Читать книгу Time Jumps. The Paradigm of Immortality - Владимир Баранчиков - Страница 2

I’m Yellowstone, supervolcano. I spread myself comfortably on a vast plateau surrounded by ridges of the Rocky Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. My gigantic size strikes the boldest of imaginations: a 2800-meter above sea level, a crater destroyed by an eruption, forms a huge, fifty-seventy-kilometer, picturesque valley. The main decoration, my sparkling pearl, is Yellowstone Lake, a hundred meters deep, lying at the foot of my peak. I am a national pride named Yellow Stone, named after the yellow cliffs that border the source of the mountainous Yellowstone River. Did some pebble bestow the nickname of a giant? However, I do not murmur, because during the human habitation in my possessions, I also had other names in other languages. But for a volcano with a life story of sixteen million years, a hundred centuries is a real moment. I’ve seen a lot and it’s time to share one secret… I now sleep peacefully, releasing tons of steam and boiling water through the thousands of geysers sparkling in the fabulous beauty of a park with three hundred waterfalls. It is not for nothing that millions of tourists who have come here from all over the world admire me, and I sympathize with this pilgrimage, paying tribute to the enthusiasm and admired views of nature lovers.

I confess: my sleepy state is deceptive and my character is wayward. From time to time, I explode with a force comparable to a major meteorite hitting Earth. I burst with my own indignation under the monstrous pressure of the melt of magma stored inside me. The enormous pressure of molten basalt, warmed to death, pushes the earth’s crust apart and rips it apart with a monstrous rumble. I salute the world with bright fireworks and the eruption of hot magma, which gives rise to amazing lava covers on the slopes, burning all life in its path. The walls of the crater collapse, and the surrounding earth subsides hundreds of meters into the void created under the crater. So a huge funnel is formed – a circular caldera – with a diameter of several kilometers. I adore scale.

Over the course of my life, I have experienced more than a hundred and forty eruptions. For a volcano, it is as natural as a person to catch a cold and sneeze. The last three super-eruptions occurred 2 million, 1 million 300 thousand and 640,000 years ago. This cyclicity leads me to think that I am ripe for a new one, and it can happen at any time, possibly in 2075. Yes, I am almost ready for this: I feel my gut overflowing with fire, and I hardly restrain the tension. There, at the bottom of the caldera, under a thin partition of rocks, my gift to careless humanity lurks – death. After all, few people imagine how dangerous this is for planet Earth. The consequences will be catastrophic, and it is not my fault that the world will turn upside down – I warned. Or do you think I’m the one who needs to ring all the bells?