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The continuation of 'Remember the Cretaceous Nights?' story. Dr. Walt Johnson and Dr. Sarah Hillingsworth are the first on the scene to observe a geologic phenomenon that had never been documented in modern times, as a supersized volcano suddenly appeared in Western Africa during the early Miocene epoch. Throughout this period, they find that this age belongs not as much to the creatures of land and sea, but to the volcanoes that seem to constantly erupt in Asia, southern Europe, and the western reaches of the Americas.
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Chapter Five… The Age of the Molten Terror
Not all volcanoes are the beautiful cone shaped mountains we so know and love. Some are little more than a steaming pit. In fact, the most dangerous ones are huge pools of magma beneath the surface that can poke through with little warning. Such was the case in western Africa in the future nation of Chad, just north of the Congo River.
A hot spot? A stray fissure from the Great Rift that was starting to develop about a third of the way across the continent from its eastern shore? It would remain a mystery, but there was one thing that Dr. Johnson was sure about. This little region of hills, almost perfectly round and about seventy five miles across, had been swelling upward for about a half a million years, and it would eventually be trouble.
“At first I thought it was just a region of uplift,” he said as they looked at this Delaware-sized feature. “But I’ve been mapping the joints and faults in the sediments. They are concentric. They’re like the rings around a big bulls-eye target.”
“General uplift and upfolding would be faulted more or less parallel to the force,” she said. “That much I DO understand about geology.”
“I noticed that there’s some temperature increases of some of the springs along the edges. It leads me to believe we’re seeing the formation of a lacolith.”
“What’s that?”
“Think of it like a giant blister,” he explained. “Magma has worked its way into the layers of the crust, and it’s lodging up just under a few layers of them, and pushing them upward. This might be a future volcano.”
“Again, I never knew of any volcanism in these parts during the Miocene.”
“This area has a ten million year unconformity covered by hundreds of feet of Pliocene and early Pleistocene sediments by the time we’ll ever get to see it.”
“We’re getting to see it now, though!”
A few years later, the strain of the magma underfoot reached the limit of the overlying Jurassic and Cretaceous sediments that had held it in check for the previous millenia. Two small volcanic cones erupted near the center of the gigantic magma blister, and occasionally they belched clouds of steam and gas into the air.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t stay that way. The pressure from underneath would become too far to bear. In a cascading sequence of events, the overlying layers would fail, unleashing a torrent of Hell on Earth. Toward the center of the immense lacolith, a section of ground one mile square instantaneously liquefied, and shot upward about sixty thousand feet into the sky, setting off a barrage of lightning strikes and ash that caught the prevailing jet stream and rained down in a horrendous fall of hot, glassy dust.
This initial eruption continued non stop for four days, followed by another even larger blast from a vent adjacent to it. Within a week, the entire center of the low range of rolling hills became a fountain of hellfire, cascading molten glass and boulders hundreds of miles from the source. Massive torrents of superheated gas and dust flowed in all directions from the source for four hundred miles, driven by jets of superheated carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and chlorine gas. Within hours, all plant growth was either killed or in flames from the immense heat.
Walt and Sarah fought their way through the clouds of hot ash and flame for eight days, finally finding relative safety near a crocodile infested river in a canyon in present day southern Egypt. Even though they were over fifteen hundred miles away from the massive volcano, the ash fell hard, and as went about their daily chore of searching for water and food, they fought a six foot deep deposit of ash that grew even deeper every day.
“I’ve seen volcanoes,” she said. “But what the hell is this?”
“They called them Megavolcanoes,” he said. “Did you ever watch The Discovery Channel before we went back?”
“Something like Yellowstone?” she asked.
“I think this one has a few things on Yellowstone!” he replied.
“How’s this going to affect things?” she asked. “Like the animals, the forests…”
“And what we’re going to eat?” he answered. “It’ll definitely disrupt us, but hopefully not too bad. I don’t think there were any major extinction events in the early Miocene!”
“Fortunately, volcanic ash has a pretty short lifespan in the air,” she said. “A couple years at the worst. Once enough of it settles out of the air and more sunlight gets down to the surface, especially the oceans, the air will hold more water vapor, and the remaining ash in the air will act as seeds to form more clouds. We’ll actually see a couple years of above average rainfall.”
“At least according to your old computer models,” he said.
“At least according to my models,” she replied skeptically. “Unfortunately, I’m becoming less and less convinced of the accuracy of my models…”
The eruption would continue for another year, and then the jets of gas and ash would give way to flows of viscous lava. Over the next several years, the lava would cool and leave a deep, lifeless valley in it’s wake.
