My mom's a rational person, but she's more than a bit paranoid about the Yellowstone Super Volcano. Today she told me to be ready to get back to the house at any moment, so we can start driving south! Not that really I blame her, I mean if this thing blows it'd be bad news for just about everyone west of the Mississippi, and probably knock all of America back a few millennia. If you're not familiar, the Yellowstone Super Volcano is many levels of magnitude larger than even the current largest active volcano, Mauna Loa. The caldera of the volcano is almost as large as the park itself, i.e. a good chunk of Wyoming is actually a volcano. The Yellowstone caldera seems to erupt like clockwork every 600,000 years (at least the last three eruptions fall on this time-line), and now the volcano is some 40,000 years over-due for a good continent-razing blast. Lava from the last eruption can be found from Washington to Louisiana.
It turns out USGS monitors show the caldera and yellowstone itself are rising several inches a year, at a rate much higher that any seen in the hundred or so years that the USGS has been keeping track of the area. The speculation is that pressure is building at an accelerating rate. It's not that I'm going to miss Wyoming much, but, you know, Colorado's not so bad.
