Original subtitles

A freak cosmic collision.

A fatal shock to the Earth's interior.

Triggers all the world's volcanoes to erupt.

This is a class one volcanic zone. In a week, you will be dead.

Could humanity prevail?

Leading minds join forces.

To craft scientifically plausible scenarios of Armageddon.

And find the secret to human salvation in the

face of ultimate disaster.

Tickets, please.

Ticket.

There you go. We actually live in an incredibly precarious place in the

We live on the outer layers of a ball of molten rock that is itself a tiny speck

around a small star that's one of 200 billion stars in a galaxy that's

its way through a universe of 200 billion other galaxies.

Ticket.

There are all sorts of very fast, very dangerous objects racing around out

in the galaxy.

And if they come into our neighborhood, they will do some very real damage.

Just about all these objects reflect light, so chances are we'd see them

from a very long way off.

There are other projectiles we would never see coming, and one of those is

called a primordial black hole.

A primordial black hole does not reflect any light.

Therefore, it's essentially invisible to us.

What time will we be getting to Dayton? 30 minutes.

Thank you.

A primordial black hole is different from these huge black holes we often

about. It's a theoretical space body that we believe is left over from the

Bang.

It's a very, very small object. It can't be smaller even than an atom.

And yet it's incredibly dense and heavy, possessing perhaps one -tenth the mass

of the Earth. And with those properties, if one of them was to collide with the

Earth, it could shoot through us like a bullet through an apple.

Take it.

How big a hole is the primordial black hole going to make in the Earth?

Well, the size of the atom is probably going to make a hole about 100 yards, no

more, across.

Really quite a small hole, except it's going to go all the way through the

planet.

It's going to hit the Earth at a very high rate of speed, maybe 20 miles per

second. At that speed, it'll transit through the entire body of the Earth and

come out the other side in about... Six minutes.

This is Peter Pacific shipment R1817 from Perth. Position 32 -22

-109 -47.

We're seeing some kind of vortex or something just flew out of the ocean.

There's a huge wave.

We're going to cap that.

Now as traumatic as this is, the planet can probably take it.

Earth could probably absorb that kind of impact.

The real problems emerge inside the Earth.

moves through the planet, its destructive power is going to release

amounts of energy.

The order of several hundred gigatons of explosive energy.

The energy relief could be equivalent to setting off as many as 100 ,000 atomic

bombs inside of the Earth.

That's a lot of energy, and that's going to send shockwaves radiating out.

And when those shock waves hit the crust of the Earth from the inside, it's

going to shake up our world in some very deadly ways.

It is a volcanic disaster without precedent. At least five active

around the world have erupted in the last 24 hours.

Near Mexico City, hundreds have died when steaming mudslides flowed into

homes.

An international coalition of geologists is gathering in New York to review data

and present their findings.

Good morning. To briefly recap, four days ago, we believe a very small

black hole shot through the center of the Earth.

This event has caused a series of shockwaves going through the Earth's

We've seen an unprecedented spike in global volcanic activity.

And this is why those shockwaves are so frightening. As they ripple out from the

Earth's core, they're going to impact all the magma chambers in all the

volcanoes all over the Earth.

And that's going to drive those volcanoes straight towards eruption.

People might not even be all that scared at first.

Is this your first time to see raw lava like this? Yeah.

It looks like you're having a lot of fun with it.

Volcanoes are interesting, they're exciting, and some may seek them out for

thrill.

The engine that makes the volcano erupt is something we call the magma chamber.

And a magma chamber is a blob of molten rock that lives inside or under a

volcano. And that molten rock comes from Earth's mantle deep within the Earth.

It can get up to around 2 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

And when it gets hot, it will melt and hot things rise.

And so the melt from the mantle rises up toward the surface of the Earth until

it reaches a place where it can't go up any higher.

It sits there, and it stews and it bubbles.

Now there's all this liquid rock bubbling away under immense pressure,

there's gas mixed into the magma, and that makes the pressure even greater.

Gas is always the biggest problem in volcanoes.

And when you get enough gas collected inside a magma chamber, it will blow up.

As the stress wave was to pass through a magma body, it could cause bubbles to

grow as gases in that magma come out of solution, and these bubbles cause a

massive increase in pressure in the magma body.

Many volcanoes that have magma sitting beneath them could be pushed to the

of eruption.

We anticipate that within the next six months to a year, almost every major

volcanic system is going to experience an event of a catastrophic scale.

The key concern now is the world's super volcanoes.

Lake Taupo in New Zealand, Lake Toba in Indonesia, Campi Flegrei in Italy,

and here, of course, in the U .S., Yellowstone.

