What would happen if recently named “zombie volcanoes” erupted? Missed that story? Geologists down under (that is, in New Zealand) have discovered a new zone of rising magma adjacent to a line of active volcanoes. Their concern is that North Island, the site of “25 enormous eruptions in the past 1.6 million years,” might produce other explosive events in the Bay of Plenty.
Termed “zombie volcanoes” by Cornell’s Matthew Pritchard, the magma chambers rising off the line of current volcanoes in places like New Zealand and the central Andes might in the near future prove catastrophic. Why? Two reasons: Eruptions pose threats to nearby population centers (and sometimes worldwide population) and they can alter planet-wide temperatures by blocking sunlight with ejected ash.* Apparently, volcanic eruptions might have forced our planet into the Little Ice Age beginning in the thirteenth century—and changing the course of human events all the way through the eighteenth century. A new series of eruptions might also introduce an “ice age” that cools planet. But, not to worry. There’s no indication that such “zombies” will awaken zoooon.
On a human level, we also face the eruptions of anger that plague us. They can lead to outright violence in an explosive outburst or to a cooling that spreads and affects many lives. Almost every big city newspaper and local TV newscast has a daily story about some zombie anger, something that has been forming under surface interactions that erupts in gunfire. And the problem for police and even for civilians is that the magma of anger doesn’t always gather beneath known sites of eruption. It’s as though we live on a human planet underlain by molten emotion secretly intruding upward toward some unexpected eruption site.
Detecting zombie volcanoes requires extensive seismic tomography, a process that involves reading “sound” waves of earthquakes and manmade sounds to reveal solid, liquid, and mushy (not an official term) material below the surface. The problem we have on the human planet is that we can’t detect the magma of anger that lies hidden without extensive intrusion into the lives of the angry or potentially angry. We shake our heads as we read the news about another tragic shooting, another bar fight, another incidence of domestic violence. It’s as though we are bystanders on the side of a volcano just looking shocked that the thing “suddenly” erupted. Like Mt. St. Helens before the eruption, the site looked peaceful, even serene.
There are those, of course, who use whatever emotional tomography is available to anticipate the eruptions of anger, but generation after generation has discovered that such zombie anger rises from the depths of youth, showing us that the magma of intense emotions will always lie below the surface and that it doesn’t necessarily lie beneath sites of previous eruptions.
No one knows when the magma beneath the Bay of Plenty will erupt. It could be years, decades, or centuries away from a breach of the surface. Even if it does erupt, it could be a minor eruption, but then it also could be major blast. We don’t know, and we have no way to stop it. The “Bay of Plenty” seems to be an appropriate designation. There appears to be a bountiful supply of anger magma in every generation. And in the case of violent eruptions we know that anger that remains long dormant can rise from the dead to wreak havoc on the living.
*Witze, Alexandra. ‘Zombie volcano’ slowly grows beneath New Zealand. Nature News. June 3, 2016. Online at nature.com: https://www.nature.com/news/zombie-volcano-slowly-grows-beneath-new-zealand-1.20023
Termed “zombie volcanoes” by Cornell’s Matthew Pritchard, the magma chambers rising off the line of current volcanoes in places like New Zealand and the central Andes might in the near future prove catastrophic. Why? Two reasons: Eruptions pose threats to nearby population centers (and sometimes worldwide population) and they can alter planet-wide temperatures by blocking sunlight with ejected ash.* Apparently, volcanic eruptions might have forced our planet into the Little Ice Age beginning in the thirteenth century—and changing the course of human events all the way through the eighteenth century. A new series of eruptions might also introduce an “ice age” that cools planet. But, not to worry. There’s no indication that such “zombies” will awaken zoooon.
On a human level, we also face the eruptions of anger that plague us. They can lead to outright violence in an explosive outburst or to a cooling that spreads and affects many lives. Almost every big city newspaper and local TV newscast has a daily story about some zombie anger, something that has been forming under surface interactions that erupts in gunfire. And the problem for police and even for civilians is that the magma of anger doesn’t always gather beneath known sites of eruption. It’s as though we live on a human planet underlain by molten emotion secretly intruding upward toward some unexpected eruption site.
Detecting zombie volcanoes requires extensive seismic tomography, a process that involves reading “sound” waves of earthquakes and manmade sounds to reveal solid, liquid, and mushy (not an official term) material below the surface. The problem we have on the human planet is that we can’t detect the magma of anger that lies hidden without extensive intrusion into the lives of the angry or potentially angry. We shake our heads as we read the news about another tragic shooting, another bar fight, another incidence of domestic violence. It’s as though we are bystanders on the side of a volcano just looking shocked that the thing “suddenly” erupted. Like Mt. St. Helens before the eruption, the site looked peaceful, even serene.
There are those, of course, who use whatever emotional tomography is available to anticipate the eruptions of anger, but generation after generation has discovered that such zombie anger rises from the depths of youth, showing us that the magma of intense emotions will always lie below the surface and that it doesn’t necessarily lie beneath sites of previous eruptions.
No one knows when the magma beneath the Bay of Plenty will erupt. It could be years, decades, or centuries away from a breach of the surface. Even if it does erupt, it could be a minor eruption, but then it also could be major blast. We don’t know, and we have no way to stop it. The “Bay of Plenty” seems to be an appropriate designation. There appears to be a bountiful supply of anger magma in every generation. And in the case of violent eruptions we know that anger that remains long dormant can rise from the dead to wreak havoc on the living.
*Witze, Alexandra. ‘Zombie volcano’ slowly grows beneath New Zealand. Nature News. June 3, 2016. Online at nature.com: https://www.nature.com/news/zombie-volcano-slowly-grows-beneath-new-zealand-1.20023
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