by Bobby Akart
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Other Works by Bestselling Author Bobby Akart
The Yellowstone Series
Hellfire
Inferno
Fallout
Survival
The Lone Star Series
Axis of Evil
Beyond Borders
Lines in the Sand
Texas Strong
Fifth Column
Suicide Six
The Pandemic Series
Beginnings
The Innocents
Level 6
Quietus
The Blackout Series
36 Hours
Zero Hour
Turning Point
Shiloh Ranch
Hornet’s Nest
Devil’s Homecoming
The Boston Brahmin Series
The Loyal Nine
Cyber Attack
Martial Law
False Flag
The Mechanics
Choose Freedom
Patriot’s Farewell
Seeds of Liberty (Companion Guide)
The Prepping for Tomorrow Series
Cyber Warfare
EMP: Electromagnetic Pulse
Economic Collapse
Yellowstone: Fallout
The Yellowstone Series, Book Three
by
Bobby Akart
Contents
[DO NOT GENERATE A TABLE OF CONTENTS -- I DO THAT ONCE ALL THE BACK MATTER IS PLACED IN THE EBOOK VERSION[S1]]
Dedications
To my darling Dani and the girls.
There is nothing more precious to me than the time I get to spend with you. I love our life together.
To a courageous young lass in the United Kingdom named Ella.
Your life is just beginning, with a disadvantage, to be sure. I hope one day you can read the story of the fictional Ella in this novel and realize no matter how difficult life may seem at times, you can overcome it because you are blessed with the power to persevere. Our love is with you as you tackle life, and we have no doubt you’ll accomplish great things!
To Dusty Holder, In Memoriam.
You took a young, pudgy boy under your wing and turned him into a golfer who came within one bad shot of qualifying for the U.S. Open at age sixteen. More importantly, you taught me that life is full of mishits, and only a true failure wallers in his anger or sorrow. I heard many times—get your head on straight and keep playing. I’ve lived my life accordingly. I’ve been up and down more times than I can count. But I always keep playing. Thank you, old friend.
To Wild Bill Cherry, In Memoriam.
Professor Bill Cherry taught geography and geology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when I was an undergraduate there. Known for his unusual approach in lecturing, he earned the nickname Wild Bill. Readers of the Blackout series might recall a character by that name. Anyway, Wild Bill Cherry taught me to love science and rocks. He also taught me that the landscape around us didn’t happen through the assistance of unicorns and rainbows. Most of our planet’s appearance came about as a result of violent conflicts underground, which changed the surface above. Wild Bill, I’ll never forget sharing a Budweiser with you at The Last Lap on the Strip. This one’s for you, Professor.
Acknowledgements
Writing a book that is both informative and entertaining requires a tremendous team effort. Writing is the easy part. For their efforts in making Yellowstone: Hellfire, book one in the Yellowstone series, a reality, I would like to thank Hristo Argirov Kovatliev for his incredible cover art, Pauline Nolet for her editorial prowess, Stef Mcdaid for making this manuscript decipherable in so many formats, Chris Abernathy for his memorable performance in narrating this novel, and the Team—Denise, Joe, Jim, Shirley, and Kelly—whose advice, friendship and attention to detail is priceless.
For the Yellowstone series, I had to make use of a wealth of source material and studied the research of every form of scientist imaginable in my attempt to get it right. There are so many to thank, so let me get started, in no particular order.
University of Utah, Professor Emeritus Bob Smith, the world’s leading expert on the geophysics of Yellowstone National Park. Professor Smith’s research at Yellowstone began in 1956. He has conducted pioneering geophysics investigations of the Yellowstone hotspot that have become a model for evaluations of volcanic hazards worldwide. My single biggest takeaway from Professor Smith is this: When the earthquakes stop, that is the time to start worrying. Earthquakes relieve pressure. Without them, the planet would burst. If you’d like to learn more about his perspective on Earth’s creative forces, purchase his book, Windows into the Earth, on Amazon.
Dr. Brian H. Wilcox, an aerospace engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, co-authored a research paper titled Defending Human Civilization Supervolcanic Eruptions. Wilcox boldly raised the proposition that the greatest threat to humankind may not come from above, in the form of a near-Earth object, but rather, from below, as an eruption from the Yellowstone supervolcano. Dr. Wilcox made headlines in 2017 when he posited the idea of pumping water into Yellowstone to cool the magma chamber with the ancillary benefit of extracting steam to drive electricity-generating turbines. To his credit, he warned that such an expensive, risky proposition would have to be undertaken with care and done correctly.
