Did anyone watch Supervolcano on the Discovery Channel last night? For those who didn't, it's a "what if" tale about the huge volcano that resides under Yellowstone Park - a caldera approximatey 1,500 square miles. The what if, is "what if it erupted?" I was curious about this because I recently read an article about the Yellowstone supervolcano in either National Geographic Adventure or Backpacker magazine. Overall I was rather impressed by the presentation. The movie is about 2 hours and 20 minutes followed by Tom Brokaw recapping the story and talking about real events at Yellowstone for another 40 minutes.
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Now I must admit, I am a sucker for disaster films as long as they meet the following criteria:
1) The science is reasonably sound
2) The sentimentality factor isn't dialed up too high.
3) The scientist / hero doesn't become superhuman, returning to the place of the disaster to save his or her child, lover, serum that will heal the world, etc.
Supervolcano managed to keep all of these straight, and it generally worked for me, although geology / plate techtonics, etc., are not my field. I'm also not sure if the "Walk To Life" concept would have been successful when initiated on the 3rd or 4th day of the eruption.