Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody by Robert Brockway

could actually be about to erupt right now— right fucking now, right in the United States of America .
    You might know ground zero: Yellowstone National Park, home of postcards that your grandparents send you, scenic vistas, Old Faithful, and, apparently, terror. The single most potentially destructive volcano on Earth, the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming, is now showing strong signs of becoming active again. It’s not only a proven supervolcano—Yellowstone has had previous supervolcanic eruptions, 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago—but it’s also a “geothermal hot spot.” Supervolcanoes and geothermal hot spots are like a disastrous peanut butter and a devastating jelly: The two don’t always go together, but they’re exponentially improved when they do. The hot spot beneath Yellowstone refers to the end of a gargantuan plume of magma, the molten rock that swirls around in the Earth’s mantle below the solid rock of the surface. Under ideal circumstances, that plume would peter out about fifty miles underground, but not in this case: Just the tip of this mantle plume is several miles wide, and it’s been sitting down there for thousands of years, slowly melting the underside of the Earth’s surface away, until it has eventually encroached to within a few hundred meters of ground level. But while the tip of this mantle plume is scary enough, you actually have to worry about the entire thing if it bursts. Just like an overinsistent teenager, what starts with “just the tip” will inevitably end with a full-on shaft. If any part of the plume breeches, the vast pressures beneath will force all of it out. And all there is right now is the thinnest veneer, a sheer G-string of dirt, really, that’s keeping that entire hot, smoking shaft of fiery death from spurting all over the Earth like the devil’s money shot.
    The chief indicator that the Yellowstone Caldera might be becoming active again comes in the form of a recent “swarm” (worryingly enough, that’s actually the official term) of earthquakes registered there. At the end of 2008 there was a period of rapid-fire, low-level tremors in and around the Caldera—around eight hundred separate earthquakes in just under a week, which, if you’re counting, is 799 more earthquakes than it takes to scare the shit out of everybody under the best of circumstances, much less when they’re emanating from a giant organic time bomb like the Caldera. Robert B. Smith, an emeritus research professor of geology geophysics at the University of Utah, believes the unusually high earthquake activity could be a sign that the volcano is reawakening. Or, as Professor Smith himself puts it:
Supervolcano Porn Titles
Steamy Eruptions
Sizzling Encounters
Spurting Plumes
Burning Love 3: Literal Edition
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah fuck fuck I wish I could run but there will be fire eeeverywheeere ahhhhhh.
    Well, he was probably thinking that, anyway.
    Considering that the minimum size for an eruption to be considered “supervolcanic” is 1,000 cubic kilometers, and the pool of magma beneath the Yellowstone Caldera is estimated to be 28 by 45 miles across, screaming panic seems like the most logical reaction. Now, I’m not exactly sure what those numbers translate to in kilometers, because I use God’s System of Measurement (which is pounds or ounces or, really, whatever we make up off-the-cuff here in America), but I’m pretty sure that’s equal to eight bazillion cubic kilometers of magma. And that, my friends, is eight bazillion more kilometers of flaming rock than anybody should be comfortable with.
    Because volcanology is not an exact science, experts have little to no idea of what to expect from an active supervolcano. They believe that four signs, like metaphorical horsemen to the Rock Apocalypse (which would be the best metal band name ever) will herald its eruption. First, the ground will rise from the pressure of all that magma, then geyser activity will