That Time the American West Blew Up

You folks at Eons really do a great job.

The Mid-Tertiary Ignimbrite Flare-up is responsible for a large majority of SW Colorado's ore deposits. Including lots of gold, silver, and copper. If you look from satellite, you can still see the La Garita Caldera via the circular depression in the ground around Creede, CO. It would have been a "fun" type to be a volcanologist back then, 25+ million years ago when CA, NM, UT, AZ, and NV had an absurd number of volcanic activity, far surpassing levels witnessed in modern day Indonesia. Another fun remnant supervolcano you can look in (not the Wheeler Geologic Area, although it is also fun) is the Chiricahua National Monument. It has 900 ft thick ignimbrite pillars which tower several hundred feet above the landscape and are still exposed. It is a national monument which honestly deserves and might soon get National Park status. Also did I mention that it also has a population of ocelots? You read that correctly, and it is in Arizona.

The Mt St Helens animals literally sleeping through a volcano eruption is a mood ngl

The Mid-Tertiary Ignimbrite Flare-up was also a great 70's rock band.

“They don’t just gently puke out lava”. Callie, you are a true poet 😂❤

This is why i love pbs eons, I never heard of this mid tertiary Ignimbrite flareup before until now. You can never learn too much.

8:19 Thank you for hitting the "Uhh" this time. ❤️ Jeff Goldblum would be proud.

My late dad is with whom I watched PBS as a kid back in the 1970s, and he would've loved Eons! Thanks for doing such a great job.

It's fascinating to see how species recover after the eruption. Our crew managed to film a unique phenomenon happening in the volcanic caves of Mount Elgon. Elephants have learned to mine a network of hidden caves for salt and mineral deposits. We follow them deep inside the extinct volcano to learn more about this incredible behaviour, and it's so interesting!

"Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be a non sinking Farallon Plate that becomes Ignimbrite."

My dad was one of the herpetologists studying St Helen's survivors, so I bet they referenced his paper. Cool that it's finding eyes 34yr later!

The way the area around Mount Saint Helens came back after the eruption was mine boggling. That being said, I remember my sixth grade teacher talking about still getting ash out of his gutter a decade after the eruption.

Wow, I'd never heard of that period. As a kid a science overview book listed supervolanos in axway that suggested they were associated with a past era, but as I learned more I assumed that was just because no supervolcanos had happened for a while. I had no idea there was kind of an era of supervolcanos. Wow!

I was always curious about this largest of super-eruptions. It’s amazing how even the most devastatingly energetic disasters are still just part of the circle of life.

I think the fact that life didn't care about these freaking supervolcanoes puts the other mass extinctions into perspective

Funny, I did a presentation on this for my geology course last semester in college, and nobody else had heard of it prior to my presentation. I would have loved to see a mention of slab rollback and how it significantly lowered the pressure on the underlying mantle to cause decompression melting, though I guess that's just the GeologyHub fan in me showing.

A lot of ash also just falls from the sky and builds up like nasty, scratchy snow. It’s not as sticky as snow, though, so it can blow off of things like leaves, allowing trees to still see the light as long as they’re not completely buried.

"Storm Cloud of Fire" is also my new Power Metal album.

This can be just a video about the ancient volcanoes of North America, but Eons made it more impactful with this approach.

Archaeology and Geology intertwined in a video. This is one of my favourite Eons video.