The Discovery Channel sometimes shows a special that shakes me up a bit, about Megavolcanoes.
These are volcanoes that far exceed the ones we know today. They are akin to Mons Olympus on Mars or something you'd find on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io. All the known megavolcanoes on earth are dormant or extinct.
You might perhaps think they are in far off exotic places like the Pacific ring of fire, who knows?
Possibly the biggest dormant megavolcano is a place called Yellowstone.
Dormant. Not extinct.
Well, come on now, where the hell did you think the heat for all those geysers came from?
I've been to Yellowstone, and I suspect many of you have too. Had I known I was trekking about on top of one of the biggest blowholes on the planet I would have been disconcerted to say the least.
Yellowstone is suspected to have played a role in at least one mass extinction, an eruption from the prehistoric active volcano producing something akin to a nuclear winter.
Today, Matt Drudge linked This Article about something happening in a lake at Yellowstone.
There's a bulge.
There wasn't one before.
Bulges due to pressure from deep subsurface magma are bad, bad news.
I had a dream as a little boy of watching two pretty women having tea in a distant gazebo. They were some ways across some kind of verdant lawn from me. Then, in the dream, some great pall sweeps over them, and the last thing I see before I wake is the same blackness sweeping over me, smothering....
I'm reminded of something else I saw on The Discovery Channel. Footage taken by a videographer caught very close to Mt. St. Helens when she blew her top in 1980. All it is is a distant blurry patch of light and the man's choking words as he makes his way towards that light, certain he will not survive. Miraculously, he did survive.
I think of my childhood dream and that video.
And a bulge beneath a lake at Yellowstone, where the magma makes the pretty geysers go.
*a whirl of dust and great mothwings flapping, indrid heads towards his perch for the night...*
