Last night I wrote probably the most exciting, grisly action fighting scene of my life. It was a fight between a hardened post-apocalyptic survivalist and a former CIA operative. One had a nightstick and the other had a knife. I won’t tell you who wins, but you’ll have to read Book 3: Babylon the Great to find out.
Way the World Ends #7: Verneshot
I don’t have one of these in my current novel, but would love to write another post-apocalyptic story about the results of such a catastrophe. Basically a verneshot is when a massive caldera like the Yosemite supervolcano erupts, sending a huge chunk of the United States out into space…but not far enough to exit the earth’s gravity. It then falls back down to earth, slamming into Europe or Asia, utterly destroying all life on the planet.
The chances of this happening are pretty high, since geologists have said that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is due for an eruption in our near future. Of course, to a geologist that could mean several million years or so, but the caldera has risen three inches per year since 2006, and continues to rise.
So what if it did blow? The following graphic explains the amount of debris that would shoot into the upper atmosphere, possibly into high orbit, and then decay back to fall somewhere on the Euro-Asian continent. The beige triangle represents the ash that would fall from the volcano once it erupted. The “Yellowstone Plateau” is a conservative estimate of the chunk of debris that would fly into space, when most people think it could be nearly a quarter of the state of Wyoming.
The thing about a volcano eruption is that it is still somewhat unpredictable, even though geologists can usually tell based on seismic activity and other factors (i.e. raising of sea level). It is definitely one of those world enders that people don’t think about, and possibly could sneak up on us quickly enough to not allow us to prepare for the devastating effects it would have on the globe.
Related articles
- Apocalypse watch: Countdown to Nothing Significant Happening (houseofthedread.wordpress.com)
- Yellowstone SUPERVOLCANO is STARTING TO ERUPT!! (lunaticoutpost.com)
- End of the world as we know it: Yellowstone (allthatsevil.wordpress.com)
- Active Supervolcanoes That Could Wipeout Mankind (ascendingstarseed.wordpress.com)
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