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Tag Archives: Volcanos

Kilauea

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Bill Leave a comment

Kilauea

We are living in a momentous time. The island of Hawai’i is growing. The entire island is volcanic. The northern portion of the island is dormant, the south is more active. It is called the big island, appropriate as it is still growing. The current eruption started sending lava into the ocean on May 22 and continues as of this writing, August 3.

It seems volcanos are popular places to settle. Worldwide, people are killed or forced to leave as the earth starts emitting hot stuff near their homes. Kilauea has forced more than 2000 evacuations. When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, more than 60,000 people had to leave. Fortunately, they had some warning which saved many lives.

It is a mystery to me why development was allowed on Kilauea where lava covered the land as recently as 1960. Yes, people have property rights, but government has the power to zone property. It rains a lot in Hawaii, and volcanic soil is fertile, so evidence of lava flow is quickly obscured.

I enjoy looking at the daily USGS reports and maps. The flows go where they will, without any discernible pattern. For a week a boat ramp becomes more vulnerable to the encroaching lava, then more lava decides to enter the ocean nearby. It also seems strange the lava travels so far from the rift before spreading. The channel from the rift is well established and the levees on either side are growing. The channel is rising and I expect breakouts much closer to the rift, but nothing seems to happen. I just looked at yesterday’s map. Lava has broken out upstream from the ocean entry. I feel vindicated.

Asks usual, government agencies insist on limiting access to the lava flows. Yes, I understand many people will put themselves in harm’s way and need rescue, but here in Colorado people regularly kill themselves in the mountains and access is allowed. I would love to put on my heavy boots and look down on a lava stream. As it is, I read online accounts of people sneaking into closed areas to look at a volcano at work.

Caldera Eruption

The crater is another phenomenon worth seeing. Before this eruption the lava lake in the crater fluctuated in elevation due to varying supply from the magma reservoir below. Once the fissures opened some distance from the caldera the lava lake began dropping. The amount of lava now flowing down the channel exceeds the supply that was in the crater. Thus, magma is flowing up from the deep. The Hawaiian Hotspot is alive and well and the archipelago continues to grow. Pele is not at all concerned about people scurrying around on her rocks.

Posted in Eruption, Geology, Kilauea, Stories

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

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

Perspective

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Roman Empire

As I moved along in my history studies I heard a lot about developing a historical perspective. It means acquiring a long view about historical processes. For example, how the civilizations on the Italian peninsula evolved from Etruscan influences to Greek colonies to the start of the Roman city state with a political system somewhat modeled on Greek city-states to a republic, evolving with the growth of the empire and the need to defend the borders which tended to generate a more autocratic government which became increasingly corrupt and unable to check the invasions of Germanic tribes which led to collapse and the Dark Ages. How is that for a synopsis?

Just about every statement I made about Rome has been debated, supported, refuted, and revised for centuries. It is my perspective, however, and provides a framework, however tenuous, for my thinking about the development of European civilization. Many of the conflicts in what was once the Roman Empire and it’s fringes have roots over two thousand years old. I draw on my views of ancient empires in thinking about current developments in our world.

Geology also requires developing perspective; probably more than history because of the vast expanse of time. We think of two thousand years as a long time historically, but it is less than a blink in geologic time. The earth is over four billion years old. What we can think of as written geologic history, the evolution of life forms leaving a fossil record, is 600 million years old. The

2013 Colorado Flooding

2013 Colorado floods, viewed as a rare catastrophe, is only one of many thousands of similar events that carved canyons, moved rivers, filled basins that continue to subside, and provided habitats for ever-changing life forms. Bring back the mastodon and the Sabre-Toothed Tiger!

Geologists think that Colorado was formed by island arcs similar to those archipelagos south of Asia colliding with the Eurasian continent. Here, island arcs from the south docked on the Wyoming Craton, some of the oldest rocks in North America. This happened a very long time ago, before life emerged. If you want to see this transition I recommend the

Wyoming Stromatolite

Snowy Range road in Wyoming. You can find stromatolites, fossilized algae. These fossils predate the Paleozoic, and are older than anything in Colorado. Yes, geologists use the word docked, if you can imagine India docking on Eurasia. The transition between the Wyoming Craton and the younger stuff is called the Cheyenne Belt.

Now here is some serious history. Since Colorado became one land mass, mountain ranges have come and gone, oceans have advanced and retreated, new life has evolved and gone extinct, and the whole deal has skidded around on the earth. All the skidding has moved at about the rate your toenails grow. That is not very fast, but after a few million years it begins to add up.

