Ashfall, Nepal and the Yellowstone Volcano

Scenes from Nepal this weekend remind all of us that this planet is a moving, living beast.  When it shrugs its skin mountains move and we small, soft, vulnerable humans are collateral damage.  The Earth of course is not alive in the carbon-based sense.  Its actions are indifferent to human presence in their application of tectonic cause and effect.  Pressure produces heat; heat causes expansion; expansion in a confined space produces tension that is released with geometrically expanded expulsions of energy and matter.  All of this is completely out of our control.

What would you do in the event of a truly world changing event?  Perhaps you have simply put your fate in the hands of an immortal and omniscient deity and set the thought aside.  That course of action is not helping the Nepalese right now.

In the same week that Atlas shrugged in Nepal, the University of Utah published a study in the journal Science proving that the Yellowstone volcano has not just a basement of magma under it (we already knew that), but a sub-basement as well. 

“But,” you may be saying, “I’ve been to Yellowstone and, while I’ve seen plenty of geysers, I’ve never seen a volcano!”

The answer to that, of course, is that you were walking in it.  Yellowstone is the home of one of the world’s largest volcanoes.  Its supersized caldera forms the heart of, and surrounds, virtually the entire park.  That is what produces the heat for all of the seismic and geyser activity.  The energy for Old Faithful comes from a hot spot in the earth’s crust.  The same types of hot spots created (and are creating) the Hawaiian Islands. 

The well documented shallower magma chamber is being fed by—well—a monster.  The newly proven reservoir is almost 5 times as big as the known chamber.  It contains enough magma to fill the Grand Canyon. When it erupts it will eject 1,000 times more material into the atmosphere than did Mt. St. Helens.  You notice that I did say, “when” and not, “if.”  This world was and is evolving in response to geological processes.  There is no finished product here, only a work in progress.  We humans are simply unique in our ability to comprehend, understand, and anticipate the action. 

The next eruption could well be within Yellowstone Park and occur northeast of the old caldera (we know this because you can map how the crust moves over a hot spot, which is why the Hawaiian Islands form a slightly arcing line.  When it occurs, when the magma chamber finally has enough stored energy to burst through the pre-Cambrian rocks of the crust, the result is going to affect every living human being on this planet.  Some more than others.   

Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park in the far northeastern corner of Nebraska (near Yankton, S.D.) is an example of a Yellowstone area eruption some 12 million years ago.   Ashfall contains thousands of fossilized skeletons of creatures from the Miocene epoch of the Cenozoic era.  These animals (typical of those seen in the Ice Age movies) are exposed but in place in the ground where they fell, instantly suffocated by the ash blown all the way from Wyoming. 

Certainly, all of this information needs to be placed in geological terms.  These Yellowstone eruptions seem to occur in roughly 700,000 year cycles.  The last one was about 640,000 years ago.  On the surface that seems to give us 60,000 years to worry.  Or not. 

Contemplate something bigger than yourself.  It will help you keep the faith.