photo: Dave Steers Photo/Flickr/Getty Images
Sleeping giants
Volcanoes are all around us in British Columbia.
British Columbia has at least 280 young volcanoes. If that surprises you, you’re not alone. Few B.C. residents realize how extensively our province’s landscape has been shaped by volcanic forces. We live on the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area where shifting tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface can cause violent earthquakes and volcanic activity. Every few hundred or few thousand years—tiny spans of geologic time—the fire that burns in the planet’s belly rises to the surface in an explosive, dramatic, sometimes deadly demonstration of its power.
Of course, “young volcano” is a relative term, as Melanie Kelman of Natural Resources Canada explains. Those 280 or so young B.C. volcanoes are the ones that have erupted within the last 1.8 million years. “The really young stuff,” she says, are the 49 Canadian volcanoes known to have bubbled over in the past 10,000 years.
Volcanoes are all around us, but they tend to go unnoticed—until they cannot be ignored. Just across the border in Washington State, Mount St. Helens exploded in May 1980, killing 57 people, flattening some 600 square kilometres of forest, and spewing ash 24 kilometres skyward.
Read more in the current issue of British Columbia Magazine
