Half of the Park’s 600 Grizzlies have convened along the five creeks emptying into Yellowstone Lake. Most are sitting in the water as though in barber chairs, staring absently, waiting to be lathered-up. They watch for a convenient trout. There are plenty of fish. The bears need not move too far. The spawn has reached its peak. The bears are packing on the fat lost over the previous winter.
The folks from Washington have invited WNET along on the condition that they document the emergency for posterity. They must keep it off the air for now. The news will leak from Yellowstone anyway, but not from them. As you would expect, their crews become distracted by the grizzlies, who, in turn, have become distracted by the people.
Humans crowd into Grant Village early this year. The bears stand up to their full nine feet of height. The film crews watch them sniff the air to catch the scent of the four Karelian bear dogs. Yes—so the bears think—the dogs are back again, but gratefully, they continue to keep behind their fence. The people and the cars do not bother the bears, but the bears keep an eye on the dogs. The film crews have to be warned not to put their fingers through the dog’s chain link fence.
Bears seem strangely smart to us. We wonder if they are happier working off their short list of things to do. The society of bears is kept simple by the estrous cycle, and by not having opposable thumbs.
Our hands give us not a moment’s rest. The human menstrual cycle gives us not a moment’s peace. We humans are continually busy, and in heat.
Mankind is suited to every season in all environments. Yet we have adapted to none, not even to the environment that man has created for himself. We come in to work behind God on the Seventh day, with hasty plans and impatient to get it done.
One of the six buildings of the lodge now fills a month early this year. It is Sunday evening. They give Claire and Jim two rooms. They will use only one.
They give WNET three rooms. Marshal Blevins assures the camera crews that he would personally escort them to the penitentiary at Lewisburg if they breathe a single word of this. They see Marshal Blevins as both very likeable and very big. Those are two good reasons for doing what he says. The program, Nature, will interview the Marshal several times. It turns out that the camera likes Marshal Blevins.
Over a year from now, after the momentous Independence Day broadcast, the government will let WNET move much more freely. The government will learn to take the film crews for granted, like they used to do with Old Faithful. Even now, there is almost no one left to watch a geyser, except those crews from Nature. When the north end of Yellowstone Plateau begins to bulge late in the year, when the Firehole River changes to run backwards, Old Faithful will close, as Mother Nature makes all of this official.
The first order of the new business begins. Six work crews depart Bozeman, heading south. They will parallel the Madison River and U.S. 287. Only at Earthquake Lake will they encounter mountains, and then once past them, the valley opens up one final time, ten miles in each direction. It is in this last vast meadow that they will build the industrial village. Until then, there is only the town of West Yellowstone, Montana and its airport.
These crews will erect the high-tension power transmission towers. They will leapfrog each other as they work their way upstream. Colonel Jeter knows that however high he guesses at the eventual electrical load, he will be short. Therefore, he takes all the power that he can. The Colonel must perform his engineering on the fly.
They move the lectern a few feet aside so that Professor Bennington does not block part of the projection screen. This is the Roosevelt Room at the Grant Village Lodge. Four conference tables, seating sixty people, are arranged in two rows, the long way. A film crew roams the margins. Sentries with shouldered rifles slouch outside the doors, just to be colorful. Claire sits front row center with Marshall Blevins, who now honors the occasion by removing his cowboy hat to reveal a hidden, curly brown mane that lends an out of place boyishness to his authority.
Jim is about to begin. They watch him pacing in front of the lectern, as though wondering where and how to begin. Several times, he glances up to smile at the audience. He winks at Claire, believing that no one else in the room will see that for what it is. There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
It appears that Jim hesitates or is unsure. But no, this is theater only. Jim has known for many years precisely how to explain this. He will play his crowd like a church organ, pushing all the keys and stops.
He knows that a sense of the dramatic will give his listeners energy—the same energy that can cause a lecture hall of students to erupt. He understands that this reluctance to begin is dramatic. His smile will melt into the visceral threat of a steely stare, and then it will form again to ramp the emotions of the crowd up and down.
Jim realizes that he has prepared all of his life to deliver this lecture. It is made all the sweeter by this persistent warmth of new love, by Claire sitting in the front row. She is wearing shorts and boots. She would be stunning wearing anything in any setting. He sees her beaming and this makes him want her again. Jim wonders what other man his age could—and then he stops—his thoughts almost leaving skid marks. Jim is calm in the face of Yellowstone’s primal force, but thoughts of his own mortality spook him.
