Volcanos | Bill's Views on Most Everything

Category Archives: Volcanos

El Volcan De Fuego

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Bill Leave a comment

Fuego

I no more than post about Kileaua, a shield volcano, when Fuego, a stratovolcano, lets loose. Guatemala is part of a string of beautiful Central American countries harboring many volcanos.

The Cocos tectonic plate is smashing into the North American Plate just north of the Caribbean Plate. As the Cocos dives below the North American, its rock containing lots of water goes down (subducts) and is heated by the hot magma in the mantle.

Pyroclastic Flow

New, lighter magma is formed which then rises and erupts. The volcano’s lava doesn’t just flow out as in Hawaii. Stratovolcano magma is more viscous, sticks and plugs the magma channel until pressure builds up and it blows in an explosive, destructive eruption. The hot stuff rises into the atmosphere (ash), and also flows down the mountain as a pyroclastic flow of superheated rock and ash, the killer. Pinatubo in the Philippines, Pompeii, Etna, Mt. St.Helens,

Rainier, Lassen, Hood, and El Volcan de Fuego (Fuego=Fire). The volcanos ring most continents and island arcs.

Kileaua has been erupting for a month with just a few injuries, and Fuego has probably killed hundreds in one day. Don’t live too close to a stratovolcano.

Posted in Geology, Stories, Volcanos

Pele

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Bill Leave a comment

Kilauea

Pele is the Hawaiian Volcano Goddess. Like many goddesses, she is both creator and destroyer. She built the entire island chain, is now busy making the Big Island bigger, and is working on a new one that is just a seamount today. It’s interesting most everyone in Hawaii believes in her and are resigned to her moods.

She is really in a mood now, both building and destroying. If you haven’t been following the eruption, go to the USGS website or Facebook feed and watch. We have a unique opportunity to watch new land being created. Broadly there are two main types of volcanos – shield volcanos like Kilauea, and stratovolcanos like the ones on our west coast. Mt. St. Helens is the latest example of what stratovolcanos can do if they have a mind to.

There are some minor ones, but those are the big two. Their difference stems from the magma rising from the interface of the crust and the mantle. Two types of magma create volcanos. Stratovolcanos have felsic magma, derived from the lighter crust beneath continents. The most common felsic rock is granite. Shield volcanos are made of basalt, a mafic rock making the ocean floor.

Mt. Rainier

Stratovolcanos tend to form those big conical mountains people like to view or climb. All the Cascades are stratovolcanos, Mt. Rainier being the most famous. Felsic magma is less viscous and as it rises from the magma chamber the gasses are trapped until the pressure exceeds the pressure of the overlying rock. Then it blows. When Mt. Hood blows, goodbye to Eugene. When Rainier blows, goodbye Seattle and Tacoma.

Mafic magma is more dense and less viscous and tends to flow out and spread with less violence if you can call a 300 foot high plume of 2000 degree lava less violent. All that black lava spreading over the land is violent, it’s just not as explosive. It’s gas bubbles that cause explosions. As magma rises, there is less pressure, allowing gas bubbles to expand and some water becomes gas. If the bubbles can move through cracks and voids in the magma it rises to the surface without big explosions. If the magma is more homogeneous, the gas stays in place until its pressure exceeds the weight of the overlying magma and things go boom.

Shield Volcano

We are on a big ball of stuff. The core tends to be iron, but there are radioactive elements there and when they decay, they give off heat. So, we are living on a ball of really hot stuff, made of layers with different density. Felsic rock continents are less dense than the mafic stuff under them. They float on mafic magma much like an iceberg in the sea. Most of the continent’s mass sits down in the mafic magma. You can’t call deep magma liquid, it is more plastic, but it moves. Hotter stuff rises through the cooler stuff above and sometimes makes it all the way.

It can rise into the mid ocean ridges, ooze out and spread. A tectonic plate is forming. As it moves away from the ridge, it runs into the lighter continent and heads back down, but not without making a mess on the continent. There is the origin of stratovolcanos. Mountain ranges and volcanos are mostly on the coasts.

Pacific Ocean Island Chain. Progress of the Hotspot

There are other place where magma surfaces called hot spots. A plume of magma rises from the deep, belching and vomiting as it gets to the surface. Hawaii, Iceland, and Yellowstone are hot spots. The Hawaiian hot spot is out there in the Pacific where mafic magma lives, so shield volcanos form. Lava flowing created the islands. Yellowstone is in felsic rock country on a continent so periodically it blows up. Really blows up, laying waste to hundreds of square miles. If it happens, Denver is toast.

