Gigantic upward forces in the first eruptive columns kept the massive volcanic clouds above Yellowstone aloft. But the mass of the column soon overcame the rising forces and the black super-hot veil collapsed, turned in on itself and fell at the speed of an airliner.
Wesley watched in rapt fascination as the roiling folds lost their grip on the atmosphere and tumbled toward earth, millions upon millions of tons of vaporized rock dust falling, a storm of atomic mushroom clouds in reverse.
Pyroclastic energy surged from the base of the eruption columns. Fluidized rock, unable to coalesce because of the super-hot temperatures within, flowed like a mile-high tsunami wave of water in every direction. The wall of broiling horror radiated outward, consuming the land, burying it, erasing it utterly.
The pyroclastic surge cloud raced over the blackened waters of Yellowstone Lake, flashing the surface to steam, rendering the path of the cloud frictionless. In seconds the boiling headwall swept into Grant Village. The buildings were as tissue paper before a flamethrower.
The pressure wave streaming before the pyroclastic hell lifted Wesley from the ground, his body sailing as easily as a leaf on the wind for a moment before being overtaken, obliterated by the 2,000-degree atomized-rock super storm. A last sensation of fission heat flashed through Wesley’s consciousness. Much of his big body vaporized, cells reduced to their base elemental atoms and seeded through the volcanic hurricane.
The surge wall raced across the boundaries of the park in minutes, a seething apocalyptic force sweeping everything away before it. The ferocious cloud fronts roared deep into Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, powered by a colossal eruptive monster the planet had not witnessed in 630,000 years. The flows kept coming, kept moving, swallowing a 100-mile radius, 200, 300 and more, and stabbing into northern Utah, western Oregon and Washington and across Colorado’s mountain fastness to the Front Range.
As initial blasts radiated outward across the West, the upward inflation of the Yellowstone plateau slowed. For hours, a two-thousand square mile raft of earth some three and four miles thick, riding atop the magma ocean, hung suspended, the moorings tying it to the adjoining landscape snapping away.
At the fringes of the vast earthen raft, gaping fissures sank away toward the fiery abyss. Up through them roared blast-furnace fountains of gassy ejecta that solidified into mountain-swallowing pumice flows. A ring of glowing crimson heat encompassed the great plateau, shielded from the outside world by impenetrable ash and smoking darkness. Rock and pumice bombs fell from the boiling heavens over three states, falling harmlessly into airy pumice avalanches hundreds of feet thick spreading across thousands of square miles of intermountain topography. Vents spewing lava opened one after the other over the newly-forming caldera, spreading molten rock across the now sterile terrain.
Within twelve hours, Yellowstone’s bizarre fate was sealed. Even as massive pumice fountains erupted along miles of ring fractures and lava surged from the new vents, the final stages of volcanism were already in motion.
The upper fathoms of molten rock froth floating atop the magma ocean jetted from their lithospheric prison and rose into the atmosphere. As the melt erupted away, the sheer volume of material in the depths declined, leaving a void. The earthen raft above, thousands of cubic miles of rock, pressed down on the magma chamber as it emptied. For the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, the volcanic structure of the region could no longer support the crushing weight of its own roof. A vast chunk of the Yellowstone plateau began to move, to sink, slipping down along the concentric ring fractures forming the outline of a wholly new, emerging caldera.
Chapter Forty-Three
A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather researcher, watching a real-time satellite image of the western United States, saw several tiny but bright flashes of light in succession in the northwestern corner of Wyoming. Galvanized by the phenomenon, she thought she must be watching the aftermath of an airburst of a small streaking meteor when an ominous black plume blotted out the entire region. It appeared to her to be much like one of the earth-size plumes that erupted on Jupiter when the Jovian planet was bombarded by fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy several decades earlier. As she watched the satellite images, details faded from view, the ash plume darkening the atmosphere so as to reveal nothing more to the space-borne camera lens.
Quake monitoring equipment at the University of Utah, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, at UCLA, on campuses at Laramie, Missoula, Seattle, and Portland danced an angry jitterbug as the pens on seismographs leapt wildly right, then left and digital readouts whirred.
Cascades Volcano Observatory teams, scurrying to monitor new Yellowstone data, clutched their guts as their technology on the ground at Yellowstone blacked out suddenly. Turning to incoming seismometer data streaming from ground stations throughout the Northwest, the teams were swamped with information pouring in, much of it reading at magnitude levels most of the professionals found inconceivable.
Chapter Forty-Four
A Northwest Airlines Airbus A320, awaiting runway clearance from the airport tower at Bozeman, Montana, swayed and bobbed on the tarmac. The huge airframe convulsed as strong seismic pulses wriggled up the wheel assemblies. The forty-three passengers aboard grew anxious about the rattling of the aircraft at rest on the runway. The flight crew could see from their instrumentation that nothing was amiss on the jet itself. They wanted to get rolling and leave the thumping airfield behind.
Liz, seated in window seat 23A over the wing, glanced back and forth across the aisle. Eyes whipsawing nervously, she sought a glimpse out the windows on the far side of the shaking airliner. The glare of the morning sky was all she could detect. A male passenger in the aisle seat, observing the woman gyrating and straining against her seatbelt, became alarmed by his row-mate’s actions.
Engine noise increased as the Airbus throttled up and lumbered down the tarmac into the prevailing winds sweeping through the Montana State University campus city. Two minutes after liftoff from Bozeman and on a western heading, the jet dropped the left wing as the pilot maneuvered the jet in a wide arc to a southeastern heading, bound for Minneapolis with a stop at Denver International Airport. As the cabin rolled from level flight to a twenty degrees angle, explosive blasts shattered the takeoff routine, their concussive force rattling everything in the craft. Passengers screamed in fright at the stunning volume of the sounds.
In the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot froze in terror momentarily, but the A320 proceeded smoothly in its turn, the instrument panels glowing normally. The geophysicist launched out of her seat, jumped the male passenger sitting a seat away, and came down in the aisle. The steep angle of the turning plane foiled her landing; she lost her balance and pitched across passengers in the far row. From the rear of the cabin, a flight attendant shrieked for the unrestrained passenger to return to her seat. The geophysicist clawed a few rows toward the rear of the plane trying to reach an open F-seat where she could peer out a window to the south.
Pandemonium erupted as passengers recoiled in fright at the careening female flyer slamming about the cabin interior on the heels of the explosive noises. Fearing a terrorist incident, several passengers attempted to tackle her and pull her down to the aisle floor, but Liz dove to the open window seat and pressed against the window Plexiglas.