That She Blows

THAR SHE BLOWS It will be perhaps a perfect day in June, under an empty blue sky. I'll be sitting on my favorite park bench, idly tossing nuts to the squirrels, reading the Post. It will come without warning and freeze everyone in their tracks: a sound like thunder, but longer. Not a clap, but a roar—like the Concorde taking off, but louder.

It will be the sound of the Yellowstone caldera erupting, the ripping tear of a supervolcano gone postal, a sound not heard for 74,000 years.

Everything within a 600-mile radius of Yellowstone will be covered by a blizzard of choking volcanic ash. Depending upon the prevailing winds, the great cloud will reach Manhattan in 24 to 72 hours—just enough lead-time to inspire an epic panic. The bridges and tunnels will be jammed, the tri-state highways clogged with crazed fools hoping to escape disaster. The ashes will fall, and a climate catastrophe along the lines of a "nuclear winter" will ensue. Many species will die off.

The last eruption of this kind occurred in Sumatra. The Toba eruption 74,000 years ago is estimated to have been 10,000 times bigger than Mt. St. Helens. Researchers believe that it was responsible for numerous extinctions, and that it reduced the human population worldwide to a number in the thousands.

Regular volcanoes are the result of a column of magma rising from deep within the planet and erupting on the surface. Think of a zit. The supervolcano is formed by the same premise, only a greater amount of magma rises through the mantle to create a great boiling reservoir in the crust of the Earth. This reservoir increases in size over time, the pressure building up until the immense eruption. Think of a huge abscess.

The word "supervolcano" is not a scientific term. It was coined by the producers of a BBC television program back in 2000, the first dominant media outlet to mention the catastrophe brewing at Yellowstone. Since then, eschatologists of every shape, size and description have been promoting the story on the web. What is known and acknowledged by the U.S. Geological Service is that the Yellowstone caldera erupts roughly every 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago.

In the last year, not only has the ground temperature in one area of the park reached 200 degrees, but there have been a series of very interesting earthquakes, and the temperature in areas of the lake has risen from 66 degrees to 85 degrees. Fish are dying and the animals are leaving.

Draw your own conclusion. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen in a month, six months, six years or 60 years. But it will happen, and when it blows its stack, everything will change.