A Big Volcano Near Idaho Could be Ready for a New Eruption

Good news and bad news.  One volcano could go boom, another is calming down.  If you’re old enough to remember May 1980, you recall the days of darkness and the cold summer after Mount St. Helens blew its top.  I graduated high school that year and then spent the summer at a family camp where we were building a house.  My role was to guard the tools and lumber.  It was chilly.  I had a fire going on almost every night.  The following winter was also no picnic.

Seismologists say there’s been a lot of recent activity beneath the mountain dome.  It may not mean anything and another eruption could be centuries away.

Today, we know a lot more about dealing with the aftermath, but preventing an act of geology is another matter.

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I’ve been told the super volcano below Yellowstone is a much bigger threat.  If it were to blow, civilization would be imperiled.  The United States of America would cease to exist as a nation.  Land could be fallow for decades if not centuries.

It may also be nothing, but seismic activity beneath Yellowstone has calmed.  We’re told that it’s pretty close due to an eruption.  It goes up roughly every 700,000 years, and the calendar says another burst is expected sometime in the next few hundred years.  In geologic terms, soon.  If you live in southern Idaho, you won’t suffer long.  You’ll be vaporized or quickly suffocate or be crushed.  Good news, right?

Of course, the odds are you’ll get through life without many earth-shattering experiences.  Not in a literal sense.