Volcano information

Hello friends,

I am telling you about volcanoes!

Reader Jean A wanted to know about volcanoes.

So recently we talked about mountains which are bits of the planet that stick out of the ground a lot. And I am not sure if all mountains are technically volcanoes or if a volcano is just a mountain when it becomes angry or what? But either way the situation of a volcano is that sometimes a volcano LOOKS very much like a mountain, you are just walking by it thinking oh this is a nice place to build a civilization, everyone bring your dogs and babies here. Then all of a sudden KERBLAM!!! The top of that thing blows off! And you might think okay the top of the mountain exploded - that is the end of anything insane happening at least, let’s all get closer to the mountain now that it’s our friend again. BACK AWAY FOOL!

You see inside of every volcano, and all over the place beneath the earth, is a sort of opposite water called magma. Where water is a liquid made of wet, magma is a liquid made out of hot. Someone might tell you magma is made out of superheated rocks, I would tell you rocks is made out of supercooled fire. Anyway magma is always roiling and boiling beneath our good earth like the waves of ocean and sometimes it gets excited to see everybody and explodes out of the volcano and becomes lava I think? I think when magma is inside the earth it’s magma but it’s called lava on the outside, I CANNOT IMAGINE WHY but I know if you say magma and lava are the same thing some worked up smarty pants will crawl out from behind your toilet to say ohhhhh no it’s differentttt and before you can ask what they were doing back there, they’re out the door with enough genetic material for them to Weird Science together a sex genie who looks like you. This is happening every day in America.

The lava comes out of the volcano in traditional orange/red/yellow Fire Colors and if you touch it you are going to die insanely fucking bad. It’s not like water where you can breathe in some and go to the hospital, you are made of water and this is Water’s Enemy and not in a Tom and Jerry way so much as a bodega cat who has grown fat and happy from eating so so so many mice lured in by the heat and smell of cakes and pies. You might be able to touch just a little lava and only get really horribly burned but if you are going to touch lava you should probably plan to die in horrible pain just to be safe. You don’t want to make plans to meet up with someone and then the next day show up as a writhing mass of heat-mangled flesh being pushed around by a nurse who has to inject you with a horse-blinding amount of morphine just to stop you screaming. You’ll never finish giving your friend your notes on their pilot and you know they’ll tell everybody about it in a way where you sound like the bad guy even though you’re going through stuff (lava mutilation.) Some volcanoes you can go up to and the lava is just happening inside and you can chuck somebody in as a sacrifice, although I don’t know if that’s real or just something an 18^th century racist imagined might happen and wrote a book about his big guesses and then we’re all sort of vaguely aware of it.

Anyways even though I’m sure theres people working hard on it whose dreams I DO NOT want to disrespect I’m fairly certain if the lava come out the only thing you can do about is run away. There’s no beam or foam that neutralizes lava it is just gonna happen as much as it wants to. Now you might be really scared right now because the earth is full of great stone spires that are waiting to unleash oceans of hell upon anyone near them but there is GOOD NEWS okay? There is a thing called an active volcano and a dormant volcano. An active volcano, that’s totally lava city and its just sort of constantly bubbling dripping out lava like life-eradicating drool BUT there’s also a thing called a dormant volcano and that’s a volcano that is, for the moment, fine. There’s scientists whose whole job is checking into when volcanoes are going to erupt and making sure we are as aware as possible of when that’s happening so we don’t get totally murderized. Volcanoes of course can still explode in a way we aren’t ready for, but hey, better than nothing! Also something you might take some comfort in is that volcanoes exploding doesn’t always mean you will see lava, sometimes they explode and there’s just a ton of smoke and ash in the air which is still really bad and dangerous and something you can die from but like a lot easier to survive encountering than a wall of liquid death. I think there’s a supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park that could explode any time and kill everyone in the states immediately surrounding it instantly and cover most of North America in a thick cloud of smoke that would alter life forever for those outside the immediate blast radius. This is one of those could-happen-whenever ones? So, you know, make sure you eat lots of good food and have lots of sex and generally go outside whenever you can, just in case.

Thank you for reading my big volcano email! If you would like to find out about something, tell me and I will try to already know about it.

Love,

Ryland Duncan