Claire thinks that Jim Bennington is very handsome when he smiles. Claire has seen Jim smile this much before, but only at the end of class, at those times when he has the students all worked up. His freshman lecture hall course, Geology-100, is known as the only one on campus to ever give its professor a standing ovation at the end of class. It takes a lot of charisma to make rocks come alive. Apart from Jim’s atmospherics, Purdue goes about its business quietly.
When Claire left West Lafayette on the twenty-nine hour drive to Yellowstone, she knew that a summer of field experience would be a good resume builder. She keeps her new feelings for the man separated from her career. When the sun comes up, she is a student; when the sun goes down, she is a girl friend.
It is a remarkable balancing act, and one that Bennington should have considered trying for himself.
Colonel Jeter tenses against a wall. Secretary Laruso joins him. Between the tables, a soldier sits to operate the overhead projector. There will be drawings of what Bennington guesses lies beneath the surface.
Laruso and Jeter briefly confer as to whom shall chair the meeting, though it appears that the Professor has nominated himself. Since Laruso is flying back to Washington that evening, and since Jeter is staying for the duration, it seems best that Colonel Jeter takes charge. The Colonel decides that they will give the ball to Bennington. He seems on the verge of running with it anyway.
Laruso’s concentration has wandered. “Colonel, what’s with that chick sitting next to the Marshal?”
“She’s a graduate student.”
“She acts like someone’s girl friend.”
“She’s a PhD candidate.”
“Good looking woman.”
“Mr. Secretary, Professor Bennington has a sterling reputation.”
“I heard that they’re camped-out deep inside Yellowstone.”
“That’s right. She is the one who discovered the volcano.”
“Man, I’d only pack one sleeping bag if I was him.”
Colonel Jeter begins looking for an empty chair next to someone he knows.
“Go ahead and get this thing started, Colonel. I have to get back to Washington.”
Laruso wonders how anyone can concentrate with Claire in the room. Laruso also wonders if Colonel Jeter begins with a Freudian slip as he asks, “Professor Bennington, what exactly is going on here at Yellowstone?”
“Colonel, Mr. Secretary, Ladies and Gentlemen, at this very moment, right here, we are sitting in the collapsed mouth of a sleeping volcano, as surely as if steam was rising.” His smile fades. He fixes his stare. “If it wakes while we are here, we will be burned alive, or blown to bits. Right now, it is tossing and turning.” Then grinning, “Let us hope it forgot to set its alarm clock.” He pauses for the expected chuckles.
“Yellowstone is a volcano in many ways like Mount St. Helens is a volcano. Except St. Helens is only a volcano. Yellowstone is a supervolcano. And it is not that it will become one, it has already been one, many times, with a dozen super eruptions that our geology can count.” Jim pauses. “And many smaller ones,” he adds, smiling quickly to fill a pause.
“That means that the volcano is so big, we can’t even see it. If a bug drops on your arm, it does not know what it has landed on. All it sees is a freckle in a forest of hairs. If we moved the bug back far enough and if we gave it a telescope, it would know, and wouldn’t that little bug be surprised!
“Most volcanoes develop because the movement of the planet crust exposes the mantle that wraps the Earth’s core. We call that a fault or a subduction zone. But here, we have a singularity. Beneath Teton County, Wyoming lies a convective upwelling of melted rock, deep within the mantle. In the past, it has burned its way to the surface. It is trying to again. The longer that this ground stays in this place, the more of it will melt.
“As we know from plate tectonics, the planet crust is always moving. A series of earthquakes of sufficient strength might start Yellowstone moving again. This would reset the process. All that is now molten would cool. The pressure would leak and dissipate. The process would begin again with a new section of the Earth’s crust, and it would take tens of thousands of years to advance, once again, to a dangerous state.
“Of course, if that earthquake were too strong, it might crack the planet’s crust down into the magma chamber. This would vent the pressure and the supervolcano would quickly become reborn.
“Our volcano is fed by a hot spot in the mantle of our planet. We call this the Yellowstone Hot Spot. It is a planetary convector. The Hot Spot formed here 17,000,000 years ago. Except ‘here’ did not used to be here. ‘Here’ used to be 500 miles to the northeast. This is the seventh Yellowstone and this one has already been a super volcano three times in the last 2.1 million years.