One evening, they stood at the edge of this massive depression and watched the sun set through the orange haze as it sank below the horizon over the Atlantic.
“How deep is this thing?”
“Hard to believe this area was about two thousand feet above sea level just two years ago,” he replied. “That hole is almost three thousand feet deep!”
“Isn’t there a big river nearby?” she said.
“A few years we came upon one a little south of here,” he said. “The ancestral Congo River. Rivers follow the path of least resistance. Eventually, it will find this nice little hole. The eruptions really shattered the hell out of the rock around here, so it’s going to start carving a nice trench right here to Ground Zero. This will become quite a nice little lake, then it will continue out to the sea.”
“Why isn’t there any lake here in the Holocene?”
“Geologically, lakes have frighteningly short life spans. They fill up fast with mud and sediments. Even a lake this big, if a big enough river feeds into it, won’t last a half million years. We come back here in a few hundred thousand years, and we’d not even know it was here!”
“March 21, 20,779,412 B.C.E…We made our way down the length of the African continent to the forest where the ‘intelligent’ primates have so successfully made themselves at home. Their numbers are greatly diminished as this area had been hit hard by the fires and ash fallout. They have moved closer to the ocean, where they’ve taken to gathering shellfish from the beaches and tidal pools in the area. They seemed to have mastered the art of digging in the sand for clams, and they learned to take deer antlers and fashion them into crude shovels to make this task easier. This area is covered by rich, lush forests, and even though this area was severely damaged by the great volcanic eruption several hundred miles north of here, they still found plenty of food and necessary items to survive here. It will be interesting to see what happens as time goes on and this area dries out…as we know it will in a matter of a few million years.
“There are two varieties of elephant like creatures on the African continent, and they live almost side by side. This is quite surprising. One species looks almost identical to our large eared African Elephants that we are so familiar, and the other species is a slightly larger beast with smaller ears, longer tusks, and a covering of long, soft fur. How they don’t out compete one another is a mystery, but they seem to share the open savannahs and grasslands without any major battles with one another. They have similar behavior, almost identical diet and nutritional needs, and from what we can tell with the rudimentary tests we are capable of, very similar DNA sequences (They actually have been observed interbreeding, and the offspring are viable and capable of reproducing as well, unlike hybrids like mules which cannot.) How these two species have developed so close together we are very unclear, but we think that the massive eruptions might have something to do with it. We did experience a ten year period of extremely wild climate variations, which consisted of a nearly twenty degree drop in average temperatures.
“This part of Africa is rather well populated with herds of herbivores, much as it was during the Holocene. In our travels through this area, we’ve been treated to quite a safari! We’ve even come upon large cat like creature with a lion like mane but stripes like that on a leopard. These creatures, which we’re thinking are the earliest of the Panthera genus. We thought this group of family Felidae was not going to make its appearance for at least fifteen thousand years, especially with species like Hoplophoneus and the early Smilodons wandering around.
“Along the great eastern rift of the eastern reaches of this continent, we’ve come upon a couple large shield dome volcanoes. The eastern half of this continent is getting quite mountainous, and since the prevailing winds currently come from the south and the east from the Indian Ocean, the central part of this continent is drying out rather fast due to the increasing rain shadow effect. Fortunately for animal populations, adaptation and evolution is happening about as fast. After the massive eruption, we didn’t notice too many species going extinct, but there was a considerable drop in the overall populations of the existing species for a few years. Once the grasses took root in the rich layers of ash, these populations made a tremendous rebound.
“Until now, we thought that this continent always enjoyed a tropical type climatology, but we’re finding out for the most part that during this time that is not the case. Even close to the equator, we’re experiencing a climate set more similar to that of Kentucky or southern Missouri, complete with occasional snowfall and sub freezing temperatures in the winter.
“Africa has completely broken away from South America by now, and Iran, India and Saudi Arabia have completely merged with the southern fringes of Asia, and Antarctica has traveled far enough south that it’s likely developing a permanent snow pack. For the longest time, northern India has played host to a long range of volcanoes near the foothills of the Himalaya, but these have stopped. The Himalaya mountains are growing gradually, and some of these peaks are close to twenty thousand feet high. These crustal activities might be why we’re seeing this climate pattern. Ocean temperatures seem to be constantly dropping, averaging about a four degree drop every million years. As this continues, we might find ourselves in another ice age soon…I think we’re about due.
The massive flows of steaming mud flowed down every channel of the broad proto-American River delta into the Pacific Ocean north of the future city of Sacramento. From a high granite bluff, they looked down upon the gray rolling mass of large rocks, tree trunks and mud the consistency of concrete.
