Cataclysms

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. --This city just west of Santa Fe is where mankind finally harnessed the sun god. There had been legends in many cultures of the attempt, but in Los Alamos, a team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer finally learned how to emulate the energy of our nearest star. In 1945, with the help of a couple objects called Fat Man and Little Boy, they brought the sun to earth over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Nothing like it had ever been experienced before.

And yet it was a miniscule accomplishment, compared to what happened a million  years earlier, just a few miles uphill from this obscure outpost in New Mexico populated by Oppenheimer's team of scientists.

I must have walked by his home. I walked all around the neighborhood where he lived, looking for it, but it was unmarked, perhaps fittingly so. Unlike Ozymandius, King of Kings, Los Alamos national laboratory persists. But there is hardly a trace of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Easier to find was the Valles Caldera on the plateau above Los Alamos. This 13.7-mile wide pasture, where grasses blow in the wind, is characterized by hot springs, streams, fumaroles, natural gas seeps and volcanic domes. It is the quiet, more subdued, cousin of Yellowstone, and rides above the same hot spot that boils the Yellowstone geysers that thousands of tourists witness every year. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Caldera.)

Twice the Valles Caldera exploded with the power of 600 St. Helens. Now it is a placid pasture.

A million years ago, the earth twice lifted up here, with more than 600 times the power of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, filling the sky with ash that settled  into what is now called "tuff" in layers hundreds of feet thick. That compressed into soft rock, into which Native Americans would later carve caves for shelter and living quarters. You can see it today at Bandalier National Monument. That's me, below, standing on a ladder, peering into one of those carved-out shelters.

Fortunately, nature is more patient with its processes than mankind. There was a rush to make the bomb and use it, but nature takes its time, so we likely will be long gone by the time Yellowstone follows suit. At least we can hope so, because the ash from Yellowstone would do more than disrupt someone's vacation; what exactly would 600 Mount St. Helens do to the Midwest, the Eastern Seaboard, the American economy and national security? Somehow, capturing the sun god doesn't seem like such a big deal by comparison.

Yesterday I and my traveling companion, Dian, got a glimpse of another kind of power. We visited the site of the August 1959 Yellowstone earthquake, where hundreds of millions of tons of earth came down a hillside and up the opposite side of a valley, displacing enough air to create hurricane force winds that stripped clothing off of campers and carried some of them away. The quake was felt over several states. Because it occurred just before midnight, I slept through it in Spokane, but mom had been watching TV, and she recounted how the living room swayed.

A Yellowstone visitor center's display shows the enormity of the landslide.

In the 1959 quake, electricity was cut off. Geysers erupted continuously. A dam was threatened.Water in a nearby lake sloshed enough to create a virtual tidal wave. The Madison River was damned.  Houses floated downstream from their foundations. Tremors continued throughout the night as campers searched for loved ones in the dark; except for a full moon, until daybreak the only significant light must have come from car headlights. They gathered on high ground and awaited help, some of which came from the air in the form of Air Force helicopters and smoke jumpers.

A relic from the landslide, where the resulting flood left it 55 years ago.

A foot path leads to a boulder that rode down one hillside and up another without tipping over.

The Army Corps of Engineers was called in to, among other things, build a spillway that would control the new Madison River channel that was being cut. It's just a temporary fix, while time redesigns the river the way nature intended. Quite likely Yellowstone will be pretty much the same as it looks now when that task is complete. The park, like Valles Caldera, is sure to explode some day, but at a time of its choosing.


Love,


Robert

Viewed from atop the landslide debris, the Madison River continues to carve its new channel.