Tectonic plates move over the hot spots, leaving a chain of Hawaiian islands. The Yellowstone hot spot has left a trail across Idaho. Much of that track is composed of mafic magma that found its way up as the continent travelled west. Lots of basalt there, forming the Snake River Gorge.

Don’t expect all this planetary action to slow down anytime soon. There are still radioactive elements decaying and the rock doesn’t cool off very fast. We have to resign ourselves to living on a big stirred up rock that will shove things around and pump magma out on the ground. Thus, we must give Pele her due. She is our neighbor and will do what she will.

Posted in Geology, hawaii, Stories, Volcanos

Terremoto

Posted on January 21, 2018 by Bill Leave a comment

I was sitting in a building in the San Jose, Costa Rica airport waiting for my luggage when the building shook. A soccer game was on the TV, and the guys just looked up and grinned at one another. It wasn’t much of an earthquake, but Costa Rica has had some big ones. It’s a mountainous country, and in 1991 a big one closed the road and railroad from San Jose to the Caribbean coast for weeks.

Typically, earthquakes happen where tectonic plates collide. In Costa Rica it is the Cocos Plate diving (subducting) under the Caribbean Plate. The Cocos is headed east, the Caribbean is moving west. The combined motion makes for some real fireworks. The boundary is marked by a string of Volcanos. The only active volcano I have visited is Irazu, northeast of San Jose. It is a big tourist attraction and showered ash on President Kennedy in March of 1963. I developed more of an appreciation of a volcano’s power when I looked into the crater.

Volcanos and earthquakes release energy on a scale that overwhelms the human imagination. The nation of Japan moved about eight feet east feet during the 2011 earthquake which caused the tsunami responsible for inundating the east coast of the island. Sea level rose about ten feet. Now that, folks, is one hell of a shove.

Economic loss was in the neighborhood of $235 billion, the costliest natural disaster ever. The magnitude was 9.1, about as big as they get. Remember the scale is logarithmic, with the amplitude increasing by a factor of ten when moving from number to another. Thus a magnitude increase from four to to nine is 500 times more intense. The energy release is not on the order of ten times, but closer to thirty times. You do the math. It is enough energy to change the rotational speed and tilt of the earth.

The southern end of our old friend the San Andreas fault is overdue for a major slip. The northern portion is less likely as several good sized quakes have released much of the stored energy. Estimates of the magnitude of a big one on the southern segment are in the range of 8.0. Not as bad as the Japan shake, but enough to more than $200 billion, with major loss of life. That Los Angeles Basin is full of people and stuff. A big quake would trap most of the people there with no power or water. Can you imagine no superhero movies for many months?

Christmas brought me several good books, including one on earthquakes and one on wildfire. Brace yourself for disaster stories. What is clear to me from my studies on wildfire and earthquakes is that there is risk to living on this planet. Humanity only serves to magnify the rise. We want our surroundings to be fairly steady state. Not so, the driving force is change. Whether natural phenomena or human caused. It will all change and then we die. The key is to make life worthwhile, accepting the inevitability of change. In the meantime, try to avoid Southern California if you can.

Posted in Earthquakes, Stories, Volcanos

Weird Wyoming

Posted on January 14, 2018 by Bill Leave a comment

Along with having the entire atmosphere pass through the state in any 24 hour period, Wyoming has some other attributes beside the wind. I like Wyoming for its diversity and the fact it doesn’t have too many people. The diversity also extends to the geology. Prairie in the east, Devil’s Tower and the beautiful country around there to some of the most spectacular alpine country anywhere, even if the mountains are lower than ours in Colorado. Oh, and Yellowstone, our first National Park.

Wyoming Geology

I especially like the deserts, like the Great Divide Basin, aka the Red Desert, a depression rimmed by the Continental Divide. Yellowstone is the largest and most dangerous volcano in the country. There is coal, iron ore, oil and gas, uranium, and trona, to name a few. Those resources are a double edged sword, leading to a boom and bust economy. Ranching just soldiers along, but it is a hard way to make a living.

