OH CRAP!
Check this out...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080608/ap_on_re_us/nevada_earthquakes
You can't grow up in the Pacific Northwest without earthquakes and volcanic eruptions being in the back of your mind. Assholes from Seattle love to lay claim to Mt. Raineer, but the truth is you can almost never see it from Seattle. Gowing up in a piss-ant town called Milton just a few miles from Tacoma, I could literaly see the massive cindercone volcano out our kitchen window. In junior high I first studied what a real explosive eruption can do, and as a freshman in high school we watched in horror and Mr. St. Hellens blew itself to hell and killed a few dozen people. Shoveling snow is a rare enough thing, but nothing compared to shoveling ash from your driveway!
Anyway, as the years went by and I became a science fiction writer, I studied in deeper and deeper detail what exactly was possible from an eruption. I moved away from the spector of Mt. Raineer long before most people living in its shadow came to realize they were living under a death sentence. Should Raineer go with even a fraction of the power of St. Hellens, more than fifty thousand would likely die.
I can't remember when exactly I learned about what Yellowstone really was. I think it was after I moved back to the Seattle area and my wife and I were considering relocating to Montana and visited the park. I knew what a caldera was, but never realized how massive of a one Yellowstone was made from. At least once in its past it had erupted with enough force to cause an extinction level event, and every time it did erupt it was devastating. Worse, it was not at the end of an activity period, but alive and well.
So anyway, when I saw this story I felt an icy chill run down my spine. If (or rather, when) that caldera goes boom, you can kiss life as you know it goodbye. Discovery (or History?) did a docudrama on the events around just that event, and they were chillingly kind of the possible outcome. We stand back and watch with fascinated horror and the destruction wrought (mostly on other lands) by massive typhoons, but the Yellowstone Caldera has the potential to make this nation a third world country, and bitch slap the rest of the world in the process. Global warming? Please don't waste my time with that BS.
I find the coverage interesting, and very subdued. This is the southern edge of the caldera, why are there no mention of true epicenters? Why not much from the USGS? I bet there are a few hundred people losing sleep over this? I have an old friend in the Pentagon, I only hear from him in very scary times. Both Iraq wars, just after 9/11, during a very tense 48hrs back in 1990... I am watching my yahoo email carefully and hoping I don't hear from him, and never more grateful I live in a geologically stable region with ancient techtonic mountains, and well above sea level.
Marik
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080608/ap_on_re_us/nevada_earthquakes
You can't grow up in the Pacific Northwest without earthquakes and volcanic eruptions being in the back of your mind. Assholes from Seattle love to lay claim to Mt. Raineer, but the truth is you can almost never see it from Seattle. Gowing up in a piss-ant town called Milton just a few miles from Tacoma, I could literaly see the massive cindercone volcano out our kitchen window. In junior high I first studied what a real explosive eruption can do, and as a freshman in high school we watched in horror and Mr. St. Hellens blew itself to hell and killed a few dozen people. Shoveling snow is a rare enough thing, but nothing compared to shoveling ash from your driveway!
Anyway, as the years went by and I became a science fiction writer, I studied in deeper and deeper detail what exactly was possible from an eruption. I moved away from the spector of Mt. Raineer long before most people living in its shadow came to realize they were living under a death sentence. Should Raineer go with even a fraction of the power of St. Hellens, more than fifty thousand would likely die.
I can't remember when exactly I learned about what Yellowstone really was. I think it was after I moved back to the Seattle area and my wife and I were considering relocating to Montana and visited the park. I knew what a caldera was, but never realized how massive of a one Yellowstone was made from. At least once in its past it had erupted with enough force to cause an extinction level event, and every time it did erupt it was devastating. Worse, it was not at the end of an activity period, but alive and well.
So anyway, when I saw this story I felt an icy chill run down my spine. If (or rather, when) that caldera goes boom, you can kiss life as you know it goodbye. Discovery (or History?) did a docudrama on the events around just that event, and they were chillingly kind of the possible outcome. We stand back and watch with fascinated horror and the destruction wrought (mostly on other lands) by massive typhoons, but the Yellowstone Caldera has the potential to make this nation a third world country, and bitch slap the rest of the world in the process. Global warming? Please don't waste my time with that BS.
I find the coverage interesting, and very subdued. This is the southern edge of the caldera, why are there no mention of true epicenters? Why not much from the USGS? I bet there are a few hundred people losing sleep over this? I have an old friend in the Pentagon, I only hear from him in very scary times. Both Iraq wars, just after 9/11, during a very tense 48hrs back in 1990... I am watching my yahoo email carefully and hoping I don't hear from him, and never more grateful I live in a geologically stable region with ancient techtonic mountains, and well above sea level.
Marik
posted by Falconsword at 8:00 PM
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