by Bobby Akart
“With no rising warm air, clouds will rarely form to create moisture. This will result in extreme drought conditions around the world for years. In the case of Tambora, within a year of its eruption, an invisible veil of ash blanketed Earth, reflecting sunlight, lowering average temps, and screwing up the weather patterns.”
“Wait, did you say invisible? You mentioned the sulfuric acid was tiny.”
“That’s another part of the problem, Ella. Most people don’t fear what they can’t see, and if they don’t take protective measures like wearing particulate masks at all times, they’ll breathe in the particles ejected by the eruption.”
“What will happen to them if they inhale the particles?”
“The tiny droplets of sulfuric acid and the pumice particles that fill the air we breathe will be mixed with saliva and other fluids in the body. The pumice will harden into a concrete-type substance as sharp as glass. It will travel through the body’s lungs and digestive system, ripping at the soft tissue of the person’s organs until eventually internal bleeding causes death. And that’s if the sulfuric acid doesn’t kill you first.”
Ella sighed. “Ashby, people need to know. I mean, I want to respect your wishes, but there are people in your country who don’t believe an eruption of Yellowstone will affect them because they live in a place like Florida, which is the furthest point away from here.”
“Well, they’d be wrong, Ella. Just because they can’t see the particulate matter doesn’t mean they aren’t ingesting it. If they don’t die quickly from internal bleeding or organ failure, they will certainly be impacted indirectly by drought and famine conditions.”
Jake hollered down to them from the deck. “Hey, guys, dinner’s ready!”
“Okay!” Ashby yelled back. Then she turned to Ella. “Let’s start this way. Rather than discussing my findings, can you write an article or a blog that educates people on what I just told you?”
“Yes… I’d like to do that.”
“Use Tambora and the year without a summer as a point of reference. And in your reporting, be sure to point out that a Yellowstone eruption would be at least ten times worse than Tambora, maybe more, because the size of the Yellowstone Caldera and magma chamber is many times larger than Tambora.”
“May I say anything about your findings thus far?” asked Ella.
Ashby thought for a moment and then tears came to her eyes. “For now, just tell them the threat is real.”
Ella unexpectedly hugged Ashby. She whispered in her ear, “Thank you. I know this is hard for you, considering.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your family.”
Ashby leaned back and asked, “You know about my parents?”
“I do, and that’s why I’d never betray your trust.”
Chapter 43
Bear Lodge at Grant Village
Yellowstone
Ella sat down at the small desk stuck in the corner of her hotel room at the Bear Lodge. Simon, who was blissfully snoring away in the second bed, had enjoyed a few too many glasses of whisky with his new best pal, Dusty. Undoubtedly, they’d both have heavy heads for tomorrow.
She was reflective, focusing on her conversation with Ashby as she began typing.
What you are about to read is fiction, but it is based upon historical fact.
That was a powerful first line to her blog post titled “Dispatches from Yellowstone, The Dragon Beneath.”
The signs were all there. The trembling and shuddering ground beneath our feet. Superheated water begging to escape from any crack or crevice, and when there wasn’t one, the massive beast made its own. The hot magma beneath the Earth’s surface pitched and rolled in a continuous fit of rage as it sought its release.
The quakes began to come in swarms, sometimes as many as a hundred per day, although too faint for me to feel underfoot, but not so imperceptible that the scientists at the Yellowstone Volcanic Observatory didn’t take notice.
Then it happened, a massive upheaval of the ground occurred in the middle of the caldera, a flattened, irregular stretch of ground the size of Delaware. The ground shook and split, changing its shape with each upward thrust.
The magma was rising now, desperate to escape, and suddenly seeking daylight for the first time in six hundred thousand years. The supervolcano reached its zenith, the climax of centuries of stress and building.
The resulting eruption was like nothing mankind had ever seen. It had the power of one hundred thousand Hiroshima nuclear bombs, concentrated in one spot—Yellowstone. The dragon was released from its lair.
It was too late for nearly one hundred thousand people who were in the immediate blast radius. Tourists, residents, and park employees were obliterated by the pyroclastic flow, which ripped along the ground at a hundred plus miles per hour. Residents of nearby towns like Billings, Montana, and Idaho Falls stood in awe as the dark clouds of debris crossed one mountaintop after another.
Surely, the mighty Rockies would stop the coming carnage as it approached, they thought. They were mistaken. Fire scorched Yellowstone National Park and points beyond. A blazing inferno was created that incinerated every combustible material.
Millions of tons of melted rock and toxic gas spewed many thousands of miles into the sky. As a result, sulfuric acid and a pumice-type substance entered the atmosphere and was carried by the jet stream to wreak havoc around the world.
But the dragon under Yellowstone was not finished. The first eruption only served to cause the entire caldera to become more unstable. For seven days, seven additional eruptions occurred. Despite being smaller in magnitude, they distributed wave after wave of volcanic material into the now permanently darkened sky. The additional fires spread out of control throughout Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and as far south as Utah.
Before people within a two-hundred-mile radius knew what hit them, the volcanic material fell back to earth in a blizzard of ash that landed three to four feet deep, burying everything underneath. Buildings collapsed under the weight. Airplanes crashed as the ash entering their jet engines turned into a ceramic-like substance and coated the working parts until they failed. Every living being in the heaviest ash fallout zone suffocated to death.