“We followed this shit from clear past Lovelock Nevada,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s still this fluid.”
“When Mount St. Helens erupted,” he answered. “Remember how far the Lahars moved down the Toutle and Cowlitz Rivers?”
“That shit even had shipping shut down in the Columbia!” she said.
“These mudflows can travel tremendously far,” he said. “When this stops, it’ll cure just like wet cement. These flows were still around when I lived here. They formed the high ridges near Newcastle and along Hazel Boulevard.”
“Didn’t you call this area the ‘Loomis Basin’ when you were living here in your earlier days?”
“Yes, it was a broad forested valley surrounded by these hilltops.”
“How can that be when this mud is in the low spots now?”
“The surrounding rocks are softer than what that shit will be,” he explained. “Over the next fifteen million years everything around here will erode around it leaving the hard stuff on the higher ground. It’s called Stream Inversion.”
Looking westward, they noticed a few small islands on the horizon to the south and west. Over the years they stayed there near these hilltops, which had become one of their favorite locations, they enjoyed thousands upon thousands of sunsets over the ever growing range of islands. One of these islands took on a familiar shape. The largest of these geologic features already began to display the distinct three-peaked summit that was such a recognizable feature of his childhood. This immense slab of metamorphic rock and oceanic sediments was part of the great monolith most Californians would eventually recognize as Mount Diablo.
“December 24, 12,665,917 B.C.E…The highest ridges about thirty miles inland are right now under a thousand feet of ice. The moment that the ranges in central Nevada and Idaho began to rise, the snow began to accumulate, and now, even my home town in the Sierra Nevada foothills are cold and uninhabitable. Up near what will become the town of Paradise, there are two glaciers that have managed to reach the ocean. A thick sheet of ice has the entire mid section of North America locked up, too. We’ve done what anyone in these parts would do during periods of cold weather…we’ve come down to Mexico!
“We’ve found a rather pleasant place with weather not much different than that around Santa Barbara. We’re still debating where we are. I say we’re near Cabo San Lucas, and she keeps saying this is Puerto Vallarta. Actually, we’re both right! The Baja California Peninsula has not broken off yet, although there’s a long down-dropped trough running several hundred miles to the north. Much of this area is below sea level, and there’s a few areas of basalt lava that has erupted from fissures along this trough.
“Along this long straight trench I’ve taken note of some fault scarps. As the materials to the west move up, the valley floor moves down, and where the two slide by, they have left a few tell-tale cliffs a few dozen feet high where distinct grooves in the rock betray this relentless, occasionally violent movement. I also notice something else. They move at an angle, as if the western chunk is moving slowly to the north. This faulting is displaying a Right Lateral Strike Slip component…much like another feature that is an important part of my home state’s culture and geology. Yes, the San Andreas Fault is also a Right Lateral Strike Slip fault. In slightly less than thirteen million years, this ground rupture will have it’s part in the massive disturbances that nearly wipe out the Imperial Valley, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, to say a few.
“We’re doing quite well down here! I went out to sea for a couple days and brought in a four hundred pound Blue Marlin! We also found a good crop of agave, and we’ve put aside a stock pile of homemade tequila. We also found a species of plant, a member of the Astralagus family, that produces a bright red fist sized fruit on it’s annual vine. After watching one of the giant flightless birds gulp down many beak full of these fruits, we decided it would be safe for us. Happily, we found that we came upon the world’s first tomatoes! They are so much fresher tasting than modern tomatoes, as they haven’t been watered down with engineering and selective breeding. We’ve also found the early version of corn, which are pretty tasty too, but the cobs are only about a quarter of the length of the crop corn that will eventually grace the shelves of the grocery stores.
“In spite of the warm weather here in Mexico, this area is a very prolific habitat for mastodons. These herbivores have found their niche in virtually every habitat type on the planet! I thought they would be uncomfortable in the tropical climates, but they don’t seem to be bothered by the heat. In fact, they are masters of the art of migration, and they have a high tolerance of extremes. The same creatures here in the one hundred ten degree heat of Mexico seem to find the same degree of comfort and prosperity in the windy forty below zero tundra of central Illinois.
“The large mammals that roam everywhere are supporting a rather interesting assortment of bird life. The most notable are the condors. There were only a few hundred condors left in the Holocene, but during these times, these birds are not only much larger in number (they‘re about as common as Scrub Jays), but they’re much larger! I’ve seen some with wingspans of well over twenty feet! They mostly eat carrion, but they do take live prey on occasion. The other day we observed one take a yearling fawn! Something that big can take one of us if it were hungry enough!