A supervolcano is one that would erupt somewhere between hundreds of cubic

or thousands of cubic kilometers of material within a short time, days to

That's a lot of stuff.

The explosive power of a supervolcano may be up to a thousand times the power

the atomic bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima.

We think there are around a dozen supervolcanoes on Earth.

If one of them went off, that would have global effect.

It's going to throw the world into financial and biological chaos.

More than one super eruption would throw us back into the Stone Age.

Our top priority now is to try and predict when these systems could erupt.

How can we do it?

How can we get enough inside information about a volcano to know when it will

erupt and how big, how deadly that eruption will be?

And these are questions we can answer by imaging the magma chamber and trying to

understand its shape and dimensions.

It's 236 and 237.

But there is a brand new technology that helps us do just that.

It's basically an MRI for volcanoes.

It creates images using tiny particles called muons.

Muons are subatomic particles that are created constantly in the Earth's

atmosphere as we are bombarded with cosmic radiation from space.

And even as we're sitting here, thousands of these muons will have been

through my body.

A muon detector is placed at the base of a volcano to detect the muons that are

passing through it. And by measuring the difference in the intensity of these

particles, we can build up a picture of what's inside the volcano.

If you have all this information, then you have probably a very good

understanding how close to an eruption a volcano is.

are scrambling to retrieve reliable data on the Earth's super volcanoes as the

world braces for a possible chain of cataclysmic eruptions in the wake of a

collision with a subatomic black hole.

But even as we get a clearer picture of what's churning inside the super

volcanoes, other problems will begin to present themselves.

The Earth keeps a lot of nasty stuff under its skin, and some of it will come

bubbling up in waves that we can't anticipate.

So here's what we're up against. Due to a rare cosmic phenomenon, a collision

with a primordial black hole has agitated the Earth and shaken it up from

inside.

Besides causing a string of violent volcanic eruptions, this event will

attacks from an invisible enemy known as a limnic eruption.

A limnic eruption is essentially the eruption of a volcanic lake.

They're extremely deadly because they're very surprising.

And what happens is you get a volcano that has a crater on top of it.

from a previous eruption, and if it's located in an area that gets a lot of

rainfall, that crater will fill up with water.

If the volcano contains a magma chamber that has a lot of gas in it, the

gas bubbles, usually carbon dioxide, will start to bubble out, and they get

the bottom of the lake, and they will just build up there.

This is because the pressure at the bottom of the lake is high enough that

instead of forming bubbles and escaping into the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide

is able to become dissolved into the lake water.

A shock wave from inside the earth will agitate this gas -rich water like it's

shaking a can of soda.

Thousands of tons of gas come out of pollution and bubble right to the

And when this is released catastrophically from the surface of the

massive cloud of deadly CO2 can actually flow downhill, displacing the air as it

goes.

And anybody caught in the wake of this cloud will be suffocated.

It will kill indiscriminately all living things that need oxygen for survival.

The only survivors will be probably plants.

Officials say more than 25 ,000 people are dead on the outskirts of Managua

after an eruption of carbon dioxide from a nearby volcanic crater. Most of the

victims were sleeping when the eruption occurred.

and had no warning.

Searchers are still finding bodies in otherwise undisturbed homes.

A

big limnic

eruption will focus the world's attention on what's coming next, the

volcano. Which ones are most likely to explode? And how big will those

be?

The way that scientists categorize the size of a volcanic eruption is using

something called the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

This is sort of like a Richter scale for a volcano.

An eruption that most people in the United States are familiar with, or at

have heard of, is the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980.

And that was a pretty destructive and phenomenal eruption.

Around 64 people were killed by that eruption.

So that 1980 eruption would have had a volcano explosivity index of four.

The explosivity index of a supervolcano would be on the order of eight or nine.

What you have to know to understand these indices is that the steps between

numbers, so from six to seven or from four to five, it's not just one time

larger. It is ten times larger.

So when we're talking of a supereruption with an explosivity index of eight,

That's 10 ,000 times bigger than a Mount St. Helens eruption.

Volcanoes don't typically erupt without showing signs of their awakening

beforehand. It is usually possible to give a forecast that an eruption is

becoming increasingly likely.

Magma that is starting to fracture a path to the surface will start to break

rock above it, and these will cause many, many earthquakes.

As earthquakes and other warning signs of coming eruptions become more common,

the pressure will grow on governments to take some kind of action, even

preventive action, to somehow use human technologies to divert or defeat these

volcanoes.

People have tried all kinds of things to try to stop volcanic eruptions, and

none of them have worked so far.

