is flooded with sulfur compounds from the eruption, blocking sunlight, chilling the climate, and plunging the world into a sudden ice age.
As the deep freeze takes hold, civilization is slowly brought to its knees.
The canals of Venice are frozen.
The wheat fields of the Midwest are dead.
Blizzards whip across landscapes everywhere, making travel nearly impossible and bringing normal life to a grinding halt.
- Once the temperature starts plummeting, life as we know it is gonna fundamentally change.
- Now, survival becomes a question of finding food for those left alive.
- So I think people would start hoarding food very quickly.
Looting, that's a possibility.
If you're thinking about feeding your family, you might think about stealing food from stores.
- The severe blocking of sunlight that would follow a hyper-eruption would lead to something like 99% of the plant life on Earth dying.
And that die-off would have severe consequences for the food webs that most life on Earth depends on.
- By some accounts, you're reaching 6 billion people dying from lack of food.
- They say we have about a year's worth of food for everyone on the planet.
- That includes everything in grain silos, warehouses, processing plants, remaining livestock.
After the first year of the ice age Food for humans, for creatures of all kinds, will be gone.
- Almost all animals of all species will die because they don't have nutrition.
This is what happens in a mass extinction.
- What happens to a world brought to its knees by the worst volcanic eruption in history? The Yellowstone hyper-eruption has left cities in ruins.
And its volcanic gases have blanketed the atmosphere, blocking the sun, and triggering a global ice age that has brought civilization to the brink.
Decimated by starvation, the human population plummets to less than 1 billion people.
- You've reached a point now where there aren't enough people left alive to bury all of the dead bodies.
You would have entire populations either vacate or die in place.
- Some survive by luck.
Those who happen to live in narrow equatorial regions do not freeze.
Other people find clever strategies to adapt and overcome the extreme cold.
Perhaps surprisingly, a chance of life exists in Iceland, where cold was already a way of life before the disaster.
- They are already used to an almost barren environment.
And they certainly have the knowledge and the technique necessary to, I believe, adapt to such an environment.
- Iceland has something that most populated parts of the planet don't: An underground source of heat and energy.
The country sits on top of a volcanic hot spot.
Survivors here are able to harness that heat to keep greenhouses warm despite freezing temperatures.
With the collapse of traditional outdoor farming, these indoor farms will be a key to survival.
More than 1,500 miles away in Denmark, another colony of survivors uses technology that had been under development in the country since 2001.
They're turning natural gas into food.
- Natural gas is mostly composed of methane.
And, as it turns out, there are some microorganisms that can eat methane for food.
And one of the strategies for finding an alternate food supply after a disaster like this is supplying these bacteria with natural gas, and then harvesting them as food themselves.
- Half of Denmark's natural gas is kept in underground storage near the town of Stenlille.
Here a food factory is built.
They feed the gas to the methane-eating bacteria.
The microbes are then dried to produce a highly nutritious edible protein.
These survivors have weathered the worst of the hyper-eruption's effects.
Now, ten years after the volcanic disaster began Earth's climate is about to turn a corner.
- After about a decade, the sulfur dioxide has rained out of the atmosphere, and its effects on the climate start to wane.
But that's when the effects of the other gas produced by the hyper-eruption start to rear its head.
And that's carbon dioxide.
And that will actually take the climate in the opposite direction and start to warm everything.
- The rapid warming period is slow to die down.
It's gonna last for thousands of years after the eruption.
- The world may have suffered a mass extinction, but human beings are among those who dodged the bullet.
- We are talking about 99.
99% of all humans dying.
But that is not an extinction.
That is just a terrible calamity.
- We won't be able to survive in the same way that we're doing right now.
We won't be able to have big infrastructure projects.
We won't have large numbers of people living together for that matter.
- As the Earth begins to warm, how long will it take humanity's few survivors to rebuild civilization? - 200 years after the disaster, plant life has started to repopulate.
And this began as ferns and ground plant life across the mainland.
And slowly, trees now start to recover, forests.
- Imagine how many cities will be first frozen, then empty of people, devoid of life, and then probably forgotten.
And as the planet warms up again, the green will come back to those long-forgotten cities.
Two centuries after the eruption, civilization begins to revive itself.
And despite the extent of the global disaster, mankind won't necessarily have to return to a primitive existence.
- The Dark Ages in Europe, people forgot about Rome.
It took humankind a thousand years to get back to where the Greeks and the Romans had been.
But that's not gonna happen this time.
We know too much.
- The planet and its people now live in a new world, whose history took a sharp turn with the volcanic explosion at Yellowstone.
The hyper-eruption's crater is filled with water from nearby streams and rivers, a striking landmark that will last for thousands of years.
- It's a lake, surrounded by vegetation.
And I think ironically it actually looks very idyllic.
It would be calm.
I think for the survivors of the new civilization that comes thereafter, this would be a symbol.
And it actually represents the beginning of the new world, as opposed to the end.