The Yellowstone Conundrum Read Online Free PDF Page A

when accidentally jerked, spilled the contents into her sleek laptop, instantly frying the circuits. Of course, like the rest of world’s population, she hadn’t backed up her data in over a year thinking; It won’t happen to me, I’m just too smart.
      She still hadn’t backed up her data but she had graduated to Safe Starbucks.
      Karen herself was a messy bag of laundry, her sex features hard to determine other than the smooth, pretty lines of her face; everything else a guy would look at was covered by drab, loose-fitting comfortable clothes; now 22, her girly pimples were gone, most of her freshman 15 lost to semi-healthier eating. However, she hadn’t done her hair in four days, so her ponytail was now a bit heavy, perhaps blond, perhaps not. Her head followed the rhythm of the music from her iPod5. She couldn’t hear anything from the outside world, which in this case was the basement of the seven-story Gothic Johnson Hall, which housed the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. 
      Outside, February was now into its third month, or so it seemed. Nothing but a cold grey mist covered everything west of the Cascades, separating Drysiders from Wetsiders.  Very few places could beat Seattle in February on the Dreary Scale. It would be four months or more before the girls with short skirts would sit on the steps surrounding Drumheller Fountain and spread just a little, pretending to study, knowing there was a cadre of horny freshmen shooting up-skirt shots from across the quad.
      Faced with actually graduating in June, Karen knew the mornings of monitoring the seismographs and printouts, then transmitting the pages of results from UW’s monitoring station back to US Geo’s Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, were coming to an end. Some other grad student would take over. The data captured each night would be verified from different angles from the other 135 world-wide monitoring stations.
      At 6:20 PST Karen’s double latte lurched into a two-step and did a head-first dive onto her laptop—kind of a swan song, a two-and-a-half-double-latte-backflip and instantly fried her computer. Karen shrieked, her headphones popping out of her ears. Her swivel chair with the roll coasters started to float across the hard computer lab’s raised floor. Books and papers started to jump like they had minds of their own— free the slaves!  I’m free at last; thank God I’m free at last and spewed in all directions across the lab.
      To her left the bank of seismographs started to dance like she’d never seen before. Unable to get out her seat because of the shaking, Karen saw the rapid fluctuation of the measuring equipment violently fluctuate on the four monitors, then rip across the printout paper---whacka-whacka-whacka. 
      The earthquake felt like it was right under her seat.
      Stumbling, she fell toward the seismographs. 
      That can’t be. She thought.
      Some spikes were going off the page; that is, the peak wasn’t sharp, it was broken. The apogee of the measurement was to the right of the piece of paper, the return shock coming back to be printed dutifully picked up where it could—beyond imagination. The top margin of the printout was 10.0. The earthquake being measured was beyond that.             
      The epicenter was in Wyoming, six hundred miles away.       Thirty seconds into the endless rattle a second set of seismographs began to spaz out.
      The second quake lasted a full 120 seconds, at odds with the first series of quakes. She looked at printer as it regurgitated the results before it spazed, jerking this way and that with the shaking before tipping over onto the floor, still printing. 
      The epicenter of the second quake was north of Bainbridge Island, two miles east of the village of Suquamish in the center of the Puget Sound; the Cascadia fault had been triggered by the severe disruption in Wyoming. When