Dropping a nuclear bomb in a volcano would be an extremely foolish thing to

It is possible that you could destabilize the structure enough to

initiate an eruption.

A tiny black hole has collided with Earth, shaking up the planet from the

inside.

And now, just about every volcano on Earth is headed towards eruption.

And a few governments, out of sheer desperation, are trying to do whatever

can to prevent this catastrophe.

There's really nothing humans can do to change the behavior of a volcano.

We have no ability, zero ability to prevent an eruption.

The only man -made device we have that even approaches the forces inside a

volcano is a nuclear weapon.

So if you tried to use a nuclear weapon to stop a volcanic eruption, it would

not work.

At best, you would hope for it to have no effect, but it is possible that you

could destabilize the structure enough to actually initiate an eruption.

In an ill -fated attempt to forestall a volcanic eruption, The government of

North Korea detonated a nuclear device inside Baikdu Mountain.

The effect was catastrophic, triggering a major eruption.

An enormous cloud of radioactive ash and steam has enveloped the North Korean

city of Chongjin.

Experts say there is little hope for the city's 600 ,000 residents.

The Russian government has ordered its fleet out of Vladivostok.

In Japan, evacuation plans are already underway for the Kyushu Islands, where

eruptions from two separate volcanoes could spell death for some 30 million

citizens.

When a volcano explodes, what you'd see is this column of dark material rising

up into the sky.

And that's what we call volcanic ash.

Volcanic ash is not really ash at all. It's made of very fine particles of

glass. It's frozen magma shards.

It would look like a snowfall, except it's not snow, it's ash.

It weighs a lot more than snow. It's going to cause buildings to collapse.

It is also very damaging to engines.

as it will clog up the air system, and in the case of airplanes, can coat the

engines in a fine film of glass, which stops them working.

When volcanic ash falls on power lines, it can coat these lines in a fine layer

of volcanic dust.

When this becomes wet, it actually becomes conductive, and this can short

the power lines, effectively shutting down the grid.

So now we have a giant ash cloud drifting out over East Asia.

And volcanic ash is catastrophic for crop.

You've ruined the food chain for that year and probably for many years in the

future.

If you live within a thousand miles of an eruption, your environment could be

poisoned for years.

The only way you can live through that kind of ash cloud is to seal yourself

away.

You'd have to create for yourself a closed ecosystem, a mini -world that was

sealed off from everything else.

The term we use for this is a biosphere.

A biosphere is essentially something that would simulate life on Earth in a

contained environment that might be able to keep out all that's happening on the

planet and simulate within it all the processes necessary to keep people,

plants, and animals alive.

Let's get down to the bare bones of it.

What do human beings need to thrive?

Air, water, food, shelter.

People have been working on biospheres for actually several decades or longer.

The idea being the self -contained unit totally sealed, grow its own food, its

own medicine. It could live without any contact in the outside world.

Can we do this? Can we build a completely enclosed world?

It might be our only hope.

Just like that.

And our whole world changed.

And there's not a place on this planet you can hide from it.

Or maybe there is.

Maybe there's a safe place, a safe haven.

The question is, who would fund the biosphere?

It could be the government, but it could also be a billionaire who has the

wisdom and the monetary wherewithal to say, you know what, let's do this.

When the volcanism crisis hit, I had a vision.

A vision of a new world.

In a habitat like safe haven, you have to choose your food supply carefully to

maximize the nutrition you get for the space you have available.

Ultimately, you might have to think about limiting the population because

everyone has to eat. Now, this isn't surviving.

This is living.

Any biosphere we'd want to construct would have to be built very quickly, and

we'd have to get them up and running on a very short timetable. Within a few

months, really.

The volcanoes won't give us very much time to spare.

When they go off, every life on the planet will be in danger.

The Earth is in crisis.

A tiny black hole has punched through the planet and shaken up every volcano.

Now, the U .S. has its fair share of volcanoes, especially in the West. But

crisis like this, all eyes will turn to one place.

Yellowstone.

Yellowstone Park lies above a huge body of magma that has been accumulating in

the Earth's crust at a depth of about 5 to 6 miles.

And this vast area of magma is about 25 to 50 miles across and could be

considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes on the Earth today.

Every time something wiggles or breathes or moves on Yellowstone, we're on it.

We've never seen Yellowstone erupt. We don't know what its signals are. So

watching very, very carefully in the hopes that we would be able to identify

signal of a big eruption.

We've got to get out of here.

Now, after weeks of waiting, warning signs of eruption have been detected at

America's biggest supervolcano, Yellowstone.

Think of the worst disaster you've ever experienced or read about.