A good portion of the economy comes from Greens (Coloradans, known for their green license plates). It’s the topography that draws me. Rivers flowing north, through mountain ranges, fed by hot springs. A range of hills known as the gas hills, where methane comes out of the ground. Mountain ranges running north and south as God intended, but the Snowy Range runs east-west and is the boundary between the ancient island arcs known as Colorado and the much more ancient Wyoming Craton.

The Wyoming Craton has some of the oldest rocks in North America, sharing the antiquity with the Canadian Shield. Ages vary but are around 2.6 to 2.8 billion years old. The oldest rocks in Colorado are around 1.7 billion years old and arrived as an island arc smashing into Wyoming, much as Indonesia and the Philippines are headed to Asia.

Wyoming has had a lot of activity down deep, shoving mountains up and sliding them around. That pushing and shoving means areas where oil and gas get concentrated in the bends and corners, thus all the oil patch work there. There is a lot of coal. The Union Pacific got its coal right near the tracks, and there is a tremendous amount of coal in the Powder River basin. Coal is out of favor now, so Gillette is hurting, people leaving.

The reason Wyoming got famous is for two reasons, unruly Indians and the livestock business. There was a lot of Indian fighting in the middle of the nineteenth century, what with the Oregon Trail crossing the region. When the Indians were whipped, all that empty country became home to cattle and sheep. The livestock people still hold most of the political power – they also have oil and gas leases, so they aren’t very environment friendly. Lots of cowboy legends came out of the place.

My favorite things are the rivers running through mountain ranges. The textbook example are the Wind and Bighorn rivers. They got their names because early explorers didn’t realize they are the same stream bisected by the Hot Springs Mountains. The Bighorn flows south through Thermopolis and its hot springs and roses into a beautiful narrow canyon. The Wind River flows out of the canyon. The river was there, the mountains came up, and the river (rivers?) stayed in the same place, cutting the canyon as the uplift occurred.

Do I need to say the Wind River is aptly named? Years ago in Colorado Springs I met a bicyclist doing a ride across the country. He came across Wyoming. He looked at me and in awe said, “The Wind”. He rode into the wind all across the state. Another time I was driving from Laramie to Fort Collins after dark. It was Christmas time and the ground blizzard was in full song. I saw a VW bus along the road near Tie Siding. In conditions like that, you stop. The occupant was from Australia and said “I’ve never encountered weather like this.” It was around zero with 50 mph wind. The VW had quit, probably a frozen gas line, and his wife got a ride into town to get help. Shock and awe. I just laughed and saw he was OK. You know about the Wyoming Wind Gauge. It’s a length of heavy chain hanging from a post.

Jackalope,, Wyoming State Animal

There is usually a Jackalope colony nearby.

There are three books I recommend:

Rising From the Plains, John McPhee; Roadside Guide to Wyoming Geology; and Wyoming Geologic Highway Map

Posted in Coal, Geology, Green River Formation, John McPhee, Stories, Volcanos, Wyoming, Yellowstone Volcano

Where Not To Live

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Bill Leave a comment

Living in Colorado, I may be arrogant about all the inferior places in the country, but the ones on this list are unsafe. They are also popular. It seems people like to live on the edge.

San Andreas Fault

At the top of my list is anywhere near the San Andreas Fault. When two tectonic plates are bumping along one another, things get shaky. Just look at those aerial photos of the gouges the sliding plates created. Lots of energy goes into motion of that magnitude, and there is plenty left over to bring buildings down. The Los Angeles and San Francisco areas have a lot to offer. Climate, scenery, the Pacific, and all those geologic features created by the colliding plates.

The place of greatest folly is the Portola Valley.

Fault in Portola Valley After 1906 Earthquake

Just west of Stanford University, the valley is not a stream valley, it’s a fault valley. The valley is full of big houses located not near the fault, but on it. Well, not right on the fault, you must build fifty feet away from the fault. Portola Valley is one of the richest zip codes in the country which is a good thing; the people will have the money to rebuild somewhere else. There is a strict building code, but the fault is just too damn close.

A relative used to live in Menlo Park, one of the charming and wealthy communities in Silicon Valley. Her house was midway between the San Andreas and Hayward faults in a flood plain. What are those people thinking? Pretty country, though. She had redwood trees in her front yard. One of my favorite ironies is that the west coast office of The United States Geological Survey is in Menlo Park. What were they thinking?

