Not Your Usual #Villain by Jean M. Grant #MotherNature

WICKED WEDNESDAY

Mother Nature can be a wicked lady. Even in her beauty, the volatile presence can make for a great villain. My guest today, Jean Grant, uses this fact to spin a great story. Tell us about it, Jean.

I have an interesting villain in Will Rise from Ashes. It’s not human. It’s not alien. It’s Mother Nature at her best: the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Though it can come off as fantastical, two giant magma chambers sit beneath Yellowstone National Park. It bubbles and hisses and erupts (ala geysers) daily. Will it unleash a grand eruption again? Yes. Tomorrow? Maybe not. Soon? Geologically speaking, yes.

Yellowstone is a scientist’s Disneyworld.

How about some cool facts about this sneaky villain?

1. Yellowstone National Park became the first National Park in 1872. Over 5 million people visit it annual.
2. Yellowstone is a hydrothermal wonderland with over 10,000 hydrothermal features: geysers, hot springs, mudpots, steam vents, and over 500 geysers. It is a very active volcano.
3. The park is the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, covering 2.2 million acres.
4. Yellowstone is a supervolcano. Two massive magma bodies bubble beneath the park.
5. There are over 20 supervolcanoes across the globe, Yellowstone being one of them.
6. Old Faithful has been very faithful, erupting approximately every 90 minutes.
7. Sadly, human trash and pollution has caused many of the vibrant hot pools to lose their color over the years. However, Yellowstone has created innovated programs to manage waste and human impact.
8. Yellowstone has had 3 [2 of them being “supervolcanic”] caldera-forming eruptions over the past 3 million years (2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago, respectively). The last eruption was 174,000 years ago, with 60 smaller ones since.
9. The VEI scale measures explosivity of volcanoes and runs from 0 to 8.
10. To date over 92 people have died in the park, mostly from falling into burning hot springs, off ledges, or tempting fate with a bison.

Where can you learn more? The USGS and Yellowstone National Park websites are great places to get accurate facts. Happy digging, my aspiring geologists!

Set in present day, Will Rise from Ashes takes a mother on a perilous journey across the country to find her missing son in the wake of the Yellowstone volcano’s eruption. Though the eruption is not supervolcanic in level, it is BIG, and unleashes ash, destruction, chaos, and death upon half of the USA, forever impacting the country and world. Young widow AJ Sinclair travels with her 9-year-old autistic/Asperger’s son as her co-pilot straight for ground zero. Along the way, her son and a stranger she meets show her a world that she's almost forgotten...that living is more than mere survival. The book (women’s fiction) is a story of heartache, healing, and hope…exploring grief, anxiety/depression, autism…and redemption.

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