15 DANGEROUS BEAUTY
IN THE 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National Park, Bob
Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became puzzled about something that,
oddly, had not troubled anyone before: he couldn’t find the park’s volcano. It had been known
for a long time that Yellowstone was volcanic in nature—that’s what accounted for all its
geysers and other steamy features—and the one thing about volcanoes is that they are
generally pretty conspicuous. But Christiansen couldn’t find the Yellowstone volcano
anywhere. In particular what he couldn’t find was a structure known as a caldera.
Most of us, when we think of volcanoes, think of the classic cone shapes of a Fuji or
Kilimanjaro, which are created when erupting magma accumulates in a symmetrical mound.
These can form remarkably quickly. In 1943, at Parícutin in Mexico, a farmer was startled to
see smoke rising from a patch on his land. In one week he was the bemused owner of a cone
five hundred feet high. Within two years it had topped out at almost fourteen hundred feet and
was more than half a mile across. Altogether there are some ten thousand of these intrusively
visible volcanoes on Earth, all but a few hundred of them extinct. But there is a second, less
celebrated type of volcano that doesn’t involve mountain building. These are volcanoes so
explosive that they burst open in a single mighty rupture, leaving behind a vast subsided pit,
the caldera (from a Latin word for cauldron). Yellowstone obviously was of this second type,
but Christiansen couldn’t find the caldera anywhere.
By coincidence just at this time NASA decided to test some new high-altitude cameras by
taking photographs of Yellowstone, copies of which some thoughtful official passed on to the
park authorities on the assumption that they might make a nice blow-up for one of the
visitors’ centers. As soon as Christiansen saw the photos he realized why he had failed to spot
the caldera: virtually the whole park—2.2 million acres—was caldera. The explosion had left
a crater more than forty miles across—much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at
ground level. At some time in the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far
beyond the scale of anything known to humans.
Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a
reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from
the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone’s vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud
pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across—roughly
the same dimensions as the park—and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a
pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the
height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone
are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust
above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about
1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond
imagining. According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London, “you
wouldn’t be able to get within a thousand kilometers of it” while it was erupting. The
consequences that followed would be even worse.
Superplumes of the type on which Yellowstone sits are rather like martini glasses—thin on
the way up, but spreading out as they near the surface to create vast bowls of unstable magma.
Some of these bowls can be up to 1,200 miles across. According to theories, they don’t
always erupt explosively but sometimes burst forth in a vast, continuous outpouring—a
flood—of molten rock, such as with the Deccan Traps in India sixty-five million years ago.
(Trap in this context comes from a Swedish word for a type of lava; Deccan is simply an
area.) These covered an area of 200,000 square miles and probably contributed to the demise
of the dinosaurs—they certainly didn’t help—with their noxious outgassings. Superplumes
may also be responsible for the rifts that cause continents to break up.
Such plumes are not all that rare. There are about thirty active ones on the Earth at the
moment, and they are responsible for many of the world’s best-known islands and island
chains—Iceland, Hawaii, the Azores, Canaries, and Galápagos archipelagos, little Pitcairn in
the middle of the South Pacific, and many others—but apart from Yellowstone they are all
oceanic. No one has the faintest idea how or why Yellowstone’s ended up beneath a
continental plate. Only two things are certain: that the crust at Yellowstone is thin and that the
world beneath it is hot. But whether the crust is thin because of the hot spot or whether the hot
spot is there because the crust is thin is a matter of heated (as it were) debate. The continental
nature of the crust makes a huge difference to its eruptions. Where the other supervolcanoes
tend to bubble away steadily and in a comparatively benign fashion, Yellowstone blows
explosively. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does you want to stand well back.
Since its first known eruption 16.5 million years ago, it has blown up about a hundred
times, but the most recent three eruptions are the ones that get written about. The last eruption
was a thousand times greater than that of Mount St. Helens; the one before that was 280 times
bigger, and the one before was so big that nobody knows exactly how big it was. It was at
least twenty-five hundred times greater than St. Helens, but perhaps eight thousand times
more monstrous.