The Planetary Convector has not moved. The surface of the earth has moved. Two-inches per year does not sound like much, but it’s been steady. We are like the bug. We are too small to see this happen, and our clock runs too fast.
“When the Yellowstone hot spot first rose up to melt a path to the surface, a river of molten rock poured out. It did not explode. It was basalt, and basalt usually does not explode because it will not hold pressure.
“This lava moved like a red-hot river at 20 miles per hour. It ran night and day and it covered the distance to the Pacific Ocean in a week. Then it cooled into rock a mile thick. Some of it is two-miles thick.
“The special effects in this part of the country, over these 17,000,000 years, have been beyond anything Hollywood can create. Image a curtain of lava squirting a thousand feet up in the air through a slit 100-miles long. Imagine a football-field size chunk of crust blasting out of the earth in a steam explosion, and falling a mile away, leaving a crater that could hide a modern basketball arena. Imagine volcanic bombs thirty feet across dropping from the sky. Imagine a herd of 300 Rhinoceroses and camels buried alive in an ash fall. That happened 670 miles east of here in Antelope County, Nebraska. That ash fall came from the volcano above the planetary convector.
“Have you ever noticed that there is water around here? We have lots of lakes, and three rivers. We get 25 inches of rain per year. It all collects in the huge bowl we are in, within this caldera of a collapsed volcano.
“Sixty miles east of us, the town of Cody, Wyoming gets ten inches. Ten-inches of rain is only three-inches more than Timbuktu in the Sahara. Why such a difference?
“It is because, over 17,000,000 years, the Planetary Convector has burned its way across southern Idaho and left a trail. It left a 70-mile wide channel through the Rocky Mountains. This channel lines up Yellowstone with the gap between the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada. The result is a moisture channel extending from the Pacific Ocean to Yellowstone. Pacific clouds blow inland unimpeded by mountains until they encounter the 8,000-foot elevation of the Yellowstone Plateau, where they release their load of rain and snow. The result is a microclimate, a little part of the West Coast a thousand miles inland.
“Okay, all of that is geologic history. So, let’s look at this on the front page of the newspaper. What might this volcanism look like today, if that alarm clock went off?
“Well, for openers, you can forget about a gentle flood of basalt lava. The lava erupting at Craig’s Pass is gentle, but it is not basalt. It is granitic. That is the kind that is usually explosive. That is because it holds pressure. Basalt cannot. Granite can and usually does.
“I suspect that the reason that this eruption is a relatively gentle flow is two-fold. First, it extrudes from out of higher, dryer ground. Vapor can become explosive as we know on New Year’s eve with champagne corks.
“The other reason is that this eruption connects to the magma chamber at an unusually low point, like a tea kettle with the pour spout connecting at the bottom instead of at the top. This means lava that is less viscous—not as good at holding pressure. The reason is because the chemical properties of magma change as the height of the magma chamber changes. Everything reacts to gravity even if it is five miles underground. It is also hotter, the lower you go. This magma is runny enough to have been squeezed into the area beneath Craig’s Pass. It has remelted the older country rock. Mostly, it is this older rock that has become the lava we now see. This lava is not entirely from the Yellowstone Magma Chamber.
“For several years, there has been some bulging farther north on the Yellowstone Plateau near Mallard Lake. Reflective seismology shows images that tell us that the center of the magma chamber is at the midpoint of a line drawn from Old Faithful to the start of the Madison River.
“My guess is that new bulging will soon begin somewhere north of Mallard Lake and that this will quickly become the main show. When it erupts, it will not be a gentle flood of runny lava. It will be like Mount St. Helens, except far bigger. This ejecta will be called Rhyolite and it will be very different from the Phonolite Porphyry that Claire Cheviot discovered at Craig’s Pass.
“The most studied eruption of Felsic lava is the Mount St. Helens volcano. So let’s use Mount St. Helens and compare Yellowstone to it.
“The mountain erupted at 8:32 in the morning of Sunday, May 18, 1980. The death toll was 57, but would have been much higher if it had not been a Sunday—if the loggers in the area had been working.
“The magma chamber here in the park is 2,500 times larger than St. Helens had been. The differential is neither a linear nor a logarithmic function. There are too many unknowns. When Yellowstone blows, in a year, or in ten thousand years, it may be from a single volcano or there may be several. If there become multiple volcanoes, they may erupt at different times, or all at once. There may be primordial gas pressure or something less than that.
