108: High School Student 16

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"Report—! Satellites are detecting sudden changes in the South Pacific!"

"There's too much atmospheric interference. It's difficult to get a clear picture."

Countless surveillance satellites hovered over the sky of Earth.

In the information age of the 21st century, satellites were an inescapably important part of information warfare. This was why China finally broke away from using the GPS technology of the United States and developed its own Beidou system. More and more countries were realizing the importance of airspace.

Even as the news broke out, the sky over the South Pacific Ocean dramatically changed.

A moment ago the ocean was bright and sunny, but now a massive, seething bank of black clouds had formed, like a swarm of snakes covering the sky. Thunder rumbled behind dark billows of mist.

The shimmering sea churned like it had been stirred by a giant, invisible hand. An immense vortex with no apparent bottom formed on the surface of the dark blue sea, as if a demon of the deep had suddenly opened one of its long-sleeping eyes.

Furious waves surged in from the ocean and beat violently against the reefs off shore. Residents of Pohnpei Island watched in fear, then turned to stare at the volcano summit in the distance.

The volcano on this island was extinct.

Volcanoes were divided into three types: active, extinct, and dormant.

Active volcanoes erupted regularly, while extinct volcanoes had erupted in the past but subsequently lost their ability to do so. Dormant volcanoes were volcanoes that had erupted before, still possessed active volcanic features, and had the possibility of erupting again.

Volcanoes were common on islands along the equator. Pohnpei Island had itself been formed from the ash produced by previous volcanic eruptions.

Although a volcanic eruption might not sound too terrible in itself, in fact, there were countless mega-volcanoes distributed around the Earth. For example, Yellowstone National Park in the United States was the site of an enormous dormant volcano whose crater was the size of Tokyo. If it erupted, ash and particulate matter ejected from the Earth's core would suffocate the atmosphere for years, easily destroying the entire ecosystem of the planet, and its force would be equivalent to a thousand atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

The volcano on Pohnpei island was also a supervolcano. Fortunately, it was extinct.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the volcano erupted and created the island. Over the following years, the supervolcano never erupted again. When geologists surveyed the site, they said that the channel from the volcano's crater to the Earth's core had been completely blocked. There was no possibility that the volcano would erupt in the future.

But now...

It seemed that something had dredged the interior of the volcano and restored the channel to the Earth's core.

"Oh God! Is this the end?!"

The ground was violently shaking throughout the island. Dark-colored ash spewed from the volcano's crater, as if the Earth were exhaling smoke from its nostrils.

"Not good! The volcano's going to erupt!"

Fishermen who were familiar with the area knew this was a sign the volcano was about to erupt.

Not only that, the ocean looked like a scene from hell.

Several passenger boats near Pohnpei Island weren't able to escape in time. The huge whirlpool pulled them in, and the boats disappeared without so much as a ripple, sinking to the bottom.

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