Yellowstone going off would make those look like a walk in the park.

Millions of Americans across eight states from the Central West are now

hoping to put some distance between themselves and the volcanic catastrophe

may be coming within the next few days.

The Department of the Interior changed the status of the pre -eruption

evacuation

to mandatory.

Come on in. Welcome to Safe Haven.

Hello, sweetheart.

Head on through.

At a certain point, the clock is just going to run out.

There will be no time left to build anything or come up with a new idea. The

solutions we put in place are the solutions we're going to live with.

Even if there are still problems and rough edges.

Communities like Safe Haven will be available only to those few people who

buy their way in. But what about the rest of us? What about the 99 %?

In this scenario, there's really only one thing the government can do,

Many people will decide not to evacuate or not to evacuate until it's almost too

late. If you saved all your life to buy a house and you know that you're going

to lose that house, the decision to evacuate or to follow the order might

as simple as we think.

Sir, this is a class one high risk volcanic zone.

I'm not moving from here.

People are enormously attached to place.

We don't totally understand it. What you don't understand is in a week, this

house will not be here. You will be dead.

It is so strong.

First place, they won't leave.

Secondly, they will try to go back.

The fact is, human beings are as unpredictable as volcanoes are.

When Mount St. Helens was about to erupt, some people chose to stay.

The government had no system, no protocol for forcing them to evacuate.

You don't mind working in the shadow of the mountain, then? No, not at all.

There's nothing to be scared of.

A fair number of those people who stayed died.

Most people, I think, in the world are used to the fact that the government has

not saved them and does not do much for them.

In this scenario, I think a lot of people would look for their own

however improvised those solutions might be.

An average adult requires about 1 .1 million calories annually to survive.

So it's possible to scrounge up enough food to last for decades, but that's a

lot of scrounging.

Hey, Dad!

The world's landscape is sprinkled with infrastructure that can in a pinch.

be used as improvised biospheres.

There are fallout shelters, grain silos, industrial buildings. A lot of concrete

has been poured in the last 50 years.

And I think this is where everyday people in small groups would try to

their lives.

If you could find a livable space underground with breathable air that has

ash in it, drinkable water and a food supply, you could last a very long time.

And you might need to be prepared to wait 20 or 30 years.

The main caldera is heaving at an incredible rate.

Yellowstone is going into full eruption.

If you are within range of this broadcast, take shelter as quickly as

We have no way of knowing how long this will last or how bad it's going to get.

It's being called the beginning of the... The Yellowstone caldera has

and a national state of emergency has been declared in the U .S. Assistance

coming in, ranging from medical assistance to technical assistance.

If Yellowstone were to go off,

what would we experience?

Well, within...

A hundred to a thousand miles of Yellowstone, there would be blankets of

meters, yards deep.

It would block out the daylight for a few days in the western U .S. Anybody

living within a couple hundred miles, dead.

Then those particles would be carried towards the east coast.

And most likely they'd make it all the way to the big cities along the eastern

seaboard and even across the Atlantic.

If you had billions of these ash particles rubbing against each other in

atmosphere, that's generating a lot of static electricity.

And so you could have the potential for an electromagnetic pull.

That's a big relief of electric or magnetic energy.

That's bad news.

Computers don't like electromagnetic pulses.

We are so integrated into our cell phones and the Internet, and that will

gone.

People will freak out. I mean, I think there's going to be mass hysteria

there will be no way to communicate.

In a crisis like this, there will be very few places in North America where

drinking water won't be contaminated by ash.

At this point, by simply breathing, you'll be inhaling pulverized ash

into your lungs.

We will be inhaling huge amounts of quartz crystals, or you can look at them

being glass shards, which will penetrate the lung tissue and stick to it.

We will develop a disease called silicosis.

And its most acute form, acute silicosis, is a very deadly disease with

high mortality.

Yellowstone will deal a devastating blow to the U .S. population and will

threaten the survival of the U .S. government.

We would need...

A lot of help from other countries to get us through that. We would need

resources, food, fresh water.

There aren't too many other sources in the world that could help feed and water

the population of the United States.

The United States government appealed to the European Union for disaster relief.

Super eruptions of the Yellowstone and Vales Calderas have paralyzed the

American West and northern Mexico.

Fighting has been reported in the port of Oakland as desperate mobs have tried

to commandeer merchant vessels to escape the Bay Area by sea. But the EU has

delayed its reply.

They are nervously eyeing their own supervolcano.

Mites in Europe could be extinguished by one system alone, the copy of Flegretti

Caldera near Naples.

