A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight by Susan R. Stoltz

After a long morning of editing blogs, posting photos, writing chapters and generally working most of my Saturday into oblivion, I sat down with a late lunch and turned on the television. I have a few favorite channels: HGTV, The History Channel, RFD - TV, Animal Planet and the Science Channel. As I clicked the remote, the screen leapt to life with the title of a program just beginning; 'Yellowstone Erupting.'

My interest was immediately piqued since I live near Yellowstone, so I contentedly munched on my chicken sandwich as the scientist gave the opening intro. Yeh right, Yellowstone was sitting on a volcano. Well I could have told you that, it's full of geysers and thermal pools and earthquakes, etc. As the scientist seguayed into detail I became more intrigued.

The Yellowstone area, which sits inside the crater of one of the world's largest still active super volcanoes, receives approximately 2,000 to 3,000 earthquakes a year. I was unaware that there are seismographs set up all over the park. Magma is looking for a fissure through the rocks to come up through the earth. Earthquakes tend to open up these sorts of fissures. The active magma pool sitting underneath Yellowstone Park is fifty miles long, thirty miles wide and five miles deep. That's about three times the size of New York City! The narrator went on to explain that this was five times the amount of molten rock needed for a super volcano.

A super volcano is different from other volcanoes in that it sits under the ground, as opposed to being contained in a looming mountain on the horizon, such as Mount St. Helens, waiting for a break in the rock formation to spew up into the atmosphere. As magma comes in contact with the air it creates what they call a Pyroclastic Zone, the magma turns to scorching volcanic ash that travels beyond the speed of sound. The power behind the Yellowstone volcano is that of one thousand Hiroshima bombs per second or ten million times the size of Ground Zero in New York. And I live on the edge of the caldera of this super volcano.

What I learned was even more compelling. This volcano has erupted four times in our earth's history. Yellowstone Park officials closed down one of the trails last year as the temperature of the earth's crust rose to boiling point, a sufficient amount of gases were released in this area that five Bison fell over dead where they stood and the earth literally started to melt and boiling thermal pools started forming in the area. Now I was really paying attention. What came next was mind boggling. In the past 12 months the floor of the caldera that Yellowstone is sitting in has been rising by significant amounts. It's predicted that an eruption would wipe out 75% of the United States cause massive global cooling due to ash clouds and wipe out most of the worlds food supply.

Yellowstone volcano has a history of erupting every six hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand years. It's been six hundred and forty thousand years since the last eruption. I did the math and added up the facts. The tiki bars of Florida started looking like a good option for retirement.