Essay --

I watched a documentary on Youtube about the Super Volcano that lies beneath the oldest national park. I have always been very interested in this particular volcano because it is so close to my home in Colorado. I found this documentary to be thoroughly informative while being left extraordinarily frightening. All of those wonderful geysers, boiling mud pits, and pools of heated sulfur, all get their power by the magma chamber a mere 5 miles below the surface. This Magma chamber contains over one million tons of partially molten rock. Volcanologists have explored all parts of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. The discoveries that they made would shock the world, they have found 3 calderas from past eruptions. The last and biggest eruption ever known to man, taking place 64,000 years ago, left a huge Caldera towards the North part of Wyoming up into Montana that can only be fully seen in the air. The effects of this eruption were felt most heavily in a radius of 300 miles however there were devastating effects were felt worldwide and they lasted up to 9 years. This caldera is the biggest ever known to mankind, and with part of it overlapped with a caldera from a previous, smaller eruption, ultimately creating an even larger caldera. This is the foundation for a globally spread disaster. There’s only one eruption that can almost match the destruction that would come when the pressure starts to build and everything explodes. That is the Eruption in Toba. We know from this eruption that when a supervolcano erupts the immediate effects will take place in a Possible 450ft. Radius. A super volcano differs from the typical volcano in the sense that there is no dome or raise earth where the opening is. Instead, the magma chamber is rumbling ... ...fference of life and death. I liked the production and presentation of the documentary, it was VERY informative and chalked full of facts that I am dying to share with everyone now. If I could change anything about the message that they sent across would be that, yes if an eruption were to happen (which it probably will sometime in the not so far away future however far away that may be, anywhere from a year from now, to one thousand years from now) our future would be bleak and most likely the earth would be desolate. But I would have added in the factor and hope that comes with knowing that God’s in control and it was his will for this to happen. Overall It leaves me knowing everything I would have ever want to know about the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Yet in a strange way, it leaves me wanting to explore deeper into the mystery that lies just beneath our feet.