The beat stopped and the intolerable silence returned. He revolved slowly toward the west when he took a seismic sucker punch and lost his feet. As he fell, the masonry in the buildings 200 feet away disintegrated and toppled. The ground vaulted up to meet the geologist, leveling a punch to ribs and hip. The jolt knocked the breath from his lungs. He collapsed into a fetal position, gasping.
The man bounced and flopped about, as if saddled to a newly-roped mustang bronco just captured and being forced from a life of freedom on an open range. The eerie silence of the last seconds was banished forever, replaced by banshee wailing and thunderclaps from the soil and rock. Titanic shocks swept through the resilient log and timber-frame buildings nearby, splintering wood, flipping clapboards away like playing cards and toppling the last of the chimneys.
At the Cascade Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, pens riding the roll paper on old seismograph drums rammed side-to-side, leaving angry, jagged sweeps of ink on the paper. Real time global positioning satellite readings, measuring elevation at dozens of points about Yellowstone, galloped upward in centimeters of rise per second, not centimeters per year.
At the southeastern horizon twenty-five miles distant, a flash of arc-welder white light zippered the cloudless blue sky apart. The blinding rays pierced Wesley’s eyes. Blinking wildly to try to clear his vision, he thought he saw an Everest peak appear out of the spring day far to the east at the flanks of the Absaroka Range peaks. He blinked again and the vision metamorphosed into a rising super-column of red heat, ash-laden smoke, pumice and pulverized stone.
At Brimstone Basin, well east of the shores of Yellowstone Lake, the earth’s crust fractured, cleaved apart and uplifted thirty feet in a broad ring-like arc. Super-pressurized gases saturating the viscous rock at the top of the magma chamber expanded violently as deep new fissures opened access to the earth’s interior. In seconds, the pressure blew away the rock layer above, freeing more gas and giving the magma ocean below an express route to the surface.
The initial explosion obliterated the thermal fields that had expanded during the winter months. Hellish materials from earth’s catacombs rocketed into the atmosphere. Pressures below plummeted, setting the stage for eruptive chain reactions. As pressures in the magma chamber fell, gases trapped and building force for millennia in the seething magma ocean three miles down suddenly had a geological pressure relief valve opened. In the vicinity of the initial fissures, where frothy magma and steam found an avenue to the surface, trapped gases flashed to full volume, much like the gas in a liter of warm and agitated soda with the cap just unscrewed. The volatile mix deep in the earth expanded instantaneously and violently. The colossal expansion heaved at the strata above, sending waves of fractures through the rock. Cubic miles of crust, like the cork in a champagne bottle, jetted away from its confines, atomized and launched vertically into the atmosphere, climbing, climbing, climbing—straining to leave the bonds of earth’s gravity.
The explosion opened a half-mile-wide chasm in the earth at the shoreline of Yellowstone Lake. The surrounding strata collapsed toward it. Suddenly, Yellowstone Lake had no floor under its southeastern expanse. Millions of gallons of lake water flooded down toward the magma chamber inferno far below. Moments later, steam explosions shattered the surrounding rock layers and disgorged fission-like blasts of steam and sound.
Booming sound waves arrived twenty seconds later and savaged Wesley’s eardrums. He screamed in pain, slamming his hands to his head.
Shock wave after shock wave skimmed through the lake waters, pushing into the old shoreline below, sweeping a surge flood before each one. Shattered lumber and furniture from the ruined buildings were swept up, floated and rafted inland. Even as the waves came ashore, the waters of the lake began to pull away from their historic boundaries.
Hellish seismic activity continued without abating. Wesley simply could not find his feet. Frantically he scanned the lake’s western, southern and eastern horizons, praying that the blast to the east might be a final one.
The eruptive column filled the southeastern horizon and climbed mile after mile into the heavens. Within the boiling folds of the ash cloud, lightning flashed spasmodically. Upper level winds, toying with the top of the cloud column, sheered away fine ash particles and draped the sky to the north and east with a veil of inky darkness.
West of the region where Brimstone Basin had crumbled, at Flat Mountain Arm, the old caldera boundary rocks cleaved apart as the basement strata beneath began to float upward on a wave pulse of magma and the expansion of billions of cubic feet of gas. Sonic boom-like reports rolled over the lake in rapid succession. Wesley, holding his head, on his knees, turned his wide eyes toward the mayhem. The horizon appeared to peel back like the curling lid on a sardine can. As the land lifted up and lay over, an opaque wall of black ash launched vertically for miles, blotting out the eastern horizon.
More than 1,500 square miles of Yellowstone surface terrain was now on the move. The whole central core of the region, caught in a volcanic whirlwind, liberated itself from the surrounding landscape as yawning fractures radiated outward, intersected with old fissures, and began tracing an immense oval. Yellowstone was unzipping, the massive cracks defining the boundaries of a new caldera.
The geologist stumbled and crawled to the truck and fumbled for the radio. He dropped it. Where was it? There. He hoisted it to his face, flipped it on and radioed headquarters. “Mammoth, Mammoth!” He was screaming into the device.
Someone was monitoring the frequency. The instant he heard a response, Wesley howled into the mouthpiece: “Mammoth, Mammoth, this is it. It’s underway.”
The transmission crackled with white noise, breaking up Wesley’s voice. “Mammoth, major vent southeast. Out of Brimstone, most likely. Other activity along the old caldera boundary….” The transmission stopped.
A nuclear flash banished the horizon, swallowing the eruption cloud.
Throughout the vast magma sea beneath Yellowstone, billions of cubic feet of trapped gas expanded a thousand fold, releasing prodigious forces many orders of magnitude greater than all the weapons arsenals on the planet. Three and four miles of earth strata capping the caldera cauldron, still acting as a lid, forced the explosive mixture below to seek out weak points in the hundreds of miles of massive fractures now rippling around and ringing the vast central basin of Yellowstone National Park. Along these fracture zones, skyscraping fountains of blistering, frothy magma jetted through new vents, clawing up, up, up toward the stratosphere.
Under Wesley, 4,000 cubic miles of Yellowstone basement rock was freed of its bonds with the surrounding mountainous terrain and pulverized by the caldera’s newfound fury. In all directions of the compass, volatile material spouted, giving dimension to the new volcanism. Slabs of rock the size of city blocks rocketed from the earth followed immediately by incandescent fountains of liquid stone.
Thrown to the ground, Wesley was seized with the sensation of riding an express elevator toward the heavens. An area seventy miles long and thirty-five miles wide began to rise as the superheated liquid rock in the upper core of the magma chamber, powered by the expansion of gas, flashed to rock froth.
Caught in the maelstrom, Wesley’s body flooded with a toxic mix of endorphins and adrenaline. An all-encompassing panic drained away and a sense of great calm washed over him. Somewhere in the quieting recesses of his mind, he resolved to experience this, to watch and learn and witness the destruction of an entire environment.