We have absolutely nothing to compare it to. The biggest blast in recent times was that of
Krakatau in Indonesia in August 1883, which made a bang that reverberated around the world
for nine days, and made water slosh as far away as the English Channel. But if you imagine
the volume of ejected material from Krakatau as being about the size of a golf ball, then the
biggest of the Yellowstone blasts would be the size of a sphere you could just about hide
behind. On this scale, Mount St. Helens’s would be no more than a pea.
The Yellowstone eruption of two million years ago put out enough ash to bury New York
State to a depth of sixty-seven feet or California to a depth of twenty. This was the ash that
made Mike Voorhies’s fossil beds in eastern Nebraska. That blast occurred in what is now
Idaho, but over millions of years, at a rate of about one inch a year, the Earth’s crust has
traveled over it, so that today it is directly under northwest Wyoming. (The hot spot itself
stays in one place, like an acetylene torch aimed at a ceiling.) In its wake it leaves the sort of
rich volcanic plains that are ideal for growing potatoes, as Idaho’s farmers long ago
discovered. In another two million years, geologists like to joke, Yellowstone will be
producing French fries for McDonald’s, and the people of Billings, Montana, will be stepping
around geysers.
The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western
states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico)—nearly the whole of the United States west of the
Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly
half the world’s cereals. And ash, it is worth remembering, is not like a big snowfall that will
melt in the spring. If you wanted to grow crops again, you would have to find some place to
put all the ash. It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris
from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would
take to clear Kansas.
And that’s not even to consider the climatic consequences. The last supervolcano eruption
on Earth was at Toba, in northern Sumatra, seventy-four thousand years ago. No one knows
quite how big it was other than that it was a whopper. Greenland ice cores show that the Toba
blast was followed by at least six years of “volcanic winter” and goodness knows how many
poor growing seasons after that. The event, it is thought, may have carried humans right to the
brink of extinction, reducing the global population to no more than a few thousand
individuals. That means that all modern humans arose from a very small population base,
which would explain our lack of genetic diversity. At all events, there is some evidence to
suggest that for the next twenty thousand years the total number of people on Earth was never
more than a few thousand at any time. That is, needless to say, a long time to recover from a
single volcanic blast.
All this was hypothetically interesting until 1973, when an odd occurrence made it
suddenly momentous: water in Yellowstone Lake, in the heart of the park, began to run over
the banks at the lake’s southern end, flooding a meadow, while at the opposite end of the lake
the water mysteriously flowed away. Geologists did a hasty survey and discovered that a large
area of the park had developed an ominous bulge. This was lifting up one end of the lake and
causing the water to run out at the other, as would happen if you lifted one side of a child’s
wading pool. By 1984, the whole central region of the park—several dozen square miles—
was more than three feet higher than it had been in 1924, when the park was last formally
surveyed. Then in 1985, the whole of the central part of the park subsided by eight inches. It
now seems to be swelling again.
The geologists realized that only one thing could cause this—a restless magma chamber.
Yellowstone wasn’t the site of an ancient supervolcano; it was the site of an active one. It was
also at about this time that they were able to work out that the cycle of Yellowstone’s
eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one, interestingly enough,
was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due.
“It may not feel like it, but you’re standing on the largest active volcano in the world,” Paul
Doss, Yellowstone National Park geologist, told me soon after climbing off an enormous
Harley-Davidson motorcycle and shaking hands when we met at the park headquarters at
Mammoth Hot Springs early on a lovely morning in June. A native of Indiana, Doss is an
amiable, soft-spoken, extremely thoughtful man who looks nothing like a National Park
Service employee. He has a graying beard and hair tied back in a long ponytail. A small
sapphire stud graces one ear. A slight paunch strains against his crisp Park Service uniform.
