Tree of Life

Tree of Life. Yellowstone NP, 2013

Yellowstone is actually just one huge super volcano…ready to blow in ten years, or 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 200,000 years. Or never. Its geologic track record, though, makes a good case against the latter.

Yellowstone is a living breathing thing…the crust moving upward, undulating, dropping, flowing as the magma underneath exerts ever-changing pressures and the North American plate slides slowly to the southwest . Geysers and steam vents change. New ones slowly–or abruptly–come into existence while old ones die out. Earthquakes roll through the region on a daily basis, although most are not quite perceptible to human senses. When you visit, you are not treading upon solid ground–it is really sort of a plastic, floating, island of crust. Alive with activity.

If, some day, there is an eruption on the scale of what occurred beginning some 17 million years ago then, more recently, some 2.1 million, 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago, it will have world-wide effects. Nothing like that has ever happened in the short history of humans.