Dangerous beauty is the 15th chapter of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and its main focus is on a National park in America called Yellowstone Park, and in the 1960s something strange happened. A geologist named Bob Christiansen was studying the volcanic history, the only issue was that he couldn't find the volcano.He was puzzled as he couldn't find a caldera. The reason behind it was the fact that the whole 9,000 square kilometer park was the caldera, the national park was one big volcano.
Yellowstone is known as a super volcano. It sits on a hot spot of molten rock beginning at at least 200 km underground and comes close to the earths surface. This is known as a super plume. The magma chamber is 72km across and 13 km thick. That is the the size of a English country filled with TNT going 13km into the sky and people are walk on top of it!
The latest 3 eruptions have been massive. The last one was 1000 times more powerful than the VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index)scale of 5 which was the measurement of Mount St Helens eruption. The one before that was 280 times bigger and the one before that was so big that they couldn't even measure how big it was. Some say it was at least 2,500 times as big but 8000 times as monstrous.
The scary thing about Yellowstone park is they average a massive blow to happen once every 600, 000 years, and the last time it erupted was 630,000 years meaning its 30,000 years overdue and people are walking on it. The last time it erupted, nobody was around so nobody knows what the warning signs are, so nobody knows if Yellowstone is about to blow up . It could be giving us a warning right now and nobody wold know and nobody would know.
The park gets 3 million people visiting every year. If they did know the warning signs and know the park is about to blow, they would assess the degree of danger and inform the superintendent, who would then decide whether to evacuate everyone or not. Once you are past the park gates its every man for himself.
Yellowstone is also on a fault zone and in 1959 at a place called Hebgen Lake, which is located just outside the park a 7.5 magnitude earthquake happened. It wasn't too big but was so abrupt that it made a mountain side collapse. That was 80 million tonnes of rock going at 160kmh. 28 people died but back then not many people went to Yellowstone so if it happened now the numbers would be much larger. Also Paul Doss (the national park geologist) reckons that a BIG earthquake is going to happen.
South of Yellowstone there is a place called the Tetons which is a jagged mountain range and 9 million years ago, they didn't exist but then a 64km long fault opened and supposedly every 900 years a big earthquake happens causing them to grow 2 meters. Saying this the last earthquake that happened there was somewhere around 5-7 thousand years ago meaning like the volcano itself, its over due-Big time.
There are at least 10,000 geysers in Yellowstone which is more than every other one in the world combined, and nobody knows when a new vent might open. Paul Doss showed Bill a place called Duck Lake which was a massive geyser that blew in the last 15,000 years. Paul Doss describe the blow as "several tens of millions of tons of earth and rock and super heated water blowing out at hyper(not super)sonic speed", and once again if another was to happen there would be no warning.
By Hamish Priest
What kind of rock is the volcano made of?
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of rock is the volcano made of?
ReplyDeleteIt is Rhyolite
ReplyDelete