Many people are familiar with Vesuvius on the west coast of Italy, and this

volcano famously produced the eruption that destroyed the Roman town of

However, the Bay of Naples itself is actually a giant volcanic caldera called

Campi Flegrei. This is capable of producing eruptions far in excess of the

of activity that we've seen from Vesuvius.

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it killed thousands of people. The main

from this volcano is something we call a pyroclastic flow.

A pyroclastic flow is a red -hot mixture of volcanic ash and gas that travels

across the land at several hundreds of miles per hour and can travel tens to

hundreds of miles distant.

Extremely hot, up to about 1 ,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

One breath would really be all it would take. You inhale something that hot,

it's going to burn your lungs, and when your lungs are burned, they don't work.

If you can see a pyroplastic flow coming, it is very likely that you're

to get out of its way. They literally obliterate everything in their path.

You stand no chance of survival.

Oh, my God!

And what happens in the case of Campi Flagelli, actually, is that people live.

inside the caldera.

It's going to be an enormous eruption.

If Campi Flegrei were to erupt, it would be a lot worse than Vesuvius.

Once Yellowstone and Campi Flegrei have erupted,

It's just a matter of time before the other supervolcanoes erupt.

And that will be the ultimate test of all our preparations for survival.

When the clock finally ticks down and the supervolcano starts to erupt, that's

when our worst nightmares become real.

We're facing a real -life hell on earth.

Naples, Italy has been ravaged by the eruption of the Campi Flegrei caldera.

100 ,000 residents are feared dead in the grim echo of the destruction of

Pompeii 2 ,000 years ago. Only the far -sighted evacuation of the city

a more chilling disaster.

That will be the end of one chapter of life on Earth and the beginning of the

next one.

Agriculture will collapse.

Industry will collapse.

And in all likelihood, governments will collapse.

Wildcat Station, New York. If you are in range of this broadcast, stay away.

The city is deserted.

The ash from Iceland and Greenland is six feet deep.

The refugee trail points south.

They say North Carolina is still pretty clear.

We're talking about mass migration.

Even when there are very few options, people are survivors. They're fighters.

And we'll keep moving, keep hunting for a place that isn't yet poisoned.

A place where we can breathe.

find food.

But volcanoes have yet another lethal trick, and that's the sulfur gas they

eject miles up into the stratosphere.

Sulfur is a very nasty gas in terms of how it affects people and the Earth's

climate.

Sulfur can combine with oxygen and water in the atmosphere and create sulfuric

acid. It can also create these little aerosol droplets, little microscopic

droplets. They actually block the incoming solar energy, so the sun's

never gets to the surface, and instead it bounces back off the top of this

aerosol layer.

Volcanoes can cause global cooling.

It's called volcanic winter, and Earth is going to become an extremely hostile

place to live.

So plants will die, animals will die, and people will die.

Most of the life on the surface of this planet as we know it would go extinct.

It just simply will die.

So who will survive?

There's a small percentage who bought their way to safety.

But they're not as safe as they may think.

Some of them won't make it either.

Remember,

the most important lesson we have in self -enclosed living is that it's

unstable because humans are unstable.

In the famous Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona in 1991, the participants turned

on each other.

I cannot imagine that you're going to have the optimum mix of

personality types in a circumstance like this, where you have a lot of people

who are just there because they can buy their way in. I think for a while, the

survival instinct is going to be pretty high.

But over time, you know, we're people.

The conflict... and things that arise whenever you have people around would be

really, really tough.

You step off now, or I'll step off.

In Biosphere 2, they experienced a fairly rapid decline in the oxygen level

within the life support system, within the dome.

There was some unexpected chemistry happening because of the type of

they used to build the structure that was keeping basically the closed -loop

life support system from being able to get the oxygen back into the air from

carbon dioxide that the animals and the people were exhaling.

And those are the kinds of things that six months, eight months, Eight years

into the survival of whoever's inside are going to make a big difference as to

whether they live or die

If

you

looked out 30 years after such an event you'd see basically a barren world.

Animals would be virtually all dead. The organisms that would sustain themselves

through such a process most likely will be marine organisms.

The world we know would be gone.

To think of a few scrappy people surviving, I think it's highly likely.

If you've got hundreds of millions of people, there are going to be a few, and

mean a very few, that might be able to make it through this by basically living

off whatever survives around them.

Life on this planet has gone through many phases.

Dinosaurs were here for 100 million years before they went extinct.

Humans have only been around for a very short period of time.

But we're kind of different.

Our ability to manipulate the world around ourselves, to find ways to

environments that wouldn't naturally support us, are really incredible.

Even in the face of something so cataclysmic, possibility exists for our

survival and our future.