Following on from my by-now long-forgotten article about the Italian homosexual volcano, Campi Flegrei, that is about to blow its job, I began to think about Yellowstone, all due respect to Yogi Bear and Co. That too is a supervolcano, sitting in America’s northwest. It has been dormant for over 70,000 years, but volcano geeks believe that there is a probability of 1 in 700,00, that it will explode in any year, delivering wonderful diversity all over this land: .

However, scientists, god bless ‘em in their gay white lab coats, have discovered, as they tend to do, that the Yellowstone supervolcano has been rising like some kind of satanic cake; the floor has risen three inches per year, the fastest rate since records were kept, beginning in 1923: . A “pancake-shaped” blob of molten rock, the size of Los Angeles, could be causing the uplifts, but without sending Hillary Clinton down to investigate, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on.

If Yellowstone blows it would release a one-foot layer of molten ash up to 1,000 miles from the eruption site. It would plunge the United States into a “nuclear,” or what is a better term, “volcanic” winter, with temperatures dropping as the sun is blocked out and crops fail. The horseman of starvation rides again, curing for all time America’s obesity epidemic. The movie The Road (2009), is a post-apocalyptic portrayal of a post-nuclear landscape, but it accurately depicts the world after a supervolcano eruption. Extreme cold and the die off of vegetation and human parasites. Ashes, everywhere, like the typical Western multicult city. Air travel and industry shutdown, like in your garden variety race riot. Detroit everywhere; Chicago on every street.

The Lake Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted around 74,000 years ago and wiped out over two thirds of the human rats existing at the time. Global temperatures dropped 10 C for over a decade : .

Other scientists – there are so many of these fuckers in this article that I am losing track of them – see further dangers from several other US volcanoes, one in Death Valley, the Ubehebe Crater, which last erupted in the late 14th century, and the Crater Lake caldera in Oregon. Once it was thought that volcanoes, like most men, present company excluded, needed thousands of years to recover after a discharge, but the Crater Lake caldera is a real goer and can do it in just a few decades: ... .

Now for the really good news. There is a smaller supervolcano, Cumbre Vieja, on La Palma in the Canary Islands, northwest of Africa. Volcanologist Bill McGuire in his book Surviving Armageddon (2005), has studies a massive slab of rock as big as the UK’s Isle of Man, which dropped closer to the sea, by 4 meters, after the 1949 eruption. He wrote: “Sometime in the future it will crash into the ocean, threatening the entire North Atlantic margin with (an) enormously destructive mega-tsunami.” (p.14)

Imagine sitting on Thomas Crapper’s invention after not having had a shit for six months. After straining and bleeding, the monster turd is born. But its splash is nothing compared to what Cumbre Vieja will do when it rumbles into the North Atlantic toilet bowl.

The technological optimists think that nuking volcanoes will help. Sweet Mary, they want to nuke everything; got a white ant problem? Nuke it. Professor McGuire says that they vastly underestimate the forces involved and that it is like using a mosquito to probe an elephant’s hide. Just let the metaphor go before it soils you.

All one hope to do in the face of a supervolcano eruption is to get the fuck out, yesterday.