PART III
Yellowstone Eruption May Yield Dramatic Global Cooling
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this morning that eruption aerosols from the Yellowstone eruption have already encircled half of the globe and are beginning to block solar radiation from reaching the earth’s surface. The clouds of volcanic dust should begin impacting global temperatures within days. Sulfur and ash particles in the stratosphere are already having a cooling effect on surface temperatures in the United States.
In the portions of the Mountain and Great Plains States where sunlight has been blocked for days by heavy smoke cover from the smoldering caldera, scientists estimate temperatures to already be 12 degrees below the seasonal average.
NOAA experts warn that overall global cooling could be pronounced, estimates ranging from five degrees below the mean to as much as 15 degrees colder on average. The cooling effect from the eruption could linger for months, years, or even a decade. Sulfur particles in the upper atmosphere could linger for years, mixing with water vapor and forming a veil that acts like a mirror that reflects incoming light back into space.
Paleoclimatologist Paul Kraus at UCLA, making the rounds of morning talk shows in the Los Angeles basin, created a stir early this morning when he stated that the last Ice Age was in full swing when global temperatures were, on average, just five degrees lower than today. His comments went viral over the internet, and at this hour his comments have reached an unprecedented internet audience.
He warned that the Yellowstone eruption was the most powerful volcanic event since the Mt. Toba eruption in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, a cataclysm that nearly drove the human species to extinction.
Government officials have been downplaying such talk but urged people to take emergency precautions, stocking up on food, water, and heating fuels.
Chapter Sixty-One
The death throes of Yellowstone National Park slackened on the fifteenth day. The interminable pumice and ash fountains ebbed, lost power and altitude and fizzled to smoke well below the cliff tops of the newborn caldera. Surface strata that was once much of Yellowstone National Park now lay in the hollowed-out upper magma chamber, settling into its deathbed more than a thousand feet, and in some places more than twice that depth, below the terrain ringing the caldera rim. Several open vents in the depths continued to vomit lava even as their more lively and quick brethren flamed out to noxious exhaust.
No religious manuscript on earth carried passages that described hell as it manifested itself at Yellowstone. Every atom twitched wretched. The caldera floor and its walls smoked, disgorging an alchemist’s cocktail of poison. Pumice and fractured rock slides rained nonstop into the abyss, the sound of their falling lost in the depths of purgatory and rendered mute by the roar of vapor and gas venting from thousands of live steam fissures.
Hot poisonous air drifted toward the heavens, laced with toxins and sulfurous steam. The northwestern corner of Wyoming lay under perpetual night, so thick were the putrid clouds outpouring from the crater.
No living organism survived at the surface within two hundred miles, not so much as a thermophilic bacterium or archaic anaerobic microbe. The grand Yellowstone forests, every stick leveled or uprooted and blown miles from the eruption zones, were buried hundreds of feet below the massive sheet flows. The trunks of the trees, lost in their airless, super-hot coffin, charred to carbon charcoal even as the heat in the lightweight porous volcanic rock fused and welded the stone together to form a fragile lid over the dead world.
The new caldera would not rest peacefully. Although the magma chamber below lost its uppermost layer of material to the atmosphere and lands above, nearly ninety percent of the original magma ocean volume remained. With the weight of the rock strata above greatly reduced, the chamber began to receive more upwelling magma from the hot spot conduit pipe running deep toward the earth’s mantle.
Even as the caldera collapsed, it was poised to rebound slowly and to begin filling with newly extruded lava. Now that the great pressures were relieved by the eruption, there would be fewer and fewer explosive events in the near future for the Yellowstone country. The land would cough out torrents of ash occasionally and ooze lava for decades, as if leaking stinking puss over a festering flesh wound.
Seismic quiet returned. Seismographs at the Cascade Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington settled down, their ink styluses jiggling but no longer sweeping in great arcs over drum paper. Infrared satellite images lost their brilliance as the searing heat of the eruption was spent and buried. True-spectrum visible light images revealed nothing at all, as the caldera lay hidden beneath prodigious, opaque outgas clouds.
Space images of topography hundreds of miles outside the Yellowstone region were disquieting to scientists and media professionals alike who were pulling the digital images up on monitors in a thousand offices across the country. It was as if a time machine had rolled back eons to the dawn of creation. Did someone forget to load color film into the cameras? Rather than a greening, verdant living world, the photographs revealed a colorless, monotone moonscape covering hundreds of thousands of square miles.
Vulcanologists and geologists all over the West sought to rush off to Yellowstone despite the risks, but getting close to the caldera was impossible and would remain so for months. Helicopter was the only way in, but blowing ash and heavy particulate loads at every level of the atmosphere could destroy the intricate working of any chopper’s engine in minutes. Flights for any purpose, civilian or military, were grounded over much of the continental United States. There would be no going into Wyoming.
Chapter Sixty-Two
On the night of May 18th, late-season arctic air streaming across the Canadian Shield slammed into a moist low-pressure system over the Dakotas and exploded into a smothering sleet and snow line. Just after midnight, accompanied by gale force wind gusts, the storm barreled across Big Stone Lake, touching off a volcanic duster reminiscent of the topsoil-choked clouds of the Dust Bowl decade.
The wide overhanging eaves on Abel’s cabin snared increasing winds and gave them a howling voice. The moaning gusts woke the man from a fitful sleep. Abel lay in the dark listening to the commotion outside the single window in the exterior wall of his small, chaste bedroom. He rolled over on his bed and brought his head off the pillows to have a look at the world outside. Streaks of pallid mud pressed in against the pane and shellacked the grounds. A slimy paste of wet snow, ash and fine dust, driven to earth by the gale, was piling up.
Abel groaned aloud as he watched the horrid precipitation fall. It would put an end to the desperate work of pollinating insects and swipe fruit blossoms from branches and berry cane. There would be no apple and berry crop yields. Every seedling breaking from spring soils through the ash layer would be beaten down.
April had been unseasonably mild on the Great Plains and the first days of May had been luxuriously warm. Everyone in the Independency village was thrilled with the early start to the growing season. Then, during the second week of May, midday temperatures began to recede from their comfortable highs. The retreat from the mid-seventies down into the fifties alarmed Bobcat. He saw it as evidence that Yellowstone’s eruption was already beginning to assert itself on temperatures in the northern hemisphere. Abel, peering out the window at the chaotic environment outside, wondered if this nasty storm was the first scout out ahead of a climatic warring party.