Living With Doomsday Beneath Our Feet

JUST WALKING AROUND YELLOWSTONE National Park, the smell of sulfur in the air, gases bubbling up in every body of water and mud puddle, you get the idea that there is something big going on below ground. The giant volcano beneath Yellowstone wasn't discovered until relatively recently, and has been the object of intense study ever since It was discovered that the volcano erupts and drastically changes the Earth's climate every six hundred and forty thousand years, and has done this three times in the past, and is overdue for another eruption right now. This knowledge represents yet another doomsday threat hanging over the human race, as if we didn't already have enough. It seems like every few days a new asteroid is discovered, some chunk of solid rock the size of a city, hurtling through space, just barely missing the Earth, sparing us once again. When will our luck run out? We had better build some system to deflect incoming asteroids. Where is Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" system when you need it? The threat from Yellowstone seems impossible to confront, with divine or alien intervention. How do you stop a gigantic volcano from erupting? By siphoning off its energy, a little bit every day? To make matters worse, it has been discovered withtin the past few months, using exact measurements of earthquakes in the Yellowstone area, that the volcano is actually two and a half times larger than we previously thought - and we thought it was pretty damned big before. What would happen if it erupted? The atmosphere would be flooded with ash over the whole world, not permanently, but long enough to kill all plant life, all wildlife, all human life. And it isn't due. Its overdue. How ironic, that the greatest threat to the world is in the United States , after all. Much of the world has long feared that the U.S.A. would destroy the world, and so it might, but not exactly in the expected way. The United States has thousands of atomic bombs, and an even bigger timebomb right under its own feet.