“For purposes of an initial presentation, let us envision the Yellowstone blast effects as those from a single volcano 2,500 times greater than Mount St. Helens. Let us assume that we will be here to see it. Now let me take you back to that single morning in 1980.
“Mount St. Helens had been asleep for 123 years, just a cat-nap, geologically. She woke up with a shallow quake centered beneath the mountain on the 18th of March. The two days that followed witnessed an awakening earthquake swarm of 174 shocks greater than 2.6 on the Richter Scale. These shocks continued afterward at an average rate of four per day throughout the rest of March and April. Then in May, one week prior, this increased to eight shocks per day.
“On March 27th, steam explosions—what we call phreatic eruptions—began to excavate a new crater 250 feet wide. These explosions sent ash columns up to 11,000 feet. This was just for openers.” He grinned.
“When this ash fell back to earth the static electricity that this falling cloud generated sparked lightning bolts two miles long around the mountainside. A three-mile long crack opened. Two days later the mountain was lit at night with blue flame from burning gases.”
No one twitched. He had them. He paused. “Sounds like Hollywood, doesn’t it?” He grinned again.
“By the last week of April, the north face bulged 270 feet. It was growing five to six feet each day. By May 15th, this displacement had reached 400 feet. Three days later, the day of the eruption, the north face had bulged to 500 feet. This was accompanied by many steam explosions.
“We call this kind of surface-bulging a crytodome because it is intruding magma pushing aside crust material. If the magma had pushed its way to the surface, we would have called it a lava dome, except that once on the surface, there is no longer anything holding it down. The St. Helens magma was the explosive kind. With no weight on top, it would expand dramatically, violently, like the pressure leaving a cannon.
“At 8:32 in the morning of the 18th of May, a 5.1 quake shook the north face. Ten seconds later, the north face of Mount St. Helens slid away in one of the largest avalanches in recorded history, reaching a speed of 150 miles per hour. All that weight, which had been holding everything down, came off.
“Right behind the avalanche, a superheated gas wall moved down the mountain. It overtook the avalanche at the speed of sound, knocking down thousands of trees. It filled the Toutle River Valley to a depth of 600 feet.
“The avalanche sloshed all of the water out of Spirit Lake, sending a 600 foot tall wave 800 feet up the forest slopes behind the gas wall. As the water moved back down into Spirit Lake, it pulled into the basin the thousands of trees that had been felled only moments before.
“Then, immediately after Spirit Lake refilled, the superheated pyroclastic flow from out of the magma chamber reached the lake and flashed it to steam creating an even larger explosion. This one was heard in Canada. The area of devastation was 20 miles across, about the size of an average American county.
“The volcano’s 57 victims felt heat hotter than an oven—670 degrees Farenheit—beyond the melting point of lead. These people were torn apart with angular rock flying at hundreds of miles per hour. The ash column poured out of the volcano for ten straight hours, reaching12 miles high. Their last breath was a suffocating gas..
“The ash cloud traveled east at 60 miles per hour. By noon, visibility in Spokane was ten feet. 210,000,000 cubic meters of solid rock had pulverized to create a volume equal to a pile of ash four city blocks on each side.
“Weyerhaeuser had a lumber camp 27 miles away. It was called Camp Baker. 90 minutes after the eruption began, the lumbermen saw a 12 foot wall of mud pass by the camp. Four hours later Camp Baker was gone.
“Mount St. Helens was seven megatons. That was just the blast. Other energies were estimated at an additional 17 megatons. The good news is that blast pressure diminishes as the cube of the distance. For instance, at 100 miles the blast pressure is only one one-millionth of what it is at one mile. The bad news is that the Yellowstone blast energy in our example will be 17,500 megatons. That means that all around the circumference of a 200-mile diameter circle the blast pressure will be equal to the Hiroshima bomb as felt in downtown Hiroshima. Inside that circle, the blast pressure increases, logarithmically, toward the center. This makes ground-zero an area the size of South Carolina. All evidence of civilization is erased.
“And we haven’t even discussed the non-blast energies which, again using this example, add another 42,000 megatons. The United States of America would take on the shape of a Pacific Ocean coral atoll, except, in our case, the lagoon in the center would be dead.
“And then there are the consequences. What happens when the food supply shrinks—not only the American food supply, but the world food supply— and a billion people suffer malnutrition. The microbial genome mutates out of control inside a billion weakened immune systems. Every human host now becomes a zoo of unrestrained evolution. What new plague evolves to infect the survivors?”
