Supervolcano All Fall Down(19)
More than he wanted to live with his mother ever again. That pretty much settled that.
* * *
“Yes, this was a large eruption, even by supervolcano standards—nearly six hundred cubic miles,” Kelly Ferguson told her class at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “This was just about the size of the first Yellowstone eruption, more than two million years ago, and almost as big as the Mount Toba blast in Indonesia seventy-five thousand years ago.” She paused. “Anybody remember how many times the Yellowstone supervolcano blew between that first big boom and this last one?”
Anybody remember? was a prof’s shorthand for How many of you did your reading? A couple of tentative hands went up. Kelly pointed at one of them. The owner of the hand, a big, broad brown guy she guessed was a Samoan, said, “Uh, two?”
He didn’t sound very sure, but he was right. She beamed at him. “Good!” she said.
He looked relieved. If she remembered how he’d done on the last quiz, he had reason to look that way. The State University was California’s second tier, behind the University of California. Students here came in two kinds: the ones who couldn’t get into the UC system, and the ones who couldn’t afford it. Some of the latter bunch were as good as anybody who did get into the University of California. The others . . . mostly weren’t. Kelly’d done enough TAing to know the kind of work UC students did. Too many of these kids couldn’t come close to that standard.
Well, you did what you could with what you had. She went on, “Both those other eruptions were still enormous. Even the smaller one ejected about sixty-four cubic miles of rock and dust and ash. That’s four times the size of the blast from Mount Tambora, back two hundred years ago, and Mount Tambora’s the volcano that gave the United States and Europe what they called the Year Without a Summer.” She glared out at them. “And anybody who mixes up Mount Tambora and Mount Toba is in big trouble, you hear? Mount Tambora is still there. One of these days, it’ll go off again. What used to be Mount Toba is Lake Toba now—the volcano blew itself to hell and gone. One of these days, it’ll go off again, too, but I pretty much promise we won’t have to worry about it. We’ve got enough other things to worry about.”
The kids laughed nervously, for all the world as if she were kidding. They scribbled notes. Some of them just recorded what she said, so they could listen to it again before the test. She’d always thought putting the material into her own words helped make it hers. She still did, but she’d come to see not everybody worked the same way. Recording sure was easier than taking notes.
“Okay,” she said. “The smallest Yellowstone eruption was four times the size of the one from Mount Tambora—and Mount Tambora was pretty big for an ordinary volcano. How much bigger than that ‘little’ supervolcano eruption was this last one?”
She waited. She’d told them how many cubic miles of ejecta the Yellowstone supervolcano’d belched this last time. Now they had to remember that or find it in their notes and make the calculation. Calculators and cell phones came out. Doing math in your head wasn’t quite so obsolete as writing in cuneiform, but it came close.
A girl in the front row indignantly hit what had to be the CLEAR ERROR button. Either she’d made a mistake or she didn’t believe the answer she’d got. A skinny black guy tentatively raised his hand. Kelly nodded to him. “Nine times?” By the way he said it, he had trouble believing it, too.
But Kelly nodded again. “That’s right,” she said. The girl in the front row looked disgusted, so she must have thought a right answer was wrong. Well, it was pretty unbelievable, all right. “If you spread the ash and dust and rock evenly all over California, it would be about twenty feet deep.”
The ones who wrote wrote that down. Of course, the ejecta weren’t spread evenly. Lava and pyroclastic flows—the really dense stuff—stayed relatively close to the supervolcano caldera. But relatively was a relative term. Jackson, Wyoming, lay maybe sixty miles south of what had been the southern edge of Yellowstone National Park. Today, it was as one with Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of these centuries, it would probably astonish archaeologists.
There was a hell of a funny book, one whose author she couldn’t remember, called Motel of the Mysteries. It was all about the stupid conclusions excavators with no cultural context would jump to when they dug up a twentieth-century motel. It also made you wonder how much of what you thought you knew about ancient Egypt was nothing but bullshit. Well, Jackson—and a good many other towns—would give future diggers their chance at dumbness.