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There's just no avoiding it, it has to be said,
Helen is a geothermal snob. She was born
in a country full of towns that smell of
sulphur, mud that bubbles, or mountains that explode.
So here she is, walking round mud pools in Yellowstone going
"why, after leaving New Zealand, am I now visiting
yet another thermal area?".
 "I mean to say", she went on,
"you call that a pool of boiling mud? Come on,
it hasn't even got a death toll."
 Helen was very encouraging
to the locals. "Well done, little fellow.", she remarked,
"You keep working on it and one day
you might get to be life threatenning, just like the real geyers
we have in New Zealand."
 Her majesty, Queen Helen
awaiting Old Faithful with some of her American
fans.
 "O.K.", conceded Helen, "Full
marks
points for effort and showmanship but my mother and I
refuse to live at any volcanic site that
didn't go BANG in 30 A.D. with
a sound so loud that they heard it in China."
Actually, Queen Helen may
get her wish sooner than she imagines.
The ground in Yellowstone is
74cm higher than in was in 1923- i.e. the magma is pouring in underground
and the pressure is building.
When Yellowstone blows,
magma will be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere.
Nearly all life
within a thousand kilometres would die from falling ash,
lava flows and the sheer BANG of the explosion.
Enough lava would pour out
to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches
thick destroying, amongst other things, the
grain harvest of the Great Plains.
Oh, and if the temperatures plummet by the 21 degrees
they did after the Toba, Sumatra
super-volcano eruption 75,000 years ago,
the Yellowstone super volcano
eruption could trigger a nuclear winter and a new ice age.
But hey, the geysers are pretty.
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