He looks more like a blues musician than a government employee. In fact, he is a blues
musician (harmonica). But he sure knows and loves geology. “And I’ve got the best place in
the world to do it,” he says as we set off in a bouncy, battered four-wheel-drive vehicle in the
general direction of Old Faithful. He has agreed to let me accompany him for a day as he goes
about doing whatever it is a park geologist does. The first assignment today is to give an
introductory talk to a new crop of tour guides.
Yellowstone, I hardly need point out, is sensationally beautiful, with plump, stately
mountains, bison-specked meadows, tumbling streams, a sky-blue lake, wildlife beyond
counting. “It really doesn’t get any better than this if you’re a geologist,” Doss says. “You’ve
got rocks up at Beartooth Gap that are nearly three billion years old—three-quarters of the
way back to Earth’s beginning—and then you’ve got mineral springs here”—he points at the
sulfurous hot springs from which Mammoth takes its title—“where you can see rocks as they
are being born. And in between there’s everything you could possibly imagine. I’ve never
been any place where geology is more evident—or prettier.”
“So you like it?” I say.
“Oh, no, I love it,” he answers with profound sincerity. “I mean I really love it here. The
winters are tough and the pay’s not too hot, but when it’s good, it’s just—”
He interrupted himself to point out a distant gap in a range of mountains to the west, which
had just come into view over a rise. The mountains, he told me, were known as the Gallatins.
“That gap is sixty or maybe seventy miles across. For a long time nobody could understand
why that gap was there, and then Bob Christiansen realized that it had to be because the
mountains were just blown away. When you’ve got sixty miles of mountains just obliterated,
you know you’re dealing with something pretty potent. It took Christiansen six years to figure
it all out.”
I asked him what caused Yellowstone to blow when it did.
“Don’t know. Nobody knows. Volcanoes are strange things. We really don’t understand
them at all. Vesuvius, in Italy, was active for three hundred years until an eruption in 1944
and then it just stopped. It’s been silent ever since. Some volcanologists think that it is
recharging in a big way, which is a little worrying because two million people live on or
around it. But nobody knows.”
“And how much warning would you get if Yellowstone was going to go?”
He shrugged. “Nobody was around the last time it blew, so nobody knows what the
warning signs are. Probably you would have swarms of earthquakes and some surface uplift
and possibly some changes in the patterns of behavior of the geysers and steam vents, but
nobody really knows.”
“So it could just blow without warning?”
He nodded thoughtfully. The trouble, he explained, is that nearly all the things that would
constitute warning signs already exist in some measure at Yellowstone. “Earthquakes are
generally a precursor of volcanic eruptions, but the park already has lots of earthquakes—
1,260 of them last year. Most of them are too small to be felt, but they are earthquakes
nonetheless.”
A change in the pattern of geyser eruptions might also be taken as a clue, he said, but these
too vary unpredictably. Once the most famous geyser in the park was Excelsior Geyser. It
used to erupt regularly and spectacularly to heights of three hundred feet, but in 1888 it just
stopped. Then in 1985 it erupted again, though only to a height of eighty feet. Steamboat
Geyser is the biggest geyser in the world when it blows, shooting water four hundred feet into
the air, but the intervals between its eruptions have ranged from as little as four days to almost
fifty years. “If it blew today and again next week, that wouldn’t tell us anything at all about
what it might do the following week or the week after or twenty years from now,” Doss says.
“The whole park is so volatile that it’s essentially impossible to draw conclusions from almost
anything that happens.”
Evacuating Yellowstone would never be easy. The park gets some three million visitors a
year, mostly in the three peak months of summer. The park’s roads are comparatively few and
they are kept intentionally narrow, partly to slow traffic, partly to preserve an air of
picturesqueness, and partly because of topographical constraints. At the height of summer, it
can easily take half a day to cross the park and hours to get anywhere within it. “Whenever
people see animals, they just stop, wherever they are,” Doss says. “We get bear jams. We get
bison jams. We get wolf jams.”