“I came close to getting attacked by a saber tooth cat again, but this time, I managed to neutralize it with a quick, well placed shotgun blast. With large herbivores comes large predators. These times are getting more dangerous by the day!
A massive earthquake rocked the western edge of Mexico, and the floor of the broad valley dropped about ten feet. A series of large cracks formed in the pile of gravel and alluvium which held the ocean water at bay for the last few million years, and a torrent of salt water began a relentless rush into the dry playas that had formed along the east side of the long row of uplifted mountains. In those brief moments, one of the most notable features of Mexico had begun it’s relentless formation. From this day forward, there would always be that long finger-like extension of land from the north that would give Mexico it’s distinctive shape. This new feature of water would eventually be called Bahia de California, the Gulf of California, or locally, the Sea of Cortez.
It was about four in the morning when they were so rudely awakened by the horrible earthquake that tore through the mountains to the east of them. They had moved northward some years before, to a broad wooded plain between a high range of mountains and the sea. When they looked about in the pre-dawn twilight, they observed numerous geysers and several springs that oozed streams of pungent black goo.
“Is this what I think it is?” asked Sarah as she knelt down and stuck her long finger in the smelly gunk.
“That’s precisely what it is!” answered Walt. He took two pieces of flint rock and smacked them together. After a couple of attempts, a large flame erupted above one of the bubbling springs. “Pretty cool, huh!”
“What are you trying to do?” she said. “Burn down all of L.A.?”
“You know that Los Angeles won’t be here for another ten million years!” he said. “This is some of the ocean sediments that have recently been uplifted. There was a lot of organic material locked up in it. Interesting what happens to all that shit when it sits underground for a few million years!”
“It’s amazing,” she commented as she thought about the Holocene society. “This stuff sits here for ten, twenty, thirty million years or more, and other than you fucking around setting off a methane explosion, it just stays…we come along, and we suck all this shit dry in less than a century!”
Later that morning, they arrived at the broad shore near what would eventually be settled as the city of Anaheim. They had many times enjoyed these uncrowded Southern California beaches, but something was different this morning.
“I’ve never seen the tide so low,” said Sarah.
“Get in the truck NOW!” said Walt. “Don’t ARGUE!”
As they got in the dilapidated vehicle that had been subject of over fifty million years of repair and replacement, they looked back only long enough to see a white wall of water reclaiming the massive expanse of exposed waterfront.
“The earthquake this morning!” she said. “It’s a tsunami, isn’t it!”
“A big one at that!” he said. “This thing will run up miles inland!”
They barely made it out of the way of the billions of gallons of murky water that denuded the coastal reaches of the future ‘City of Angels.’
“November 4, 6,245,784 B.C.E…We’ve decided to visit our comrades in Southern Africa. They’ve come a long way since those days long ago in the aftermath of the volcanic eruptions near the Congo. They no longer live in the treetops, and they’ve grown. The largest ones are about the size of an average nine year old child. They just learned to make stone tipped spears and arrows, and they walk almost entirely upright, which gives them a tremendous advantage over other creatures in the tall grasses of the open plains in this region.
“These creatures, early Australopithecus, have also begun doing something that we were absolutely amazed to see, especially since this behavior was thought to still be millions of years later. An old female had passed away, and the remaining members of the colony took the time to dig a shallow hole and bury her! They carefully took the corpse, laid it on her side, and placed some of her favorite tools and items in the shallow grave with her. They gently put the soil over her body, and then sat over the grave and moaned. The following morning, they returned to the site of the burial, huddled around it, and began to chatter a few sounds among themselves as if they were saying some kind of prayer. This is the first time we saw a species that practiced some form of ceremonial interment.
“They’ve developed a pattern of clicking and grunting noises that after careful observation we figure is actually a learned language. They have separate vocal sounds for fourteen different items, three actions, and ten descriptions. We have identified their ‘words’ for: tree, stone, large creature, fish, rain (interchangeable with stream or lake), sky, moon, tooth, grass, bird, penis, female genitals, and ‘one of their own’ .We have also identified their expressions for running, performing bodily functions (defecation and urination share the same word) and sexual intercourse (and this word sounds frighteningly close to the colloquial English term for the same act!) So far, we’ve learned their words for foul smelling, dangerous, hard, soft, right, left, forward and dead. All creatures have limited methods of communicating with one another of the same species, but what is different with these creatures is the fact that beyond the basic grunts and facial gestures that all creatures genetically pass down from generation to generation, these beings actually spend much time teaching their children how to use this communication, and they don’t always get it right away. They have to learn…much like we do!
