by Larry LaVoie
“You mean it isn’t a fragment of the main asteroid but was captured by the larger asteroid. I didn’t consider that.”
“Asteroids have been known to have moons,” Lisa said. “Give me a trajectory if the main asteroid has a metal base and the smaller one is silica or basalt. I want to know how the two will react when they approach earth.”
Ashlar was a whiz with the computer simulation. In less than an hour he showed Lisa programmed approach of the two objects approaching earth. This simulation showed the earth, the moon, and the other planets in their orbits. The asteroids passed by Mars and started to drift apart. A million miles from earth the orbit shifted slightly and, as the moon orbited the earth, the larger object changed its orbit again, dipping between the earth and the moon. The smaller object hit the moon as the main asteroid skimmed by the moon’s surface.
“How close is that to hitting the moon?” Lisa asked.
“Two kilometers,” Ashlar said.
“How far is the moon from the earth at that moment?” she asked.
Ashlar had not been tracking the moon’s orbit. It was fixed for the time and date as a constant in the computer. “You are asking if the asteroid can alter the moon’s orbit. I will have to modify the program to see if the mass of the asteroid can do anything so great as to pull the moon toward it.”
“Thanks, Ashlar. I’ll leave you to it. This would be a good subject for a Master’s thesis. What do you think?”
Ashlar grinned. He liked Dr. Wilson and hoped someday he might meet and marry a woman like her.
Chapter 6
Yellowstone Park
In his first year on the job in Yellowstone, 23-year-old Cody Street worked under noted volcanologist Jack Vanderbeck, an expert on predicting volcanic eruptions along with a long list of other academic achievements. The man’s health was failing due to pancreatic cancer and Cody knew it wouldn’t be long before his mentor would no longer be able to work. Cody was excited to work under him and hoped to fill his shoes one day. The day came sooner than he expected. When Cody took over the office, he found an unorganized mess. Records were not filed properly, and critical measurements were not being taken or reported in a timely manner. The USGS had overlooked the shortcomings because of the man’s previous contributions to the volcano science community. Cody was told to clean up the mess. In doing so he had come across several undisputed papers written by his former boss that he didn’t agree with. One published article dealt with the volume of magma underneath the Yellowstone Caldera. His former boss had theorized there would never be another eruption of the super volcano because the system was dying. He claimed there simply wasn’t enough magma to generate another super eruption. Like so many volcanoes throughout the world, some live and some die. Over the past 70,000 years Yellowstone had remained quiet because it was slowly dying. In another 100,000 years the geysers would be gone and the caldera would be lush volcanic soil that would be perfect for growing crops in the summer months. No one had done the research to dispute such a claim. Jack Vanderbeck knew more about volcanoes than any living person on the planet. Cody disagreed.
In a paper presented to his new boss at USGS, after his first full year stationed at Yellowstone, Cody claimed the paper presented by Vanderbeck was flawed. New evidence which Vanderbeck should have known, was omitted from the paper. That evidence was obtained by monitoring the seismic waves of thousands of earthquakes outside the caldera boundary. The data showed the size of the magma pool was growing and the viscosity of the magma was decreasing, a factor that would lead one to conclude an eruption would be more violent than the one that created the West Thumb Caldera in Yellowstone Lake 174, 000 years ago, or the last known lava flow 70,000 years ago.
Dr. Cody Street presented his findings, but they were either ignored or criticized as unprofessional by those loyal to Vanderbeck. There was good reason to bury Cody Street’s paper. Politically, talking about an eruption in Yellowstone had become incorrect. There was no way to forecast an eruption, so any talk of it was theory and couldn’t be proven until the event happened. Of course, by then it would be too late. Financially, the running of the park depended on millions of visitors each year and thousands of jobs would be lost if unproven theories kept the visitors away.
Cody had taken the rebuff in stride. He continued to collect data and see if it would lead to a different conclusion, but he no longer took objection to those who claimed an eruption was highly unlikely. The math showed on any given year there was 1-in-749, 000 odds of a super eruption occurring. At the time Cody let Vanderbeck write the last chapter in the Yellowstone Volcano Bible. For now, he would continue to gather data.
Now, years later, the death of Melissa Grainger made Cody more aware than ever that political correctness and a cavalier attitude had no place in the science of Yellowstone. His gut told him the increased activity was leading to a major event, but still didn’t have any evidence that would prove it. If he was asked the right question in court, what would his answer be?
Chapter 7
Yellowstone National Park, July 19
Cody heard three alarms in succession come over a computer. “What’s going on?” he asked Greg, one of his undergraduate employees.
Greg was staring at the monitor about to panic. “I don’t know, this has never happened before.”
“You mean it’s never happened since you arrived. Come on, grab a jacket, we’re going to check it out.” He called Doug Jennings on his cell and asked him to return to headquarters and take over for him.
“How long are you going to be?” Doug asked.
“As long as it takes. Those GPS stations are near the West Thumb Basin and spread out over a twenty-mile area.”
“Anything I should be concerned about?”
“I’ll call you to verify we’re back online,” Cody said. “Stand by in the office.”