But this was just the beginning. Over the next year, a cloud encircled the planet, causing dramatic climate change, drought, and famine. Those who were unaware of the toxic effects breathed in the air polluted with sulfuric acid and pumice. Their organs eventually failed as they suffered in death. It just took one deep breath of the fallout, and they died, eventually.
For the next six years, ash particles remained in the air until gravity, combined with cleansing rain, eventually took its toll. Earth’s climate was radically altered from the worst environmental disaster in the history of modern man. The skies cleared, and mankind, what was left of it anyway, tried to rebuild as this near-extinction-level event, the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, finished its cycle, until the next time.
My friends, the threat is real. Govern yourselves accordingly.
Ella’s eyes welled up with tears as she pressed the ENTER key on her laptop to upload her blog entry for the day. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Although she’d been born into a family who regularly attended church services, she’d strayed from God in her adult years as the logic of science overtook her spiritual beliefs. In this moment, Ella had had enough of scientific thought. Now, she intended to look to God for guidance.
She joined her hands in prayer, and as if by divine intervention, the ground began to shake again.
Chapter 44
Jake’s Cabin
Yellowstone
Another day of aftershocks concerned Ashby and her team. They’d spent their entire day in the area surrounding the Steamboat Geyser. Within Yellowstone, geysers were especially abundant in the Upper, Midway, and Lower Geyser Basins. Geysers could occur on a fairly regular schedule, like Old Faithful, hence its name. Others, like Steamboat in the Norris Geyser Basin, were far more unpredicta
ble.
Geysers are known to have two fundamental features. One is a reservoir just below the Earth’s surface where waters accumulate and are heated to boiling temperatures by the magma chamber. Second, something constricts the reservoir, creating so much pressure that it has to find a conduit to escape. When the subsurface reservoir boils the water, pressure is built, and then water is ejected through the surface. At some point, the reservoir is emptied, and the pressure drops to begin the cycle all over again.
Steamboat Geyser was of particular concern to Ashby because of its sudden frequency of erupting. With the ninth eruption, and the fifth in as many days, she was confident in her continued study of the Norris Area. Frequent eruptions alone, even unusual ones like Steamboat, were insufficient to raise red flags. But when coupled with the other markers of an eruption Ashby and her team had uncovered, the conclusion was coming into focus.
Jake had remained at the cabin for much of the day except for a brief drive into their headquarters to quiz some of his fellow rangers on their sightings around the park. When the van arrived, he greeted everyone with a cold beer and suggested they take a stroll down by the creek. He wanted to share what he’d heard and listen to the result of their day’s work as well.
“Several of the guys who patrol the roads have reported blue flames in the northern part of the park.”
“That’s methane,” said Dusty. “That’s not that unusual considering what’s underneath us.”
“Oh, okay,” said Jake. “Also, I heard that—”
“Jake, wait a sec,” interrupted Rita. “Did you say at Norris?”
“Yes.”
She turned to Ashby, who took the lead walking across the river stones up Sentinel Creek. “I’m familiar with the methane leaks at Brimstone Basin on the east side of the lake. Wouldn’t that be unusual at Norris?”
“Rita, it goes back to everything else,” answered Ashby. “By itself, we might chalk it up to our lack of understanding of Yellowstone’s plumbing. Taken altogether, however, it’s yet another sign pointing to trouble at Norris.”
Jake continued as they climbed higher to get a look at a waterfall up ahead, one of several located at Sentinel Creek. “Also, at Norris, popping, hissing and squeaking sounds have been reported up along the roadside near the point we went to see the lava flow.”
“These are new?” asked Ashby.
“That’s what the guys said,” replied Jake. “I know that area well, and I’ve never experienced them before.”
“Fumaroles, right, Doc?” asked Dusty. A fumarole was an opening in the Earth’s crust often in areas surrounding volcanoes. They emit steam and gases into the air.
“Most likely, Dusty,” Ashby began. “Although it doesn’t sound like typical CO2 or hydrogen sulfide emissions. It might be helium. We need to get up there and determine if it’s helium-3 or 4. That’ll tell us whether it’s being emitted from the hot spot beneath. Make a note to put it on tomorrow’s to-do—”
The ground shook so hard that all of them lost their balance. Jake fell to one knee, but the rest of the group hit the ground hard.
“Is everyone okay?”
“Yeah, but we—” started Ashby as the earth trembled again. It continued, causing her to be alarmed.
“This is not good,” said Dusty.
Everyone held on to each other to keep from losing their balance.
The tremors grew in strength until Dusty shouted and pointed upstream toward the waterfall. “Guys, look!”
Boulders had worked their way loose and began crashing toward the stream below. The base of the waterfall, which was at least twenty feet above where they stood, did nothing to stop the boulders’ forward momentum. The rocks were rolling their way in a hurry.
Jake shouted instructions. “Hurry! We have to get out of their way!”
He turned around and saw that they were in the bottom of a ravine. It was too risky to climb up the sides of the steep slope. They had to run.
