Supervolcano

Well, after fiddling around trying to convert an avi file of Supervolcano into an mpeg to create a video cd I finally noticed that we had a dvd authoring program that came with our main computer. Doh! It's a doddle too, just import the file and it automagically burns it into a playable DVD complete with customisable menus.

I really enjoyed the show too. I've always had a fascination for the awesome unstoppable power of volcanoes. I remember as a child watching footage of lava from Mount Etna destroying roads and houses despite the efforts to divert it. More recently I read more about explosive eruptions and 800 Kph pyrochlastic flows burning everything in their path in a fascinating and frightening book called 'Surviving Galeras' by an american volcanologist called Stanley Williams, who was caught in an eruption that killed most of his colleagues.

Supervolcano was a great bit of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it speculation with some nice computer graphics and one or two contrived action scenes. I wanted to know more about the long term effects on the world climate, but I suppose that would be the least of our worries if an eruption on that scale actually did happen. The main point really was the utter helplessness of humanity faced with something like that. The only real achievement of the main character was advising people to walk away from the areas blanketed in ash simply because there was no realistic prospect of aid and rescue ever reaching them. There was no way to prevent the eruption or to diminish its effects once it had all kicked off. If this had been an american production then Bruce Willis would have been sent in to plug the crater single handed (which is more or less what happened in the very silly film 'Volcano' a few years ago), but for the rest of us we saw america nearly wiped out in the space of a week.

Top entertainment!