Shaking in Parkfield, Oakland, San Francisco, Northfield, Palmdale, and soon. The entire Los Angeles area is at risk. There hasn’t been a big quake in some years.that means increasing amounts of energy is being stored along the fault. It’s not if, but when.

Mt. Rainier

Those tectonic plates are at it it the Pacific Northwest as well. There are earthquakes there, but the real danger is those pesky volcanos. All those striking photographs of Seattle nestled beneath Mt Rainier? It is an active volcano, folks. It has been a while, but every day is one day closer to the next one. Mt. Hood is due as well. Are you old enough to remember Mt. St. Helens? 1980. Not many lives were lost, it is in a remote area, but the blast flattened the forest for miles.

The real danger from those big volcanos is pyroclastic flows and lahars. The eruption releases massive amounts of ash and larger chunks (clasts). In addition, parts of the mountain blow apart, and the whole mess heads downhill. It is hot, coming out of the volcano, and wet from the ice and snow on the mountain. There are huge landslides contributing to the mass, which can travel as fast as 300 mph. Everything in the flow’s path is buried or carried with the flow. What is scary is that Seattle, Tacoma, Eugene, and other towns are in the path of the flows.

Track of the Lahar after Mt. St. Helens eruption.

In an earthquake, buildings collapse and maybe burn. A pyroclastic flow kills everything in its path. If the heat doesn’t do it, the ash in the air is so dense it fills the nostrils of any animal. It also buries land with upwards of several feet of ash. Lahars travel down valleys and is a mass of ash, rock, water, and any other thing in its path. It flows down the valley and when it stops, it is the consistency of concrete. No living thing survives. Stay away. The Puyallup Valley is most vulnerable from a Rainier eruption.

Don’t live right on the coast either. Earthquakes can generate tsunamis that will sweep away anything in their paths, sometimes far inland. In addition, sea level rise will drown lots of development.

Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains. Fault at base of mountains

Moving east, the Salt Lake mountain front is overdue for a big earthquake. The city developed at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, with a huge fault at their base that moves fairly regularly. Watch out, people, Zion is going to shake.

Another place to avoid is Florida. A beautiful place with amazing wildlife, the peninsula is just a slow moving disaster punctuated by somewhat lesser disasters. The biggest problem, it is all limestone. Not just limestone but limestone honeycombed with water filled voids. The voids are growing as the abundant rainfall soaks in and dissolves even more limestone. Sinkholes are the result. There are more all the time. In addition, Florida is low and flat. Low enough for much of it to go under as seal level rises. It’s happening. Every flood tide, water flows out of manholes in subdivisions north of Miami. The rise will continue, and Mr. Trump isn’t helping.

Charlotte Harbor

Oh, and there are the hurricanes. They sure do make a lot of messes. Climate change is predicted to increase the number and intensity of the storms. My late in-laws lived for a time in one of those retirement trailer parks on Charlotte Harbor, on the Gulf coast. The trailer park is gone, thanks to Hurricane Charley in 2004. My in-laws had moved to Mt. Dora before the hurricane. Mt. Dora is in the middle of the state on high ground (around 300 feet). They have had 77 hurricanes since 1930. One of the storms knocked out power for two weeks.

The only time I have had real reason for fear while in an airplane was when we flew into Orlando during a thunderstorm. We were on approach when I saw the storm hit us. The visibility went to zero and turbulence rocked the plane. The pilot shoved the throttles forward and went around. By the time we circled around, the storm had moved on.

The entire East Coast is also hurricane country. The ocean also seems to want to move inland. Don’t be in the way. The ocean is rising. The coast is moving west.

New Orleans After Katrina

The Gulf Coast is also a danger zone. Subject to hurricanes, low lying areas can also be flooded by rising rivers. The Mississippi Delta is also no place to live. It is sinking. The Mississippi River mud is going over the continental shelf, thanks to the Corps of Engineers channeling the river straight to the gulf rather than allowing it to build the delta. The river is going to win. It will not allow itself to be contained for long. Louisiana, beware.

Go up the river to New Madrid, Missouri south of Memphis. Earthquake country. The last time it shook, bells rang in Boston. That was in 1812, when the population in the quake region was small. It is small no more. St. Louis is vulnerable.

Tornado

Now that we are in the Midwest, let’s discuss tornadoes. The entire region is at risk, with devastating storms anywhere. Tornado Alley, from Texas through Oklahoma and to Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota, and Iowa has the most danger, but anywhere east of the Rockies has some risk.