In the autumn of 2000, representatives from the U.S. Geological Survey and National Park
Service, along with some academics, met and formed something called the Yellowstone
Volcanic Observatory. Four such bodies were in existence already—in Hawaii, California,
Alaska, and Washington—but oddly none in the largest volcanic zone in the world. The YVO
is not actually a thing, but more an idea—an agreement to coordinate efforts at studying and
analyzing the park’s diverse geology. One of their first tasks, Doss told me, was to draw up an
“earthquake and volcano hazards plan”—a plan of action in the event of a crisis.
“There isn’t one already?” I said.
“No. Afraid not. But there will be soon.”
“Isn’t that just a little tardy?”
He smiled. “Well, let’s just say that it’s not any too soon.”
Once it is in place, the idea is that three people—Christiansen in Menlo Park, California,
Professor Robert B. Smith at the University of Utah, and Doss in the park—would assess the
degree of danger of any potential cataclysm and advise the park superintendent. The
superintendent would take the decision whether to evacuate the park. As for surrounding
areas, there are no plans. If Yellowstone were going to blow in a really big way, you would be
on your own once you left the park gates.
Of course it may be tens of thousands of years before that day comes. Doss thinks such a
day may not come at all. “Just because there was a pattern in the past doesn’t mean that it still
holds true,” he says. “There is some evidence to suggest that the pattern may be a series of
catastrophic explosions, then a long period of quiet. We may be in that now. The evidence
now is that most of the magma chamber is cooling and crystallizing. It is releasing its
volatiles; you need to trap volatiles for an explosive eruption.”
In the meantime there are plenty of other dangers in and around Yellowstone, as was made
devastatingly evident on the night of August 17, 1959, at a place called Hebgen Lake just
outside the park. At twenty minutes to midnight on that date, Hebgen Lake suffered a
catastrophic quake. It was magnitude 7.5, not vast as earthquakes go, but so abrupt and
wrenching that it collapsed an entire mountainside. It was the height of the summer season,
though fortunately not so many people went to Yellowstone in those days as now. Eighty
million tons of rock, moving at more than one hundred miles an hour, just fell off the
mountain, traveling with such force and momentum that the leading edge of the landslide ran
four hundred feet up a mountain on the other side of the valley. Along its path lay part of the
Rock Creek Campground. Twenty-eight campers were killed, nineteen of them buried too
deep ever to be found again. The devastation was swift but heartbreakingly fickle. Three
brothers, sleeping in one tent, were spared. Their parents, sleeping in another tent beside
them, were swept away and never seen again.
“A big earthquake—and I mean big—will happen sometime,” Doss told me. “You can
count on that. This is a big fault zone for earthquakes.”
Despite the Hebgen Lake quake and the other known risks, Yellowstone didn’t get
permanent seismometers until the 1970s.
If you needed a way to appreciate the grandeur and inexorable nature of geologic processes,
you could do worse than to consider the Tetons, the sumptuously jagged range that stands just
to the south of Yellowstone National Park. Nine million years ago, the Tetons didn’t exist.
The land around Jackson Hole was just a high grassy plain. But then a forty-mile-long fault
opened within the Earth, and since then, about once every nine hundred years, the Tetons
experience a really big earthquake, enough to jerk them another six feet higher. It is these
repeated jerks over eons that have raised them to their present majestic heights of seven
thousand feet.
That nine hundred years is an average—and a somewhat misleading one. According to
Robert B. Smith and Lee J. Siegel in Windows into the Earth , a geological history of the
region, the last major Teton quake was somewhere between about five and seven thousand
years ago. The Tetons, in short, are about the most overdue earthquake zone on the planet.
Hydrothermal explosions are also a significant risk. They can happen anytime, pretty much
anywhere, and without any predictability. “You know, by design we funnel visitors into
thermal basins,
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