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This Volcano Formed In 24 Hours and Wrecked Lives
What would you do if a volcano appeared in your backyard?
Standing just ten miles from the town of Uruapan stands a rather unremarkable sight. It is a cinder cone volcano standing just 200 meters above the surrounding landscape. In a region known for volcanism, such sights are commonplace. To the untrained eye, Parícutin looks like dozens of other similar volcanoes in the area. That is until you learn that this pile of cinders sprouted out of the ground and grew seemingly overnight. In a world awash in deep geologic time where everything is assumed to take millions or even billions of years, the fact that this volcano grew so fast is astonishing.
Parícutin emerged from the rich Mexican soil in 1943, making it one of the youngest pieces of land in the world. The age of the rock is only estimated to date back to 1941. Which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t even constitute a single blink of an eye. So, how did this volcano form so quickly? What were the effects of a brand new volcano growing from the ground? As you can expect, having a new mountain form overnight was rather traumatic and disruptive to the surrounding region.
Parícutin Is Born
In 1943, a farmer by the name of Dionisio Pulido was tending to his land like normal. It was time to plant new crops, so some fallow fields needed to be cleared, and his oxen needed to be moved to different pastures. As Pulido was walking to find where his oxen had wandered off to, he stumbled across a terrifying sight. An area that had once been a green field was now home to a fissure measuring over six feet across and extending into the depths of the Earth. The fissure was hissing and belching rancid gas that smelled of rotten eggs. The new obstacle blocked his path, and Pulido rushed off to find his family.
In the run up to the imminent eruption, the locals had been subjected to a familiar song and dance. Thunderous sounds during the day time, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and warms of small earthquakes and tremors spoke of a coming eruption. Eruptions weren’t…
