MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky – “UTURUNCU VOLCANO, Bolivia — The broad hill at the base of Uturuncu is unassuming. Its gentle arc fades naturally into the Andean landscape.

But the 43-mile-long stretch of rocky soil is now an object of international scientific fascination. Satellite measurements show that the hill has been rising more than half an inch a year for almost 20 years, suggesting that the volcano, which last erupted more than 300,000 years ago, is steadily inflating.

‘The size and longevity of the uplift is unprecedented,’ said Shanaka de Silva, a geologist at Oregon State University who has been studying Uturuncu since 2006.

Taken together with other new research, he continued, the inflation means ‘we could be witnessing the development of a new supervolcano.’

Such a volcano could produce an eruption of ash, rock and pumice 1,000 times the strength of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state, the worst volcanic event in modern American history, and 10,000 times that of the Icelandic eruptions in 2010 that paralyzed global air traffic for weeks.” Read more.