Dr. Michael R. Rampino, Professor of Biology at NYU, conducts research in the area of earth sciences and in the causes of mass extinctions in particular. He has focused ongoing research on large supervolcanic explosive events that result in catastrophic climate change. The episodes of volcanic winters in our history may have caused the near extinction of humans. Dr. Rampino believes a reoccurrence would most likely threaten our civilization and existence. For more on Dr. Rampino’s work, purchase Cataclysms, A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century, available on Amazon.
Finally, to my new friends at GeoScienceWorld in McLean, Virginia, who helped guide me during my initial research into the subjects of earthquakes, volcanoes, and anything else going on under our feet. You folks are way smarter than I am!
Thank you all!
About the Author, Bobby Akart
Bestselling author Bobby Akart has been ranked by Amazon as the #3 Bestselling Horror Author, the #3 Bestselling Religion & Spirituality Author, the #5 Bestselling Science Fiction Author, the #7 Bestselling Historical Author. He has written over twenty international bestsellers, in forty different fiction and nonfiction genres, including the reader-favorite Lone Star series, the critically acclaimed Boston Brahmin series, the bestselling Blackout series, the frighteningly realistic Pandemic series, his highly cited nonfiction Prepping for Tomorrow series, and his latest project—the Yellowstone series, hailed by scientists as harrowing and extraordinary.
Bobby has provided his readers a diverse range of topics that are both informative and entertaining. His attention to detail and impeccable research have allowed him to capture the imaginations of his readers through his fictional works and bring them valuable knowledge through his nonfiction books.
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Author’s Introduction to the Yellowstone series
June 15, 2018
Anniversary of the Mount Pinatubo eruption
Let me get right to the point. While most people look at volcanic eruptions as natural disasters, the fact of the matter is, without them, the Earth would explode.
When I began outlining the Yellowstone series earlier this year, I came across numerous articles about telltale signs of Yellowstone’s imminent eruption. Many of them came from online news websites in the United Kingdom. Sometimes, alternative news sites in the United States would republish their content.
As I furthered my research, I noticed that news reports of this nature dated back for many, many years. In other words, Chicken Little was at it again—The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Too often, we become desensitized to the threats we face because the media, desperate to draw attention to their publications, in whatever format, overstate the signs of collapse.
Rather than focus on the news, I delved into the science. I’ve come to accept that volcanic activity is absolutely necessary for our planet’s survival but is also one of the biggest threats to mankind’s survival.
Volcanoes are the Earth’s way of letting off steam. Deep beneath the surface of the planet, excess heat builds up, and it finds a way to vent. Over many thousands of years, intense energy is created by the heat from the Earth’s core. Natural radioactivity in the granite beneath the surface couples with leftover energy from the time our planet was created some four and a half billion years ago, to generate an unimaginable pressure.
Imagine an extremely overcrowded city bus in the dead heat of summer, stalled in traffic, with no air-conditioning. The anger built up by the passengers reaches a boiling point until they force their way into the street, spilling out of the bus. Like an overcrowded bus, the overheated magma under our Earth’s surface stews in its own madness, allowing pent-up frustrations to boil over, until it releases its fury—its hellfire—upon the world above.
The energy released by volcanoes varies in degree depending upon the type. To put it in perspective, consider this. Throughout 2017, the International Energy Agency estimated that the entire world used eighteen terawatts of energy. By comparison, the amount of built-up energy seeking to escape the Earth’s interior is almost fifty terawatts—nearly triple.
This graphic provides a basic look at what lies beneath us.
However, those who live near active volcanoes have something lurking below that most of us do not—magma. People who lived in Leilani Estates, Hawaii, and near Volcán de Fuego in Guatemala spent their days playing golf or walking to their villages. But beneath their feet, slowly, relentlessly, subterranean rivers of magma, the molten rock that constantly forces itself toward the surface, bullied their way through the mantle and crust. When it broke the surface, the eruptions in these two regions of the world faced devastating consequences.
Here’s a graphic of the Kilauea volcanic activity.
While Volcán de Fuego, a conical stratovolcano, blasted an ash cloud that crushed surrounding villages, Kilauea was a perfect example of a slow eruption, featuring multiple fissures and vents oozing magma down its gentle slopes. To the casual observer, Kilauea appeared nonthreatening in terms of explosivity. Pictures began to surface of the aforementioned golfer, folks roasting marshmallows over the magma, and others taking selfies near the glowing flame.
With the attention given Kilauea, it’s hard for many to fathom some of the more devastating volcanic eruptions, such as Mount St. Helens in 1980 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Mount St. Helens registered as a VEI 5 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Mount Pinatubo was a VEI 6.
Using Mount Pinatubo as an example, which is located in the Philippines, the eruption ejected ten trillion tons of magma into the stratosphere. Another twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide combined with toxic metals and minerals to fill the air around the planet. For many months, a layer of sulfuric acid haze circled the globe. During a three-year period, global temperatures dropped half a degree, and the Earth’s ozone layer was depleted temporarily.
