Words & Images are the ©Copyright of Villayat 'Wolf' Sunkmanitu 2009
New Life in Yellowstone
Part of Yellowstone National Park is reported to be one huge Volcanic Caldera measuring approximately 34 x 45 miles.
Over the past 17 million years or so, this hotspot has generated a succession of violent eruptions and less violent floods of basaltic lava. Together these eruptions have helped create the eastern part of the Snake River Plain from a once-mountainous region. At least a dozen or so of these eruptions were so massive that they are classified as supereruptions. Volcanic eruptions sometimes empty their stores of magma so swiftly that they cause the overlying land to collapse into the emptied magma chamber, forming a geographic depression called a caldera. Calderas formed from explosive supereruptions can be as wide and deep as mid- to large-sized lakes and can be responsible for destroying broad swaths of mountain ranges.
I stood there transfixed by the colours of the micro organisms living in the heated and water and wondered if this was how life began for all currently living species.
