A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [113]
Yellowstone, I hardly need point out, is sensationally beautiful, with plump, stately mountains, bison-specked meadows, tumbling streams, a sky-blue lake, wildlife beyond counting. “It really doesn't get any better than this if you're a geologist,” Doss says. “You've got rocks up at Beartooth Gap that are nearly three billion years old—three-quarters of the way back to Earth's beginning—and then you've got mineral springs here”—he points at the sulfurous hot springs from which Mammoth takes its title—“where you can see rocks as they are being born. And in between there's everything you could possibly imagine. I've never been any place where geology is more evident—or prettier.”
“So you like it?” I say.
“Oh, no, I love it,” he answers with profound sincerity. “I mean I really love it here. The winters are tough and the pay's not too hot, but when it's good, it's just—”
He interrupted himself to point out a distant gap in a range of mountains to the west, which had just come into view over a rise. The mountains, he told me, were known as the Gallatins. “That gap is sixty or maybe seventy miles across. For a long time nobody could understand why that gap was there, and then Bob Christiansen realized that it had to be because the mountains were just blown away. When you've got sixty miles of mountains just obliterated, you know you're dealing with something pretty potent. It took Christiansen six years to figure it all out.”
I asked him what caused Yellowstone to blow when it did.
“Don't know. Nobody knows. Volcanoes are strange things. We really don't understand them at all. Vesuvius, in Italy, was active for three hundred years until an eruption in 1944 and then it just stopped. It's been silent ever since. Some volcanologists think that it is recharging in a big way, which is a little worrying because two million people live on or around it. But nobody knows.”
“And how much warning would you get if Yellowstone was going to go?”
He shrugged. “Nobody was around the last time it blew, so nobody knows what the warning signs are. Probably you would have swarms of earthquakes and some surface uplift and possibly some changes in the patterns of behavior of the geysers and steam vents, but nobody really knows.”
“So it could just blow without warning?”
He nodded thoughtfully. The trouble, he explained, is that nearly all the things that would constitute warning signs already exist in some measure at Yellowstone. “Earthquakes are generally a precursor of volcanic eruptions, but the park already has lots of earthquakes—1,260 of them last year. Most of them are too small to be felt, but they are earthquakes nonetheless.”
A change in the pattern of geyser eruptions might also be taken as a clue, he said, but these too vary unpredictably. Once the most famous geyser in the park was Excelsior Geyser. It used to erupt regularly and spectacularly to heights of three hundred feet, but in 1888 it just stopped. Then in 1985 it erupted again, though only to a height of eighty feet. Steamboat Geyser is the biggest geyser in the world when it blows, shooting water four hundred feet into the air, but the intervals between its eruptions have ranged from as little as four days to almost fifty years. “If it blew today and again next week, that wouldn't tell us anything at all about what it might do the following week or the week after or twenty years from now,” Doss says. “The whole park is so volatile that it's essentially impossible to draw conclusions from almost anything that happens.”
Evacuating Yellowstone would never be easy. The park gets some three million visitors a year, mostly in the three peak months of summer. The park's roads are comparatively few and they are kept intentionally narrow, partly to slow traffic, partly to preserve an air of picturesqueness, and partly because of topographical constraints. At the height