The general idea here is that nowhere is completely safe, nature being what it is, but there are some areas that I would not live in. I think I will stay in Colorado away from those canyons that like to flood. Oh, wait, if Yellowstone lets loose, we’re toast.

Posted in Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Mt. St. Helens, Stories, Subsidence, Tornadoes, Volcanos

Shaking and Baking

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

As you are aware if you are a regular reader of my ravings, I am a geology buff. I like the Big Picture, mid-ocean rifts and rises, tectonic plates shoving one another around, places where the hot insides spout out of the ground, mountains rising and being worn away, and the oceans becoming ever more salty. Most of the time, all this is a slow process, but sometimes all hell breaks loose.

San Andreas Fault

Just look at that photo of the San Andreas Fault. Things are clearly on the move and the land is being torn apart. The Pacific Plate is sliding northward along the North American Plate. Pasadena will one day be next to Anchorage. Don’t wait up for it, though. The Pacific coast of North America is one of the most seismically active regions on the Ring of Fire surrounding the Pacific Ocean. It shakes, it blows, it smokes, it flows.

Places like that make nice places to live. Most of the time. There is the ocean, lots of pretty landscapes with beautiful mountains nearby, and places to grow things. Just look at the Seattle-Tacoma area. Bays, inlets, rivers, islands, and a big old mountain to look at. It is easy to forget that mountain is a large volcano just biding it’s time until it lets loose again.

Mount Rainier. Close to Town

If Rainier resembles Mt. St. Helens in the way it erupts, there might be some warning. What we won’t know is how big, exactly when, and for how long. There is a lot going on in that area. Boeing, Microsoft, REI, millions of people, and Starbucks are a few examples. If a swarm of magnitude four earthquakes begin, what to do? Shut everything down and evacuate? Where will everyone go? What about looting and plundering? What if it doesn’t erupt for months, if ever?

Pyroclastic flows of very hot, wet, chunky stuff have flowed off that mountain all the way to the ocean. The old cliche says “It is not if, but when.” We just do not know when. So, life along the Pacific Rim is always something of a gamble. I have felt small earthquakes and looked into the crater of a Volcano in Costa Rica, a lovely, green, paradise. Earthquakes destroy roads and railroads, volcanos bury villages, and life goes on.

Irazu, Costa Rica

Small, poor Costa Rica is one thing, the Seattle-Tacoma area, or Los Angeles, or Portland, or Eugene, or San Francisco are entirely different matters. No amount of preparation can take into account all the things which might happen. Prediction is in its infancy. Mt. St. Helens in hindsight gave lots of warning, but the disaster was huge in a relatively isolated area. When Rainier or Mt. Hood let go the disaster will be in a heavily populated area with just a few ways out.

Currently there are lots of earthquakes in the oil field regions of Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding areas. I wouldn’t worry too much if I lived there, the odds of a Big One are fairly small. St. Louis and Salt Lake are at more risk. The West Coast is the big danger zone. The earth will keep moving, the plates will continue to slide. Eruptions and quakes will continue to happen. My solution? Don’t live there. What is your plan?

Posted in Apocalyptic Prophesies, Cliches, Earthquakes, Environment, Fear, Mt. St. Helens, Stories, Volcanos

Weather

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Climate Change

2013 Flood

There is currently a lot of controversy about climate change and whether humankind has a role in the warming trend. While I think it is true that pouring huge amounts of sequestered carbon is the culprit, I don’t think it matters much for us here in Colorado and much of the west.

We live in a land of extremes except for the rainy Pacific Northwest, but, they have their earthquakes and volcanos. Here in Colorado, we dwell in a land of extremes. The west is dry, it snows in the mountains, the Front Range is kind of a mix, and it is pretty dry in the east. That varies from year to year. It varies a lot.

In the late nineteenth century it was a wet cycle in the eastern prairie, and the railroads made millions enticing settlers to buy their land and get rich farming. The population in eastern Colorado peaked then and has been declining ever since. The mountain ski areas have lots of snow some years and almost no snow other years. The western desert country looks dry and desolate most of the time, but I have seen it bloom in a stunning variety of color.

Then there are the floods, blizzards, and tornados, often followed by drought. The one thing we can count on is change. There are long term trends. Most archeologists think one reason the ancestral Pueblo Indians left southwestern Colorado was a prolonged drought cycle. Anyone who tries to raise dry land beans in that country can tell you not much has changed.

