More Japanese Volcanoes Ready to Erupt

Japan’s Meteorological Agency warns that after the massive March 11 earthquake, the country’s other 20 volcanoes have become more likely to erupt, and there will also continue to be aftershocks in the area. Maybe we should heed the warning: Japanese geologist Masanobu Shishikura warned his country that a massive quake was coming, which would send up a huge tsunami, but that no one would listen to him.

On the Wall Street Journal website, Peter Landers quotes him as saying, "It was the phenomenon just as I had envisioned it." Now Shishikura’s team is looking at the Nankai area, which could trigger other tsunamis, These giant waves hit there every 400 to 600 years, with the most recent one engulfing the areain 1707. This means the danger is still a century away, but Landers quotes Shishikura as saying, "We had better be on the lookout."

Now what about OUR OWN volcano, simmering away underneath Yellowstone National Park? Almost 17 million years ago, the plume of hot and partly molten rock known as the Yellowstone hotspot first erupted near what is now the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border. As North America drifted slowly southwest over the hotspot, there were more than 140 gargantuan caldera eruptions–the largest kind of eruption known on Earth–along a northeast-trending path that is now Idaho’s Snake River Plain. Geophysicists have recently made the first large-scale image of the electrical conductivity of the gigantic underground plume of hot and partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano. This image suggests the plume is even BIGGER than it appears in earlier images. But so far, they’re not willing to take a guess (at least not publically) about when it may erupt again.

Thank goodness there are no volcanoes ANYWHERE near beautiful Nashville, Tennessee–so that’s where we decided to continue to hold our delightful Dreamland Festival. Come meet all your favorite hosts from our wonderful Dreamland radio shows IN PERSON (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but don’t delay: Our tickets sell out nearly every year.