Jake directed their attention to the fork in the stream two hundred yards below them. He knew they couldn’t outrun the landslide, but at least the ground would flatten out, giving them the opportunity to enter the forest.
“Run! And don’t look back!”
Jake led the way, periodically checking to make sure the group stuck together. Dusty, who was slightly hungover from his ill-advised attempt to match Simon drink for drink the night before, was lagging behind.
“Which way, Jake?” asked Ashby.
Jake dropped back to encourage Dusty to keep up. “Look for a flat spot and then turn up into the woods. Faster!”
The boulders were bouncing off each other. Some were six or more feet wide, while other, more jagged rocks were smaller. None of them appeared ready to stop their downhill chase.
Dusty’s chest was heaving as the slightly overweight scientist ran out of breath.
“I got you, buddy. Don’t panic and follow my lead.”
“Jake, I can’t.”
“You can, and you will,” said Jake as he glanced back and saw the landslide was gaining on them. He needed an exit strategy.
They ran another thirty yards before Dusty’s legs gave out. He tumbled forward and landed on his stomach, skidding to a stop in the water.
Jake didn’t hesitate. They had no other options.
He grabbed Dusty by the feet and dragged his body through the water to a fallen tree that had been uprooted due to erosion. The quaking aspen tree itself would be crushed like splinters if the boulders hit it, but Jake hoped the rare lower limbs could work as a ladder of sorts.
“Come on, Dusty, use the limbs to pull yourself up the bank.”
Jake showed Dusty what to do as he glanced downstream and saw that the women were out of sight. He focused on helping his new friend. “You can do this! One limb at a time, but you’ve gotta hurry!”
The boulders were upon them, but thus far, they bounded by, leaving a rumbling sound not that different from the bison that had rushed by him the other day.
Jake made his way to the top of the bank and dropped to both knees. He reached his hands out to help Dusty. “Grab my hand!”
Dusty reached up and grasped Jake’s outstretched arms just as the landslide struck the root ball and turned the tree sideways. Dusty lost his grip on the tree branches, but he held on to Jake, who jerked him up the bank and out of harm’s way.
Dusty rolled onto his back, and his chest was heaving, begging for air.
Determining that he was all right, Jake began yelling, hoping he could be heard over the rocks tumbling downstream. “Ashby! Are you okay? Rita!”
The last of the rocks passed him and he slid down the bank.
“Ashby! Ashby!”
The rocks found their way to flat ground, and Ashby emerged from the forest across the creek.
“We’re okay. Hey, where’s Dusty?”
Jake was overcome with nervous laughter as his adrenaline levels began to subside.
“He’s fine! I think he’s swearing off drinking right about now!”
Chapter 45
Jake’s Cabin
Yellowstone
Ashby had a fitful sleep after the flirtation with being crushed by a landslide. The team stayed up into the early hours of the morning, waiting for the data feeds from NASA and the USGS to update regarding last evening’s earthquake. It registered as a minor quake at three-point-nine on the Richter scale, which meant it was felt by people but rarely caused property damage. It was, however, significant in other respects, as far as Ashby was concerned—as was this day in particular.
The first to rise, she immediately found her way outside and marveled at the beauty of their surroundings. Jake’s cabin had a view of the mountains on one side and the creek on the other. The trees circled the cabin like a mother’s arms comforted a child. Ashby walked down the slope to revisit the landslide.
She paused at the edge of Sentinel Creek, which had risen substantially after the landslide ripped away part of the cliff that had c
reated the waterfall. The rocky, flat area between the convergence of the two creeks, where she and Jake had fished just a few days prior, was now covered with water, creating a shallow wading pool now teeming with fish.
It was a reminder. Nature was in control at Yellowstone. The bison roamed free. The crystal-clear waters of the streams ran freely. To the naked eye, tranquility ruled at Yellowstone, which was why millions of people visit every year.
Ashby took a moment to breathe in the fresh air and listen to the water splashing its way across the rocks, wishing—no, fantasizing, that what she was experiencing aboveground was in harmony with what was happening below.
Suddenly and without warning, a bald eagle swooped down and snatched a fish out of the shallow pool of water, grabbing it with its talons and snatching it into its beak in one fluid motion. Ashby flinched but was able to watch the eagle doing what comes naturally, feeding.
The scene was a reminder to her that in a blink of an eye, nature could change the dynamics of our planet, sometimes with little or no notice. Just a few days before, she and Jake had stood where the pool was, fishing, much like the eagle just had, in order to feed themselves. Last night, an earthquake caused a landslide that could’ve killed them, but instead, created a pond for the eagle to feed. Tomorrow, someone else might stand where she was now and admire the sparkling pool of water, not realizing the activity surrounding its creation.
This is the way life works on our planet. One event leads to another, which leads to another, and most of us are either blissfully unaware or uncaring as to the reasons why.
Ashby had carried her parents’ journal down to the creek with her that morning. She had no photographs or old home videos. All of that had been lost to the lava and fires at Mount Pinatubo. As were her parents. She tried to hold on to her memories as she grew older. Over time, the pleasant ones faded away as the moment she saw them die began to consume her psyche.