2013 Flood

Here along the base of the mountains we have the extremes as well. There was the drought of 2002, and the floods of 2013. The mountains create an unusual weather pattern that stalls along the mountain front, bringing more moisture than the land can handle. That is when lots of the mountains wash out into the flat country. It has been going on for more than sixty million years. The gravel in the Platte River in Nebraska is Rocky Mountain gravel. Some of the Louisiana mud is Long’s peak mud.

Some climate models say climate change is going to dry Colorado out, other models say it will be wetter. My money is on more extreme weather. Longer, more violent wet periods and long droughts. Look for more frequent floods, not the thirty or forty year cycle we have had since the first European-American settlers and miners arrived. Think about the tornados and hailstorms recently.

I like the extremes. We have our regular four seasons here but the winters are milder than in Iowa. It can get hot but there are few days over one hundred degrees, but not like southeastern Utah. I think that may change, hotter in the summer. I don’t think the winters will be colder. I can remember forty below in Boulder when I was flunking out of CU. Twenty below seems to be more the cold winter norm now. What I do not like is the hailstorms. I don’t think the insurance companies like them much either. Homeowners insurance costs keep rising. That hail is hard on the garden as well. We had only one tomato plant survive last year.

One of the big impacts of climate change will be on water supplies. The amount of precipitation may not change, but if it is warmer, the snowpacks will not last as long in the spring. That means more spring floods and a shorter runoff period, which will impact water storage. That could be bad news for the populated Front Range. People keep coming, but there will not be more water, and a lot of the big spring runoff will go out of the state. That will be good for the Sandhill Cranes in Nebraska, but bad for Parker and Highlands ranch.

I spent a long time in the water business, and it always disturbed me watching all that high quality drinking water being used to attempt to replicate Surrey or Connecticut foliage in the Great American Desert. All that bluegrass will have to go. The urban forest will have more drought-hardy trees. Denver Water’s customers have done a good job of conserving since the big drought of 2002, but the bluegrass model of landscaping continues. In Denver, daily water consumption is about 110 million gallons per day in winter. I the hot part of summer, it’s over 400 million gallons per day, most of it run out onto the ground.

At our house, we have significantly reduced the size of our lawn, but we still have a lot of crabgrass. It should be buffalo grass and blue grama, both native drought-resistant grasses. They don’t stay green all summer, so we are stalling and paying the water bill. Marijuana legalization is bringing lots of people to Colorado, and the economy is booming. Those people use water, and lots of water is used growing the stuff. One of the unintended consequences of legalizing pot is increased water consumption.

Myself, I am not too concerned about climate change for myself. After all I am 73 years old and don’t live on the coast. Long term change is a reality, but as John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long range we are all dead”.

Posted in Colorado, Earthquakes, Environment, Floods, Hailstorm, Money, Rain, Spring Flowers, Stories, Volcanos, Water Treatment, Weather, Winter

Our Little Planet

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Bill One comment

Mt. St. Helens showing a Lahar, a mud and ash flow that ran 50 miles downstream during the eruption.

Stephen Hawking says we need to have to develop means to get off the planet when the Big One, whatever it is, is about to strike. That is not terribly realistic, relocating several billion people to a place light-years away. In other words, life on earth is toast. Someday.In the meantime, life goes on. It is spooky how we are fouling the planet. We humans may create the need to get off this little ball without the means to do so. In other words, life on earth is toast. Sometime, maybe sooner.So, let’s deal with what we have while we can. There are things we can do, but the means to act are part of a political process. As long as politics is motivated by greed at the level it is currently, we are likely toast. Maybe sooner.

The cliff that collapsed into a massive mudslide is seen covered with felled trees in Oso, Washington March 31, 2014. Recovery teams struggling through thick mud up to their armpits and heavy downpours at the site of the devastating landslide in Washington state are facing yet another challenge – an unseen and potentially dangerous stew of toxic contaminants. REUTERS/Rick Wilking (UNITED STATES – Tags: DISASTER ENVIRONMENT) – RTR3JE4A

As individuals, we must do what we can, and get along with our lives. We can help, and maybe stave off the inevitable to some degree. We can respond to natural events. Floods, earthquakes, tornados, landslides, hurricanes, those things we can react to and help. We must do more than sit in the Lazy-Boy looking at the screen eating Doritos. We can give money away, stir things up in meetings, vote, and give some time.

