#supervolcano

Welp, better luck next Apocalypse, everyone. 🌋✨🤦

Chrono Trigger, with the disaster being Lavos: an asteroid impact and the living being within the asteroid emerging billions of millennia later, creating a supervolcanic eruption and a verneshot (displacement of material into the upper atmosphere, for it to rain back down equivalent to an asteroid impact/meteor storm)

I'm going to be brushing up on research on this and writing it up as best as I can over this week - like some of our disasters (e.g. the close runner up of Xenogears' Disc 2 with nanomolecular gray goo/mutation zombie apocalypse) this is one that's mostly speculative/hypothetical - even the closest analog we have in real life (the Chixculub impact) is something no one living thankfully experienced, although there's smaller impacts that have been (Tunguska, Chelyabinsk) and a lot can be inferred from those and calculations from nuclear weapon yields and the like.

Similarly, no supervolcanic eruption has happened in the real world since Krakatoa, so while it's somewhat more easy to model from living memory than an extinction level asteroid (and we do know more about volcanoes and how they work than asteroids and comets) there has never been a true verneshot within human existence (which would require a lot more power than even Krakatoa provided, it would likely need at least a level of the Toba catastrophe)

Congratulations to the people who voted for Chrono Trigger, and I shall have this up sometime within the week: I'm going to do some more research, update what I know from what real events and science we do have, so while I'm obviously speculating, I'm not JUST regurgitating something like Supervolcano or History Channel Doomsday and covering the same territory they did but for the setting of Chrono Trigger. (And unlike Doomsday, I promise there will be NO CGI butt plugs presented as Balanced Rock at Arches National Park. Not even joking, I just saw that episode again...)

Also, to be truly pedantic, since Lavos is a "living being," this would also qualify as an "alien attack," but I'm going with "asteroid, supervolcano, and verneshot" since that's the apparent effects and how it did its damage - it didn't say release armies or biological substances, didn't intentionally terraform aside from the results of its arrival, didn't take over existing power structures (but did get found/used by them) and seemed to do most of its damage just from being an impacting object and then from coming out from the ground.

I didn't just go to Aotearoa for the animals and plants - I wanted to see the geology as well. Australia hasn't done much apart from erode for the last 99 million years, but New Zealand is on the tectonic boundary between the Australian and Pacific plates, so the geology is much more active. In fact, in some areas it's positively lively.

This is Lake Taupō, a very large lake in the middle of the North Island, and the most active supervolcano in the world. The last big eruption, about 230 CE, blew out over 100 cubic kilometers of rock, much of it over seven or eight minutes. The previous one, 25750 years ago, blasted out over 10 times that. Large parts of the island were buried in hundreds of meters of red-hot volcanic ash, travelling at just under the speed of sound, that settled still hot enough to fuse into ignimbrite rock. The very term ignimbrite was coined in New Zealand to describe this kind of pyroclastic deposit. Microscopic diatoms from the lake sediments have been found mixed with the ash that landed in the Chatham Islands over 800km away. It's also made a nice dating layer in the Antarctic ice cap.

And if all this ash and the volcanic domes and geothermal fields around the lake weren't enough, the fact that the lake has black beaches, with a strandline of fist-sized pumice, and steep cliffs around the periphery, should be a big clue that this is not a healthy place to be. At least over geological periods. In theory there should be a little warning the next time the supervolcano decides to blow out a crater the size of Singapore.

@purrdence and I stayed at two places around the caldera - Taupo township, and a much smaller place on the southern end of the lake with a name that translates as 'Sandfly and all his mates'. Both venues had geothermal hot tubs attached. We also visited the Craters of the Moon geothermal field, and the Huka Falls cascade.

Craters of the Moon was certainly pungent - the numerous fumeroles and mudpots percolate a lot of sulphur, arsenic and other elements. One of the now-collapsed fumeroles, the Devil's Trumpet, used to be nocturnal pyrotechnic display, after guides threw kerosene-soaked sackng in and got a 50-foot column of fire in responce.

Some of the species I've seen before - most from Purrdence's visit to the area a year earlier, but also some from Australia. And at least two from my carport here in Perth.

Dr. Arnold Newsome, a U.S. volcanologist, trudged through the crater-laden landscape of Campi Flegrei, a hotspot 10 miles west of Naples where constant earthquakes have residents on edge. His colleague, Dr. Otto Lidenbrock, disappeared the previous day after sending strange and disjointed text messages to Newsome’s assistant. Newsome’s safety gear added to his trudge through Campi Flegrei, a…