Archive for September 2006
The beauty & the power
There isn’t much doubt that Crater Lake in Oregon is beautiful: set high in the mountains, it is a deep-blue jewel surrounded by striking cliffs. But standing on the rim above the lake, what moved me to silence was the attempt to imagine the power that created this.
First there is a mountain….
Mount Mazama it has been called and, on the placards that dot the viewpoints around Crater Lake, it is shown in outline, towering above what is now the lake. More than 7,000 years ago, a volcanic eruption blew the mountain apart and sent what was left of the peak tumbling into the caldera that has slowly filled with Crater Lake.
According to the website Crater Lake National Park.com: “That eruption was 42 times as powerful as the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. The basin or caldera was formed after the top 5,000 feet of the volcano collapsed. Subsequent lava flows sealed the bottom, allowing the caldera to fill with approximately 4.6 trillion gallons of water from rainfall and snow melt, to create the seventh deepest lake in the world at 1,932 feet.”
There are unimaginable numbers in there: 42 times more powerful than the blast that tore the side out of Mt. St. Helens; 5,000 feet of mountain collapsing. Given that the lake is said to measure six miles by five miles — 30 square miles between 23 and 28 square miles — that is an inconceivable amount of mountain (solid rock and earth) to be either vapourized, spewed over the surrounding country or to collapse in on itself.
So I find great beauty here, but more than that I stand in awe of those destructive, creative forces. I can’t conceive of the terrible power that created this beauty. It is beyond understanding.
Photo link goes to my Flickr page.
NOTE: This post was corrected after I realized I used the wrong formula for calculating the area of a circular space.