Which brings us to our chart setting forth the relative levels of volcanic eruptions. Many factors go into determining the VEI, including the volume emitted during the eruption and the cloud height. Currently, the Kilauea eruption is scaled in the VEI 1 to VEI 2 range. The Volcán de Fuego eruption in Guatemala will approach a VEI 3.
The largest volcanic eruptions in history, known as mega-colossal, have reached a category of VEI 8. The smallest of the Yellowstone Caldera eruptions occurred six hundred thousand years ago and has been estimated to be a VEI 8. Scientific evidence shows an eruption of this magnitude to occur on our planet every fifty thousand years. The last VEI 8 supervolcanic eruption on a level similar to Yellowstone was on Sumatra in Indonesia.
The Toba super eruption, which occurred seventy-five thousand years ago, has long been considered one of the Earth’s largest known eruptions. The Toba catastrophe resulted in a volcanic winter of six to ten years and a period of nearly a thousand years of global cooling.
Genetic research was conducted showing the number of modern humans dropped significantly about the same time the eruption occurred. The Toba Catastrophe Theory posited that people today evolved from the few thousand survivors who managed to avoid the worldwide impact of the eruption.
The giant plume of ash stretched from Southeast Asia all the way to the Middle East. Since then, other researchers have found evidence that pockets of humanity continued their lives during this period. As a result, they cast doubt on the Toba Catastrophe Theory. The fact remains, however, that in the time period following the eruption of Toba, mankind almost became extinct, and no other plausible theory has been accepted by the scientific community as a whole.
The following graph depicts the various levels of volcanic eruptions. As you scroll down the graphic, note which volcanic system is associated with the highest level that doesn’t appear on the chart—VEI 8.
Yellowstone’s three prior eruptions have been equal to, or greater than, Toba. Which takes us back to our VEI scale. A Yellowstone eruption will be at least a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens and ten thousand times more powerful than Volcán de Fuego or Kilauea.
When seeing the death and destruction left behind by these smaller, more humbling eruptions, it’s easy to see why the Yellowstone Caldera garners so much attention from scientists. It is easily the most monitored volcanic system in the world.
Yellowstone is quite simply the most potentially explosive, violent, deadly, active volcano on Earth, and scientists agree—a catastrophic eruption is inevitable.
Yellowstone erupted two-point-one million years ago and then again one-point-three million years ago. The last time it erupted was six hundred thirty thousand years ago. Scientists agree that Yellowstone, and our planet, is overdue for a massive, violent eruption. It will be an environmental disaster of global proportions. It might be, in fact, an extinction-level event. If so, it won’t be the first time.
I can’t resist repeating this often-overused phrase—it’s not a matter of if, but when.
Yellowstone is not an ordinary volcano. It is an extraordinary killer that will show itself in due time. Will Yellowstone erupt during our lifetimes? Maybe, or maybe not.
But if it does …
Epigraph
“Some prayed for help. Others wished for death.”
~ Pliny the Younger, Pompeii, A.D. 79
*****
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~ Cicero
*****
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~ Michael
*****
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~ 2016
*****
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~ Cicero
Prologue
The Yellowstone Eruption
The Seventh Day
&nbs
p; Volcanoes had been erupting for billions of years, shaping and molding our planet, killing life, and recreating it at the same time. For ten thousand years, humans have been around to observe these earth-changing events, but only since the early twentieth century have modern day scientists been able to measure them with precise, scientific methods.
By studying rock samples, the earth’s geography, and layers of volcanic ash in core samples, scientists could reconstruct some, although not all, of the most epic volcanic eruptions, including the ones from hundreds of millions of years ago.
According to scientists at the United States Geological Survey, the largest known eruption occurred twenty-seven million years ago in the San Juan Mountains centered in southwestern Colorado. The La Garita eruption was large enough to cover much of the western United States in a forty-foot layer of ash.
The eruption was deemed so large that in a 2004 edition of the Bulletin of Volcanology, scientists recommended adding a ninth level to the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Some even declared the La Garita eruption to be a magnitude nine-point-two.
Throughout the millennia, large eruptions have occurred measuring VEI 8. The USGS has identified fifty such catastrophic events, occurring at a frequency of twice every one-hundred-thousand years. The most recent VEI 8 occurred twenty-six-thousand years ago at Lake Taupo in New Zealand.
In 2004, many scientists disputed the VEI 9 designation applied to La Garita. They argued the Earth didn’t have the capability of launching ten-thousand cubic kilometers of ejecta from its core. A VEI 9, they said, would require an eruption ten times greater than Toba and past Yellowstone eruptions.