Well, we can do things until Yellowstone blows. It is surprising how resilient humans are. Ice ages, cataclysms, droughts, they may kill some and move others around, but the species has struggled on through it all. We haven’t been around very long, however, and haven’t had to deal with any Really Big Ones in the blink of time we have been around.

The Yellowstone Caldera

The Park Service says the Yellowstone super-volcano is pretty safe, that most eruptions are limited lava flows. But, someday, it will be like the last big one that created a caldera almost as large as the park. The Snake River Plain in Idaho with all those lava flows is the track of the Yellowstone hot spot as the North American Plate traveled west. The plate moves at about the rate your fingernails grow. As it moves, it erupts. It just takes a while.

Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, all interest me, but I am most interested in geologic cataclysm. One of my favorite potential geologic disasters is climate-related. Years ago I read an article proposing that sea level rise could lead to the Gulf Stream moving over the continental shelf and invading the Arctic Ocean. Europe would cool off with the loss of that warm water and the Arctic Ocean would thaw. With all that open water in the north, evaporation would increase, snowfall would increase in the Arctic, precipitating a new ice age.

I haven’t seen much on that hypothesis lately. Researchers seem to be concentrating on the rapid melting going on without Gulf Stream migrations, although the Gulf Stream does seem to be weakening. There are just so many variables to consider.

Ash From a Yellowstone Eruption

With respect to the Yellowstone super volcano exploding and killing most life in North America, there is only one variable: when. A couple of years ago I was on a ramble in Wyoming. Fort Laramie was my destination, but on the way I looked for the Oregon-California trail wagon ruts along the Platte outside Guernsey. The ruts are dramatic, going up from the river bottom to some higher ground. They are axle-deep in some tan colored rock that looks like sandstone at first glance. It is volcanic tuff from the last time Yellowstone blew. The layer is four or five feet deep about 200 miles from Yellowstone. That is a lot of stuff blown into the atmosphere. All that material along with the CO2 and SO2 would kill most everything for many hundreds of miles.

The most recent volcanic eruption in Colorado was about 4500 years ago at Dotsero. The entire San Juan mountain range is volcanic. Huerfano Butte near Walsenberg is a volcanic neck. There are eroded lava flows on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. There are lots of hot springs in Colorado. Where is all that heat coming from? Will the Glenwood Hot Springs Pool erupt? Will Steamboat Springs’ boiler explode?

Landslides. There is even one not far from Fruita on I-70. Debeque canyon on the Colorado River is famous landslide country. That landslide that killed three men outside Collbran last year is the same geologically. Green Mountain in Lakewood has a landslide that destroyed several houses. The Vail/Eagle River valley is good landslide country. All it takes is a lot of moisture in spring. The canyons incising the front range are landslide prone. All that rock will eventually find its way to Louisiana as mud.

The upside of all that landslide country is that it gives geologists and earthmoving contractors work.

There is a radioactive isotope of radon gas that is common in some of our Colorado rocks that houses are built on. Basements become carcinogenic. There is an anthropomorphic cause of radioactive basements as well. In Grand Junction, uranium mill tailings were used as backfill around basements is some subdivisions. More work for geologists, and a Superfund site.

Debris is strewn over an area affected by an earthquake and tsunami in Miyako, Iwate Prefecture, March 14, 2011. REUTERS/Aly Song (JAPAN – Tags: DISASTER ENVIRONMENT)

Earthquakes. Again two causes, natural and human-caused. All those earthquakes in Texas and Oklahoma caused by injecting fracking water back underground have a Colorado history. Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside Denver was used to manufacture poison gas for military use and later poison gas for agriculture. They pumped a lot of the toxic wastewater down wells and set off earthquakes. They stopped that. The oil companies are not stopping. Yet.

Colorado is earthquake country. Making mountains, shoving rock around to make room for more rock shakes things up. The Flatirons outside Boulder used to be flat. North and South Table mountains are capped with basalt from lava flows. These processes are still going on in lots of places.

The Rio Grande Rift is a Rift Valley stretching from Southern New Mexico to north of Leadville. The earth is pulling apart. Look at the San Luis valley, that is a lot of pulling. It is still going on, but slowly in human terms. There will be earthquakes. The biggest quake-causing fault near Denver is the Golden Fault, formed when the Rockies were uplifted. That uplift has happened about three times. The mountains come up, get eroded down, come up again, get eroded again. Will it happen again? There seems to be some weakness in the crust around here.

