tortured me one Saturday night by watching a documentary about Pompeii. I remembered casts of bodies trapped in the inescapable ash, mannequins forever caught in the poses of death by suffocation. “That part will stop, though, right? I mean, a volcano mostly makes lava and that can only affect the area already ruined, right?”
He shook his head as he clicked over the other windows opened in his browser, finally finding a map of North America with some oblong shapes drawn over the west. “This is what the stratigraphic history shows from previous eruptions. This dark oval is ash coverage from two million years ago, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Iowa, Montana to Texas. This lighter gray one, from 630,000 years ago, stretched from Oregon to Iowa again, and from the Dakotas to Mexico.”
I glanced up at Boone. He had obviously seen this before and knew those long ago eruptions totally covered Nebraska.
“Now, this doesn’t mean these areas were devastated,” Dr. Potter added. “Only that there is a detectable layer of ash in the geologic record. In modern U .S. history, the only experience we have is with Mt. St. Helens. A ten-hour eruption ejected 1.3 cubic kilometers of ash and about a tenth of a cubic kilometer of pyroclastic material. So, let’s be generous and say it produced 1.5 cubic kilometers of ejecta in 1980.” A map showed a bright yellow area around the black dot of Mt. St. Helens with some small orange areas. The map key said the orange areas had received from five inches to a quarter-inch of ash. The yellow, less than a quarter inch. He continued reciting statistics. “The Yellowstone eruption 630,000 years ago produced an estimated 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta. The one 2.1 million years ago produced 2,500 cubic kilometers.”
“Wait, did you say 1.5 cubic kilometers versus 1,000 cubic kilometers?” I said. Here we go with all those zeroes again, I thought.
He nodded.
I knew a cubic-something meant in three dimensions, like a child’s block. But cubic kilometers? One thousand of them? I couldn’t wrap my head around the scale.
I searched Google on my phone, requested the route home with a shaking finger. Four hundred miles. 400 miles equals…. Then I selected the autofill for 400 miles equals how many kilometers. 643.7376. So, the seven-hour drive from Sycamore Springs, Indiana, to Case, Pennsylvania didn’t equal one side of the block of crap potentially spewing into the air. “And that will be all ash, shooting up in the atmosphere?” I asked, feeling a little faint.
“Even if most of it’s lava,” the professor said, “there’ll be an ash component, and any percentage of a thousand cubic kilometers is a shedload. All the volcanologists who know Yellowstone are saying the same thing—if this eruption continues, it isn’t going to sit there and simmer. The way it erupted, almost without warning, how every single sensor in the entire region went offline at the same instant indicates this thing has popped its cork with an almost unfathomable amount of energy behind it.”
“Are we all gonna die?” I asked, feeling like the useless, helpless, clueless peon who perished first in every natural disaster flick I’d ever seen.
His head swiveled , and he looked at me, stricken as he realized he was like a fireman yelling “Fire!” in a burning elementary school. “Where’s home?”
“Indiana .” I figured on the global scale of things—on the scale of 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta, for example—the name of the town probably didn’t matter.
“Your family ’s safe for now. The jet stream will probably carry the worst of this north, along the Canadian border, for the next few days, at least.”
I looked at Boone’s map. The Dakotas and Dr. Potter’s family waited right on that path. Hopefully, the eruption will stop. It has to stop. The mind of the elementary student produced those words, not the knowledge of the fireman.
Boone and I held hands to
He shook his head as he clicked over the other windows opened in his browser, finally finding a map of North America with some oblong shapes drawn over the west. “This is what the stratigraphic history shows from previous eruptions. This dark oval is ash coverage from two million years ago, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Iowa, Montana to Texas. This lighter gray one, from 630,000 years ago, stretched from Oregon to Iowa again, and from the Dakotas to Mexico.”
I glanced up at Boone. He had obviously seen this before and knew those long ago eruptions totally covered Nebraska.
“Now, this doesn’t mean these areas were devastated,” Dr. Potter added. “Only that there is a detectable layer of ash in the geologic record. In modern U .S. history, the only experience we have is with Mt. St. Helens. A ten-hour eruption ejected 1.3 cubic kilometers of ash and about a tenth of a cubic kilometer of pyroclastic material. So, let’s be generous and say it produced 1.5 cubic kilometers of ejecta in 1980.” A map showed a bright yellow area around the black dot of Mt. St. Helens with some small orange areas. The map key said the orange areas had received from five inches to a quarter-inch of ash. The yellow, less than a quarter inch. He continued reciting statistics. “The Yellowstone eruption 630,000 years ago produced an estimated 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta. The one 2.1 million years ago produced 2,500 cubic kilometers.”
“Wait, did you say 1.5 cubic kilometers versus 1,000 cubic kilometers?” I said. Here we go with all those zeroes again, I thought.
He nodded.
I knew a cubic-something meant in three dimensions, like a child’s block. But cubic kilometers? One thousand of them? I couldn’t wrap my head around the scale.
I searched Google on my phone, requested the route home with a shaking finger. Four hundred miles. 400 miles equals…. Then I selected the autofill for 400 miles equals how many kilometers. 643.7376. So, the seven-hour drive from Sycamore Springs, Indiana, to Case, Pennsylvania didn’t equal one side of the block of crap potentially spewing into the air. “And that will be all ash, shooting up in the atmosphere?” I asked, feeling a little faint.
“Even if most of it’s lava,” the professor said, “there’ll be an ash component, and any percentage of a thousand cubic kilometers is a shedload. All the volcanologists who know Yellowstone are saying the same thing—if this eruption continues, it isn’t going to sit there and simmer. The way it erupted, almost without warning, how every single sensor in the entire region went offline at the same instant indicates this thing has popped its cork with an almost unfathomable amount of energy behind it.”
“Are we all gonna die?” I asked, feeling like the useless, helpless, clueless peon who perished first in every natural disaster flick I’d ever seen.
His head swiveled , and he looked at me, stricken as he realized he was like a fireman yelling “Fire!” in a burning elementary school. “Where’s home?”
“Indiana .” I figured on the global scale of things—on the scale of 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta, for example—the name of the town probably didn’t matter.
“Your family ’s safe for now. The jet stream will probably carry the worst of this north, along the Canadian border, for the next few days, at least.”
I looked at Boone’s map. The Dakotas and Dr. Potter’s family waited right on that path. Hopefully, the eruption will stop. It has to stop. The mind of the elementary student produced those words, not the knowledge of the fireman.
Boone and I held hands to
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