He paced. Jim’s dramatic pause was short. “So is there anything we can do about it? Do we just migrate? Maybe we should sell the Rocky Mountains to the Chinese before the word gets out. Maybe it might not happen for a hundred years, or a thousand. Maybe we should just cross our fingers.
“I have an idea. My idea might not work. We might not have time.”
He knew they were waiting for it. “I suggest we drain the Yellowstone Magma Chamber. We take the pressure off. That might give us another fifty-thousand years.” Jim became confidential, intimate. He spoke in his most respectful mortuary voice. “We bore tunnels in the earth all the time. We use big machines called TBM’s. They can cut a hole up to fifty-feet in diameter. So far, we have cut tunnels forty-feet in diameter for twenty miles. I only want to go ten.”
Jim paused to let this sink in. He smiled respectfully, adding, “Piece o’cake.” A nervous chuckle added counterpointe.
“Once a tunnel boring machine cuts into the Yellowstone Magma Chamber, enormous pressure will be released and cubic miles of melted rock will come roaring out. Where do we put all this? The answer is beneath Madison Valley, Montana.”
Jim continued carefully, not to startle them out of their growing visions. “Some years ago, one of my graduate students discovered an empty magma chamber—a hollow spot below the planet crust. It is just the right size and it is at just the right depth and it is not too far away. That empty chamber is sitting at almost the same level as the chamber under us—the one which is full to bursting.
“When all that magma goes roaring into it, there is probably enough weight of crust on top to contain the expansion. Might be a hell of an earthquake, though. Let’s let Dr. O’Dell tell us about it. It’s all yours, Digger.”
Colonel Jeter saw that Dr. Bennington had just promoted himself to Chairman of the meeting, but he did not mind. As long as the job gets done, that is all that is important. The Colonel knew that he could put himself back into control at any time he wished. Let him have his show, he thought.
Jim Bennington had been banging the drum for Digger all morning, telling everyone that Digger was just the man for the project. After all, Jim would end by saying, Digger had been his student. Digger O’Dell represented reinforcements. The University of Utah has had geologists inside Yellowstone for years. They form the bulk of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
One man alone stands no chance before a swarm of academics. One man with a pretty grad student, perhaps a better chance. Add to that a physically imposing man like Digger O’Dell, a geologist with his own, unique discovery and this just might remain Bennington’s volcano.
Hank Bracken thought that Bennington’s lecture had been a performance—like the dinner-theater in Cheyenne. Was Bennington trying to get his picture on the cover of Time Magazine? Perhaps he might. The film crews had lapped it up like cream. Bracken was glad to see Bennington finally move off his stage.
Digger had been standing in the back. Before he can move, the projector begins skittering across the table. The soldier catches it before it reaches the edge. The tremor is brief, but starts again. Small earthquakes swarm across a span of ten minutes. A brief pause intrudes. Another quake begins. During all of it, the audience remains poised to sprint from the building, but each time, the quakes stop short by just enough.
Finally, it is over. Amid the sighs of relief, Colonel Jeter points to Digger O’Dell.
Bracken watched the new man, who looked like he belonged in the NFL, amble up to the lectern. Average sized men are always a little surprised to find that big men are smart.
Claire had been holding the seat next to hers for Jim when he finished. Bennington smiles charmingly and takes his seat. He sits very straight.
As Digger walks to the front, Bennington glances around as if to indicate that everyone should continue to listen seriously.
Growing up, Digger O’Dell had learned, unconsciously, not to compete with people. He knew that he would never have to. He spoke slowly. His eye contact was fleeting. He made his footprint as small as he knew how because he knew that it was already large enough.
His slow, deep delivery came from some kind of sympathy. This allowed some to become too quick to score him low. Digger was not slow. This was calm, if you cared to understand.
Claire thought that Digger had the biggest, saddest eyes she had ever seen. There was something remote and appealing in his gypsy-life of following a new oil field, sinking wells, bringing them on-line, then moving on to the next town and the next well.
It seemed especially adventurous for a man who had earned a doctorate and chose to forsake the comfortable campus life of a professor. Claire wondered if she had the guts to be a romantic loner. She wondered if, in some way she did not yet understand, she already was.
Claire felt glad that someone else from Purdue had come to Yellowstone. For Claire, it was like seeing a friendly neighbor moving in next door to she and Jim.
