Is the End Near?

Even though a large number of Bible-believing Christians talk about the end of the world-and point to Bible passages that predict it-you don't have to take the Bible seriously to believe that earth itself has the potential to bring about the end of life as we know it today. The recent earthquakes at Yellowstone National Park have me wondering what may be around the corner for civilization.

The earthquakes raise some troubling questions about the natural stability of our planet. My wife and I have visited Yellowstone several times. I have several impressions of the area: (1) This is not the place I would want to build a permanent retirement home; (2) This is not the place for someone to express one's gardening enthusiasm; and (3) This is not Kansas (or Iowa, where I grew up, or Minnesota, where I now live). When you have to walk carefully to avoid jets of steam coming up out of the ground or walk carefully in order not to drop into the ground, you know you're dealing with a very unstable area.

A recent article on the Scientific American blog emphasizes the enormity of the damage that could be caused by an eruption of Yellowstone. Yellowstone, the blog continues, has erupted every 600,000 years or so, and it's been about 640,000 years since the last one. The last eruption spread about 240 cubic miles worth of rock, dirt, magma, and other stuff, and another eruption could affect as much as half of the United States. As I've reported in another Associated Content article, everything west of the Mississippi River could be damaged by an eruption of the caldera (volcanic area) that underlies Yellowstone.

Not to worry, says Scientific American. Things still look normal overall at the park. I do worry, however, for a couple of reasons. First, the caldera has been rising in recent years, causing even more of the volcanic features that make Yellowstone a unique (actually, an almost unique place) among America's national parks. Lassen Volcanic National Park in the state of Washington has an area with Yellowstone-like features. See my Associated Content article about Lassen. With the rising caldera and the increasingly unstable nature of the area, the potential increases for what Scientific American calls a "monster" eruption. Since my wife and I and our daughter and her husband all live west of the Mississippi in a suburb of Minneapolis, we are in the danger area if the park erupts. Our son, who lives east of the Mississippi in St. Paul, laughingly says he's safe, although he's staying with us over the holidays, so he may not be as safe as he thinks!

My second reason for being concerned about the possible eruption of Yellowstone is not just because of what's happening in Yellowstone itself, but also because of the volcanic nature of much of the world. If many of the mountains of the west coast of the United States are "sleeping volcanoes," (and they are) and if they all tap into a common underground reservoir of magma or liquid rock (which I suspect that they do), could not the other volcanoes across the world (and there are many volcanoes on this planet) also tap into a common source of magma? And if they do, what is to prevent a major eruption in one location (Yellowstone, for example) triggering successive eruptions around the world?

Although scientists tell us that the current volcanic activity seems normal right now, the Scientific American blog goes on to say in a less assured statement that "Unfortunately, scientists can't really predict when the next such eruption will happen, and the range of possibilities is large: from later today to a million years from now." [My emphasis]

I'm not comforted by that. Are you?

During a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest, my wife and I bought a book at a National Park Service visitor center. The book is about Yellowstone and is titled, Super Volcano. The subtitle is The Ticking Time Bomb BeneathYellowstone National Park. (See reference information below) Just that information should give you some idea of what the book is about. At another visitor center, we asked a park ranger when Yellowstone was going to erupt. Her half-serious answer, "Anytime!"

How would you like to work in a place that could be gone in seconds? In a sense, many of live in a nation, parts of which could be gone in seconds. I don't want to be an alarmist, but there it is. Now the question is whether or not to spend my retirement money as quickly as I can, or wait and trust that I have quite a bit of retirement left to enjoy!

Sources:

www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm

www.associatedcontent.com/article/1072289/craters_of_the_moon_national_monument.html

www.associatedcontent.com/article/1196634/visit_lassen_volcanic_national_park.html

Greg Breining, Super Volcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park (St. Paul, MN: Voyageur Press, 2007)