Failure of GPS monitors, while uncommon, was not unheard of. Three going out in the same area at the same time was highly unusual. Cody stopped at the door of his office and turned back to Sue Hong, an intern from Arizona State University. “Sue, could you pull up all the earthquake activity and find out if any quakes were located in the West Thumb Basin. Call me with your findings.” He turned and was out the door with Greg on his heels.
The West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake was formed about 150, 000 years ago when a volcano collapsed forming a caldera. The West Thumb Caldera that later became part of Yellowstone Lake is approximately the size of another caldera that became a lake, Crater Lake in Oregon. In effect, West Thumb is a caldera within the huge caldera that makes up Yellowstone Park. The West Thumb Basin is also the largest hydrothermal area around Yellowstone Lake.
Cody knew the history and also was well aware that the heat that drove the geyser activity in the area was located only about 10,000 feet below the surface. The basin covered 136 sq. miles. Greg and he would have their work cut out for them.
The trip from Mammoth to Grant Village took only twenty minutes by helicopter. It would have been several hours by motor vehicle at the height of the tourist activity in Yellowstone. As Cody piloted the Enstrom F-28A helicopter over the village he was talking to David Miller the park ranger in Grant Village.
“We haven’t had any reports of earthquakes or any unusual activity,” David said. “I can hear you overhead.”
“We’re going to be making a low fly over to see if we see anything unusual and then checking our GPS stations. If anyone calls in, you have a heads up.”
“I appreciate that. Good luck.”
Cody flew southeast and then circled back along the shoreline of Yellowstone Lake. They could see a few boats on the lake. “There’s a fault that runs along this ridge north into the lake,” Cody said. “That’s one of the stations that went out. No place to land nearby so we have a bit of a hike ahead of us.” He hovered for a few minutes checking out the terrain, looking for a closer spot to land than the last time he had been in the area. He found a spot a mile away, a rock outcropping wi
th a flat top. From the air they couldn’t see what had happened to the station, in fact they couldn’t see the station. Cody set the helicopter down. “Grab that backpack. If it’s fixable we’ll have the tools in there, otherwise we’ll collect the station and bring it back with us.” His phone rang and he put it to his ear. “What do you have, Sue?”
“There was a small earthquake along the Flat Mountain Arm and another centered under the South Arm. They were both pretty minor, only three point one and two point eight. They were shallow; two miles deep.”
“We’re on the ground now. Stay on the phone while I get a map and you can give me the coordinates.”
Cody spread a map on the nose of the helicopter and fought a breeze to keep it flat. He used a marker to circle the area of the quakes. “Thanks, Sue. Good work.”
From the landing spot, they hiked down a canyon and up a ravine to Plover Point an area that overlooked the lake near the South Arm. “That would do it,” Cody said, pointing to a sunken spot on the ground. The portable station had toppled over, one of the legs in the hole. As they approached, a puff of steam shot out of the hole. It reeked of rotten eggs. “This isn’t good,” Cody said. “We’ve had this station located here for ten years and now we have to collect it.”
“Why can’t we set it up over there,” Greg asked.
“We’re going to take it in and check it out. The electronics don’t like the corrosive gasses. The problem is we need to get it without getting boiled alive in the process.”
“I’ll get it between eruptions,” Greg said.
“You wait here,” Cody said. “Here’s my phone. Use it if you have to.” He timed the eruptions and took note of the distance they covered. Because of the pieces of equipment, retrieving the instruments would take three attempts. He ran and grabbed the GPS antenna. It was hard wired to a box containing a tilt meter. The box was located on a concrete pad that was partially swallowed up by the hole. The ground rumbled and Cody retreated just in time to escape another blast of steam and water smelling of rotten eggs. “This vent is loaded with HS,” Cody said to Doug, who had been watching, ready to run at a moment’s notice.
“That piece of equipment is expensive, but not worth risking a life over it,” Cody said backing away to avoid the acidic fumes. “It looks like the system has collected another trophy.”
“We’re leaving it?” Doug asked.
“It’s toast. We can come back with some protective gear and get what’s left of it. For now, let’s see what happened to the other ones.” Cody took his phone from Doug, called Sue back, and had her make a note regarding the condition of the station. He made a digital recording of the vent.
“This place is continually changing,” he said to Doug.
The next station was only slightly shifted from position. A limb from a pine had broken off and landed on top of an antenna. Cody and Doug lifted it off and set it aside. They checked the signal linking it to the satellite and were on their way to the last one. “It’s right below us,” Cody said hovering a hundred feet off the ground.
“Looks like a fresh rock slide,” Doug said. “Do you think all three were taken out by the same event?”
“They all showed up at the same time. What doesn’t seem right is the recorded earthquakes didn’t seem strong enough to move things this much.”
Cody set the helicopter down two football fields away and walked along the ridge looking for the path that led to the GPS station. “We’re walking along another fault,” Cody said. “It looks like it shifted. We haven’t seen much ground movement in this area since we started collecting data. Looks like we lost this station, too.”
He was staring down at a boulder the size of a car resting nearly on top of the station. “That rock doesn’t look very stable.”
“Seems like you could find a better place to locate the stations,” Doug said.
