Supervolcano: Eruption Read Free Page B

campground. A landslide dammed the river and made what they call Quake Lake. You can still see drowned trees sticking up out of the water.”
    “A 7.5 will do it, all right,” Colin said soberly. How many people would an earthquake that size kill in L.A. or the Bay Area? One hell of a lot more than twenty-eight.
    “It sure will,” she agreed. As Colin had before, she pointed northeast. “I think you’ve got the size just about right, too—”
    “Practice,” he broke in.
    “Uh-huh.” But she hadn’t finished. “You got it right if the quake’s from magma shifting in the Sour Creek dome. But if it’s from the Coffee Pot Springs dome . . . That’s farther away, so the quake would have to be bigger.”
    “Didn’t feel that far off,” Colin said. “The jolts were sharp, not roll-roll-roll the way they go when they’re a long way out.”
    “Here’s hoping you’re right.” She didn’t sound—or look—happy. And she had her reasons: “The Coffee Pot Springs dome literally just showed up on the map a little while ago, and it’s swelling like a stubbed toe. It’s like the magma’s found some new weak area that gives it a path up toward the surface.”
    Colin knew what magma was: the hot stuff that spewed out of volcanoes. Here in Yellowstone, it was also the canned heat that kept geysers boiling and hot springs bubbling. He had trouble putting those two things together, though. “What would happen if it did?” he asked.
    “Did what? Get to the surface?”
    “Yeah. Would it be . . . a volcano, like?”
    “Mm, kind of.” Now the look on her face said he’d disappointed her. He’d known something about earthquakes, so she’d hoped he would know something about volcanoes, too. That shouldn’t have bothered him. If anybody’d had practice disappointing women, he was the guy. But, obscurely, he didn’t want to disappoint this one. She went on, “Like a volcano the way a Siberian tiger’s like a kitten, maybe.”
    “Huh?” he said brilliantly. To try to salvage things, he added, “I’m not staring at your chest. I’m just trying to read your name badge.”
    That got him a crooked grin. “Well, it’s a story. I’m Kelly Birnbaum.” He gave her his own name. She came up and shook hands over the boardwalk railing. He’d known police sergeants with a less confident grip. She looked west. “I bet you went to Old Faithful before you came here.”
    “Well, yeah.” Colin hated being predictable. Sometimes he was—sometimes everybody was—but he still hated it.
    “Don’t worry. People do that. It’s what the thing is there for, you know?” Kelly said. That made him feel worse, not better. Then she asked, “After you looked at all the stuff there, what did you do?”
    “I had lunch.” He’d testified in court too often to be anything but literal-minded.
    This time, she stuck out her tongue at him, which made her look about twelve. “You sound like a cop, all right. Let’s try it again. What did you do after lunch? Did you drive up to the Black Sand Basin?”
    “Yes, Honor,” Colin answered, deadpan.
    “Okay,” Kelly said in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “You can see the caldera wall—the edge of what fell in the last time the supervolcano erupted—really well from there. I think they’ve got a sign about it, too. Do you remember that?”
    “Uh-huh. As a matter of fact . . .” Colin took the camera out of his jacket pocket, powered it up, and thumbed back till he found the pictures he wanted. One was of the sign she’d mentioned. The other was of the caldera wall itself: an almost vertical cliff of solidified lava, several hundred feet high, with lodgepole pines growing up out of it here and there.
    Kelly leaned forward to look at the photos in the viewfinder. She nodded. “That’s it, all right. That’s what’s left from the last time it went off, I mean, maybe 640,000 years ago. It shot out about two hundred and forty cubic miles of ash and lava and