If you’ve ever lived in Wyoming long enough to shovel your car out of a drift tall enough to qualify as affordable housing in Jackson, you’ve probably heard the comforting bedtime story:
“There’s a supervolcano under Yellowstone. If it blows, Wyoming becomes a glow-in-the-dark parking lot.”
But now? Kalshi has turned that into tradable entertainment, and the market currently gives a 11% chance that we’ll all get front-row seats to Nature’s Fourth of July Spectacular sometime before 2050.
Honestly, 11% sounds low. Anyone who has watched a tourist put a toddler on a bison for a selfie knows our state’s risk tolerance is way higher than that.
The Kalshi Market Action:
Right now, you can buy “YES, a supervolcano erupts” at around 16¢–20¢. Which is funny because that’s about the same price as a gas station coffee in Rawlins, and one of those options could actually kill you. (It’s the Rawlins coffee.)
Trading volume is just over $6.3K on Kalshi, which means at least a few people are either:
- Hedging against their Jackson mortgage,
- Trying to impress their doomsday-prepper friends, or
- Betting YES and then driving to Yellowstone with a stick to poke the ground and speed things up.
Wyoming Angle:
Let’s be honest, if the Yellowstone Caldera ever goes off, the investors who bought YES won’t be around to brag. The rest of the country will say things like, “I miss Wyoming,” and Wyoming will say things like, “…” (because there won’t be a Wyoming).
On the bright side, it would finally settle the Jackson vs. Bozeman rivalry. Permanently.
Should Wyomingites Invest?
Look, betting “YES” is basically buying a lottery ticket where the jackpot is: You were right, but also vaporized.
Betting “NO” is the classic Wyoming move: “Ahh, it’ll be fine.”
This is the same logic we use when driving through a whiteout with bald tires.
Scientific Note (For Legitimacy™)
Geologists say Yellowstone erupts every 600,000 years or so. The last big blast was 640,000 years ago, which means statistically we’re already “two minutes past curfew.”
But hey, the ground only rises a few centimeters a year, the geysers only explode unpredictably, and we only have small swarms of earthquakes “for fun.” So really, what’s to worry about?
An 11% chance of a supervolcano erupting before 2050? In Wyoming, we call that “Spring.”
AntlersArch founder and the voice behind Teton Tattle.
- Jason Ziernicki
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