“Twenty-twenty hindsight,” Cody said. “We placed portable stations at these sites because we knew they were at risk. We didn’t expect they would be taken out by a minor event.”
Cody climbed back in the helicopter. He waited for Doug to get buckled in. Before he started the helicopter, he made another call back to his office. “Sue, what were the last readings from each of the stations before they went offline?”
“Wow,” Sue said.
‘What?”
“It’s probably a mistake or a bad reading, but the station where you are right now moved two feet before it went offline.”
“Do me a favor and make a plot of all the ground movement in the past seventy-two hours. We’re heading back.”
“What’s going on?” Doug asked.
“I’m thinking the systems under West Thumb Basin may be plugged. The ground has been swelling and could produce another hydrothermal explosion like the one that caused West Thumb Caldera.”
“We would expect a series of earthquakes and a lot more venting before we could say that,” Doug said.
“This system is different from a magma system. What we have under West Thumb is a massive lake of superheated water. Normally it releases pressure by venting. We saw evidence of a new vent formed but other vents may have been plugged at the same time. If we have enough pressure built up to raise the ground two feet, we’re sitting on top of a time bomb.”
Cody started the engines and they lifted off. He made a circle around the basin and headed back north to Mammoth. If he was right, the entire south end of Yellowstone Park was at risk and it was the height of the tourist season.
The next morning Cody called Calvin Baker, the head of Menlo Park USGS. Calvin had all the fire power Cody needed to alert the proper authorities about the risk in Yellowstone. He knew Park Director Jerry Adams wouldn’t take advice from him without checking with Menlo Park first and thought the move would cut through some red tape and speed up the process. He was wrong.
July was historically the busiest month for Yellowstone visitors with over a million visitors expected. Closing the park or a portion of it had huge financial and political ramifications.
Calvin Baker told Cody not to do anything until he talked to Jerry Adams. While he waited for a return call, Cody had his team crunch numbers and put together a presentation the Park Director would understand. He had a Power Point presentation on his computer when he got the call Calvin would be coming to Yellowstone to go over the information with him before it was presented to Adams.
“This is a colossal waste of time,” Cody protested. “No one can say for certain when or if that system will blow.”
“Precisely why we need to all be together on this,” Calvin said. “In the meantime, you need to get new sensors in the area so we can continue to monitor it.”
“I’ll have to steal them from another site,” Cody said.
“Do what you have to do. I’ll be there on Sunday.”
Cody checked his calendar. He had two days to relocate two GPS stations and get them up and running.
“Doug, I need to pull two GPS stations and relocate them to West Thumb Basin. Find the two with the least activity. We’re going to lose any way you look at this. Try and make them ones that are easy to access.”
Doug found two stations, both placed within ten miles of each other near Specimen Ridge. The ground had been stable in that area for as long as they had been taking measurements. From the air Cody and Doug could see a herd of elk grazing in the Lamar River Valley. Cody put the helicopter down within twenty yards of the station. They collected the instruments and secured them for the flight. The next stop was a hop up a trail where the petrified forest could be seen. In another time, Cody would have liked to spend more time in this area checking out the theory the trees had been carried to the spot by a giant mudslide or Lamar debris from an eruption at a higher elevation. He had heard the eruption at Mt. St. Helens in 1980 had displaced trees and deposited them, still upright, in a location miles down the mountain.
After collecting both stations, they found clear flat areas out in the open to place the st
ations in West Thumb Basin. Daily monitoring of the area would be necessary to back up his evidence of rapid ground movement.
***
Sunday, July 22, started out with a call at midnight. Cody rolled over in bed and answered his phone. It was Calvin Baker. “I thought you might be interested in the latest data from West Thumb Basin,” Calvin said. “The system seems to have relieved itself. Crisis adverted.”
“I knew the ground was receding,” Cody said. “You’re telling me it’s back to normal?”
“You’ll see when you go in your office. Anyway, I won’t be showing up in the morning. Looks like another false alarm. No since getting Jerry all excited.”
“I ran into him in the hall and told him you were coming in,” Cody said.
“Well, tell him I cancelled. Good job, by the way in getting those stations in place.”
“Thanks.” Cody hung up. He couldn’t get back to sleep so he got up and had a cup of coffee. He thought, eight o’clock in Hawaii. Lisa is about to start her night. He wondered if he’d ever see her again.
Chapter 8
Keck Observatory, Hawaii
Dr. Lisa Wilson pushed her chair away and stood up staring at the data Ashlar Shari had sent her. She grabbed her coffee and walked across the room and opened her office door. “Ashlar, come into my office.”
Janice Collins, a graduate student from UC Berkley, rolled her large green eyes and grinned. “I told you she would flip out.”
“Be right there, Dr. Wilson,” Ashlar called, giving Janice a stern look. “You double checked the numbers before I sent them off to JPL?”
“Yeah, now you’re going to pin it on me.”
By this time, Lisa Wilson was standing at the doorway watching them. “Both of you, in my office.”
They followed her into her office.
Lisa was upset. “Is this some kind of sick joke? The Government spends billions of dollars funding our research and you two take it upon yourselves to send out this kind of data without clearing it with me?”