“The language is simple. It is usually the action, followed by the object or creature, then whatever description…verb, noun, adjective. They have two tenses, for actions that either are occurring or will occur, and for those which have already occurred. They differentiate between the two by repeating the verb for past tense communication. For example they would say ‘Ush ush murp lag may,’ they would be saying ’’the large dangerous animal ran forward‘. ‘Ush’ is ‘to run‘ but using it twice means ‘ran‘. ‘Murp’ is ‘large animal‘, ‘Lag’ is ‘dangerous (such as a lion or saber tooth) and ‘may’ is ‘forward‘. It’s a pretty simple language, but it is an actual learned language.
“The males do the majority of hunting, and what is remarkable is their understanding of the physical features of their environment. As they prepare for their hunting expeditions, they discuss and assign hunting tasks and areas among themselves, and they do so by actually sketching crude but remarkably true to scale ‘maps’ in the dirt to explain the areas they are to explore or place themselves in position to ambush prey.
“Their mating practices are surprisingly similar to ours. Males are rather eager and boastful, and females (although they have a strong sex drive) are quite selective and desire to be more discrete. They ‘perform’ much as Homo sapiens sapiens, in the fact that they enjoy experimenting with different methods, and are also prone to some of the ‘kinkier’ activities that have purposes that are more for mutual pleasure and not effective at all for reproduction. We even found a few instances of homosexuality among this species, both male and female. Like Homo sapiens sapiens, we also observed the same outright disgust with those individuals found to engage in that kind of activity (and they show their disagreement in brutal and violent means.)
“The life expectancy of these creatures is about twenty six years on average, but we have observed some surviving to the age of about forty. Females stop reproducing around the age of nineteen…but they still enjoy the activity involved. Non reproducing females spend much time with their offspring in helping with the chores necessary of raising the next generation. Since they no longer have children of their own to tend to, they are free to carry on their wisdom and skill to their grandchildren. We have similar behavior in modern days, as this is likely where the compulsion of grandparents to spoil the grandchildren rotten on birthdays and Christmas morning comes from! My grandmother set up a bank account to pay for my college education…now I understand that this act was something over six and a quarter million years in the making!
“These beings structure their colonies much as we do. An alpha being, usually male (but not uncommonly, a female!) takes responsibility of all the activities among the colony, and he or she delegates some of this ‘authority’ to two or three other individuals in the group. Individual tasks are ultimately delegated to the other individual members of the society, usually based upon apparent talents of those individuals. Some might be better hunters, some better shelter builders, and some might have strategic skills in warding off invaders from other colonies. These creatures differentiate and compartmentalize their tasks…much the same way we do!
“All mammals spend some time engaged in useless activities, we call ’play’ for the mere purpose of passing the time and entertaining themselves. These beings are no different, other than the fact that their entertainment is much more complex than just chasing each other around as we’ve seen horses and dogs do. As evening approaches, they spend their time telling stories, performing dance moves, sexual activities, or physically re-enacting events from hunt or quarrels with their neighbors. They also developed something else in their senses of pleasure…laughter. They enjoy witnessing the improvised incidents or discussion of ironic events…basically, jokes or humorous play-acts.
They followed behind one set of creatures, a colony they would call ’the North Johanesburg Clan’ for a long time. Over the years, they moved gradually from the southern nip of South Africa to the heavily vulcanized area of the Rift Valley. Frequently they encountered other groups of these well developed primates, and upon conquest, they would incorporate the defeated population begrudgingly into their own.
Unfortunately, near the broad fissure that would eventually grow to become the mountains around Mount Kilimanjaro, they came across a clan that was as large in number and in possession of equally devastating of weapons. They fought hard for years over the game rich valleys. Neither group was willing to give up their claim on this healthy turf.
Battle upon battle with stone tipped spears and sharp rocks decimated the numbers on both sides. Upon the death of the alpha male in one of the battles, the group was doomed. Lacking leadership, they had no ability to remain and stand their ground. After a somber evening, they discussed among their remaining numbers the course of their retreat.
But they wouldn’t accept simple defeat. An evil plan was hatched. A few months before, an adolescent male had been bitten by a hyena and had now begun exhibiting some bizarre mental behavior. This individual was now acting violent and dangerous. Although they didn’t completely understand this process, they were aware of what was happening. Contact with this individual meant risk of him biting or spitting, and this frightening ailment could be passed on. When the members of the colony would leave that following dawn, they would leave this infected individual behind, where he would likely infect the other group when they would come in to lay claim to the makeshift village.
They had observed the planet’s first use of a biological weapon, Rhabdovirae lascivious, the virus responsible for the ailment that in the Holocene would be called ‘Rabies.’