Bennington was glad that Digger would have his back. The little Purdue team would have been too outnumbered when Utah moved in to reclaim their turf. Even so, Bennington wishes that Digger was more assertive. Digger could act almost elderly, instead of the young giant he was.
“While I was knocking around the west side of Teton County some years ago, I became acquainted with an obscure Indian legend. It seems a shame to have to keep it to myself.
“Many years ago, Yellowstone was empty. It was a hunting ground of the Indians, but none of the tribes could live here. This was because all of the other tribes would attack whoever tried to claim Yellowstone for their own. So, the tribes would come and go, but none could stay.
“There were two branches of the Shoshone People: the Fish-Eaters and the Sheep-Eaters. They wished to unify to become stronger and so resist the other tribes that wanted to enter the Yellowstone.
“They selected one member from each tribe to marry and in so doing to unite all of the Shoshone people. Their families brought them into the Yellowstone and left them with food and tools and then departed.
“These two young people were Pretty-on-Top, a young maiden of the Fish-Eaters, and Hunts-to-Die, a young brave of the Sheep-Eaters. They built a wikiup, hunted, and lived in one of the geyser basins. At night, as they lay on their bed of skins and furs, the voice of the Great Spirit came to them from underground. He told them that Hunts-to-Die must dive into a hot spring. The Great Spirit told Hunts-to-Die that he would not let him be burned. He told him to sling a spear over his shoulders and to swim to the bottom, where he would emerge on the other side at a riverbank. There he would encounter the Geyser-Devil who controlled all of the eruptions of boiling water. The Great Spirit told Hunts-to-Die that he must either convince the Geyser-Devil to keep the other tribes out of the Yellowstone, or else Hunts-to-Die must fight the devil, and kill him to take the power for himself.
“The geyser-devil was so impressed with the courage of Hunts-to-Die that he promised him that he would let the Fish-Eaters and the Sheep-Eaters live in the Yellowstone and that he would keep the other tribes beyond the mountains that ringed the place.
“Hunts-to-Die spent three days with the Geyser-Devil. At the end of this time, and before Hunts-to-Die returned to the surface, the Geyser-Devil warned that there was a greater tribe living far away across the great water and that the Geyser-Devil had no power over those people. He said that this other tribe would someday take the Yellowstone from the Shoshone and would drive them out. But he told Hunts-to-Die that before the end of time, the Great Spirit, who lived above the sky would come down to drive away this other, greater tribe. The Great Spirit would let the Shoshone return to live in the Yellowstone—until the day when the Great Spirit finally destroyed the world.
“Before Hunts-to-Die dove back into the water to swim back up to the surface, the Geyser-Devil gave Hunts-to-Die a yellow rock. He told him to carry it to the river and to throw it into the water. He said that this would turn all of the rocks in the river yellow, which would remind the Great Spirit what he someday must do for the Shoshone People.
“In return, Hunts-to-Die gave the Geyser-Devil his spear to remember him by, and then dove into the steaming water and swam up to the surface where he found Pretty-on-Top sleeping on skins and furs next to the hot spring, waiting for him. He left her sleeping there and walked through the forest to the river where he threw the rock into the water, turning all of the river-washed stones to yellow.
“When he returned to the hot spring, Pretty-on-Top was still asleep. He awakened her with a kiss. He told her all about his three days far below the surface of the earth.
“Pretty-on-Top and Hunts-to-Die had two sons. One day, the sons were sent out in two different directions to deliver the word to all of the Shoshone People to pack all they had and to move into the Yellowstone. One son returned with the Fish-Eaters and the other son returned with the Sheep-Eaters. They became a single people, and lived here in happiness for many years.
“We are that greater tribe, originally from beyond the great water. Now, it is up to us to take the fire away from the Great Spirit, or else he will use it to drive us away, just as he promised Hunts-to-Die. The Colonel brought me here because I’ve studied the Madison Valley.”
Bennington silently corrected him thinking: Nice try, Digger. I brought you here. Try to remember that.
“Madison is one of Earth’s most unique places, but being next door to the even yet more unique Yellowstone, it has been ignored. After all, it is only an empty chamber, yet a very large one.
“Seven years ago, I discovered a hollow place below the valley floor. The top of it is four miles beneath the surface. This is an underground chamber in a spheroid shape with a long axis of ten miles. You could put Mt. Everest inside and have room left over.