Trail Ruts at Guernsey WY

One of the problems of moving in next to Wyoming is that Yellowstone is there. 200 miles north of Denver is Guernsey, Wyoming, home of some interesting human history. Guernsey is on the Platte River and the Oregon-California Trail. Hundreds of thousands of people traveled the trail seeking new opportunity. The trail stays close to the river in most places, but at one point the banks narrow and the trail climbs up about 20 feet through what looks like soft sandstone. The Rock is so soft the wagon wheels formed axle deep ruts.

Yellowstone Volcanic Caldera

The rock is not sandstone. It is volcanic tuff, deposited by ash clouds from the last time the Yellowstone Supervolcano blew, about 640,000 years ago. On the highway it is about 380 miles. Four feet of hot ash from 380 miles away. It must have gotten pretty nasty here in Denver. That volcano is going to erupt again. We don’t know when, but the magma continues to bulge and recede in the area around Yellowstone Lake, which formed in the caldera. Now that is historical perspective. I live in a place that is going to be cooked and buried some day.

For those of you in coastal lowlands, along the West Coast, near St. Louis, Salt Lake, or anywhere between Tibet and Australia, there will probably be cataclysms occurring sooner than Yellowstone erupting, but nobody knows for sure.

Posted in Geology, History, Stories, volcanoes

Backpacking in the San Juans

Posted on June 20, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Getting Off at Needleton

My backpacking days are over. I’m old, I have a titanium knee, and I hurt in lots of places. The inspiration for this piece is Reese Whitherspoon’s Wild. The movie is about a woman who decided to pull her life together by backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail. She did it and found herself on the way. I didn’t find myself backpacking, but had some experiences that are still with me. I even had some parallel experiences, the main one being: don’t go on a long backpack with boots that don’t fit unless you enjoy pain.

On a long trip through the San Juans, my boots were too small. We took the narrow gauge train from Durango to Needleton, just a stop on the line halfway to Silverton. We got quite a few looks from the flatland tourists as we got off for a trail into a canyon a long way from anywhere. From the trailhead it was several uphill miles to Chicago Basin in the heart of the Needle Mountains, where we planned to spend some time.

Don’t Buy Them Too Small

About halfway, we came across some guys helping their friend with a badly sprained ankle to get to the railhead. He was in serious pain, unable to put any weight on his ankle. His friends were looking pretty strained. That first trail is where I began learning about my boots. It was the seventies when you had to have those massive European climbing boots for a walk in City Park. I think I spent something like $200.00 for them. I was determined they would fit OK once they were broken in. Hint: those things could be so worn out the soles are falling off, but they won’t be broken in. There was only one thing to do, keep walking.

Chicago Basin

Chicago Basin was miraculous. It is a large glacial basin ringed by mountains, three of them fourteeners. Windom Peak, Sunlight Mountain, and Mt. Aeolus. The area is full of thirteeners, not as famous, but challenging. It is steep country. Most of the San Juans are volcanic, but the Needles are the cores of ancient mountains, much older than the relatively recent volcanos.

In the 1970’s, the United States Geological Survey was changing from 15 minute topographical maps to 7 1/2 minute maps. The map for the Needle Mountains was somewhat behind in the revisions. It was published in 1900. No color, no modern changes to man-made features, but still useful for navigation. 7 1/2 minutes is roughly 7 miles. It is possible to walk through the area covered in one day. The Needle map was 15 minutes with a note to add eight feet to each elevation. No GPS in those days, just triangulating from one peak to another.

The Needle Mountains are one of the most remote mountain ranges in Colorado. A big glacier once sat in that basin at the foot of those mountains and ground away for a long time. There are lots of places in the Rocky Mountains with great views, and Chicago Basin is right up there. The other good thing is that it is hard to get to. Keeps the riffraff out. We had the basin to ourselves, even during the backpacking boom.

Columbine Pass

As a bonus, the weather was good. When it was time to leave, we thought a good breakfast was in order. Pancakes and coffee. Lots of both. We struck camp and headed over Columbine Pass. The trail switchbacks up that glaciated wall to a summit over twelve thousand feet high. Hint number two: don’t climb a steep trail at high altitude with a stomach full of pancakes. They didn’t feel like pancakes, they felt like lead in there. I guess suffering is one of the aspects of backpacking.

The descent led us to Vallecito Creek, and a long hike to Vallecito Reservoir, where my father gave us a ride to the car in Durango. Now, it is day hikes or four wheeling. The knees are the first to go.

Posted in Backpacking, Colorado Mountains, Geology, Memoirs, My Story, Pain

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

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