What the Meteor Looked Like Impacting off Yucutan

There are asteroids out there that have orbits that coincide with the earth’s orbit. It has happened before, could again. I saw Charlie Rose interviewing Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and he mentioned the possibility. We have the technology to deal with the the threat, but it will take a lot of money and cooperation. Will it happen before we need it? Will it be too late when the danger is imminent? Ask a Republican. I hope you sleep well tonight.

Posted in Colorado History, Colorado Mountains, Earthquakes, Extinction, Floods, Geology, Landslides, Mt. St. Helens, Stories, Volcanos, Yellowstone Volcano

In the Path of Destruction

Posted on May 28, 2015 by Bill One comment

Mt. St. Helens Before Eruption

I started a post last week about volcanos, then I got sick, so here it is now. I was inspired to write this because I follow the United States Geological Survey (USGS)and the American Geological Society on Facebook. The 18th of May was the 25th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Both organizations ran daily posts about the most violent volcanic eruption in the continental United States in recorded history.

The USGS quoted extensively from In the Path of Destruction, a book about the events around the eruption. That eruption in1980 was the most violent volcanic eruption the United States has experienced in recorded history.

Start of Eruption. Landslide

Close to some big cities but relatively isolated, only about 56 people were killed. The low death toll was also a result of the Forest Service, the local county sheriffs, and Weyerhauser Timber restricting access to the area around the mountain, a popular recreational area.

In the Path of Destruction has two sections, narratives of events before and during the eruption, and many eyewitness reports collected by author Richard Waitt, a USGS geologist present at Mt. St. Helens starting in March 1980, when the volcano started coming alive and throughout the eruption and aftermath. Three weeks after the eruption he was in a bar talking to a man who had lived through the eruption and realized the stories of witnesses could add to scientific knowledge of the event.

This book is one you lose sleep over. Do you remember May 18, 1980? Those people do, their memories are as vivid now as my memory of the day Kennedy was shot. Waitt interviewed a wide range of people from USGS geologists, pilots in the air nearby when it blew, campers, loggers, and local residents who survived. Their stories are why the book kept me awake. The author’s narratives are well researched and written. He puts the science, events, and the human story into a book that will hold even those who are not geology geeks.

The Big Boom

In fact as a geology geek, I found myself wanting more science. That is probably good for most readers. A big part of the story is the unusual behavior of the volcano before it blew. There were hundreds of earthquakes in the two months before the big eruption, accompanied by venting, minor ash falls, and the formation of a small crater. The strangest phenomenon was the formation of a huge bulge on the north side of the mountain.

The bulge grew about five feet every day, accompanies by swarms of small earthquakes some of the USGS people thought were from magma intruding into the bulge. The bulge grew, with vertical cracks forming on its face. Some thought a major eruption was imminent, others thought it would be a relatively minor event. Politics kept moving the roadblocks back and forth, with logging being allowed outside the immediate danger zone. It’s tough enforcing a roadblock with logging trucks coming out of the closed area.

In 1980, eruptions could not be forecast. In 2015, earthquakes can’t be forecast. People wanted in the closed area to go to their cabins, to hike, camp, and fish. We think of volcanic eruptions going up from a crater at the summit. On May 18th, a magnitude five earthquake caused the bulge to slide. That caused the mountain above the bulge to slide.

View of Mt. St. Helens from Mt. Margaret, July 27 1980
Devastation

The accounts of the survivors and witnesses of the eruption are what make the book so gripping. For me events thirty five years ago came alive. I won’t go into any of the stories. Read for yourself. The photographs and maps provide a useful context and show the eruption as it happened. I continue to be astounded that one plate smashing into another at the rate your fingernails grow can produce events like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes like the one in Nepal. There is lots of really hot stuff down there in our Earth, and if the crust gets weakened, here it comes.

A few weeks ago I was headed east from Gunnison up the Tomichi Creek valley. The rocks looked sort of like sandstone, so common here in Colorado, but they just didn’t look right. It dawned on me. Volcanic tuff, just like the ash that blew out of Mt. St. Helens. It happened here and in geologic terms, not that long ago. Maybe 65 million years ago, give or take.

Posted in In the Path of Destruction, Mt. St. Helens, Stories, Volcanos