“Volcanoes are great big over-pressure vents. This pressure could be explosive with steam or carbon dioxide. Or the pressure could be from displacement, like if you squeezed a balloon.
“A magma chamber can hold pressure until that pressure becomes greater than the weight of the earth’s crust on top of it, or until it finds a crack. Once in the air, it expands. That can be a slow flood, or an explosion. While under pressure, we call this material magma. Once it reaches the surface we call it lava, or ejecta.
“Using the Mount St. Helens multiplier of 2,500, and using the St. Helens’ pressurized magma volume, we can project a volume of pressurized magma beneath Yellowstone of 125 cubic miles.
“Once this magma becomes ejected—violently—it expands. It gets larger. Once airborne, it may become an ash volume of 825 cubic miles. If we can move the Yellowstone magma from one place to another, and keep it four miles underground, the resulting partially expanded volume will be somewhere in between these numbers. It will expand, but by how much is a matter of so many variables that any calculation would be wrong.
“The Madison Valley chamber was likely formed inside of a large pluton of intrusive mafic rock—basalt. A pluton can be as large as a car, or as large as a city. The big version is called a batholith.
“Sometime after the formation of this first stage, the center of the batholith melted during a secondary upwelling of buoyant magma. I theorize that the pressurizing gas escaped over time through a series of geothermal vents. This allowed the secondary upwelling of magma to sink, leaving a place melted hollow inside the original batholith. All of this is covered by the lithosphere, the crust, to a depth of four miles.
“We think that under the Yellowstone Plateau, we have the same thing going on again. There is another upwelling of magma remelting the surrounding batholiths. If enough steam can vent, then perhaps it cools and hardens into a pluton, or maybe the inner core of it subsides, and we wind up with another Abyss.
“In these cases, our worries are over. If the Yellowstone intrusive magma becomes extrusive lava, if it reaches the surface, or even just close enough to the surface, then it explodes. Remember that an explosion is just an expanding gas wall. Many things besides a chemical or nuclear explosive can cause this. A meteor is one. A volcano can be another if the pressure release is sufficient.
“The important thing is that the top of the Yellowstone Magma Chamber and the top of the Madison Valley Abyss are both about four miles beneath the surface and less than ten miles apart.
“Dr. Bennington wants to connect them—to channel the pressurized Yellowstone magma into the Madison Valley Abyss. A hundred cubic miles of melted rock moving at fifty miles per hour would make for one hell of a large earthquake. That by itself might cause the whole thing to blow wide open, depending upon the weight and structure of overlying crust. A half mile of dirt overlaying a three-and-one-half mile stone batholith would be very heavy. We’ll find out more about it when we drill through it.
“Right now, the surface bulging at Mallard Lake is small. A giant earthquake will not cause an avalanche unless Yellowstone grows itself a new mountain. As Dr. Bennington has told us, Mount St. Helens’ North Slope grew 500 feet in two months.
“I know that we can afford to try Dr. Bennington’s plan. The Mount St. Helens eruption cost us 2.75 billion dollars. Using the multiplier, this means that the cost of the Yellowstone eruption would be seven trillion dollars. Jim Bennington’s plan won’t cost one-percent of that.”
Digger wonders if he is done. Then outside, Digger hears the faint sounds of panic. Without another word, on instincts, Digger races to the door.
A pickup truck has pulled up front. There is someone lying in back. The driver shouts for help. A graduate student from the University of Utah, attached to the Yellowstone Volcanic Observatory has been severely scalded. The young man had been walking the slope between West Thumb and the Continental Divide. A new geyser opened up. It was a small hole, only inches across. His right side had been sprayed with water heated to 240 degrees Farenheit.
Such occurrences would soon become commonplace. These will become known around Yellowstone as casual phreatic events.
Digger will later explain what happened as a sudden encounter of ground water with magma. The resulting explosion varies as to the volume of water and as to the temperature of the magma, which can range from 1,000 to 2,000 degrees Farenheit.
The others run across the lobby even as Digger returns, carrying the student in through the doors. Jim Bennington knows that Yellowstone is venting. He understands that this is both good news and bad news. He wonders if the sounds of steam, while still deep underground, might be in the register of the hearing of the Karelian bear dogs. Perhaps that is what they have been hearing this spring—steam and escaping gases. If so, they will have to react to the sound by instinct. There will no time to train them—only time enough to drop to the ground before the blast.