They escape as the Yellowstone Caldera suddenly erupts, though Charlie stays behind to broadcast the eruption for his remaining surviving listeners and is killed.
At Mount Merapi, the authorities had anticipated an eruption for days, preparing refuges and medical and disaster response teams as the mountain rumbled.
"It had to have had a huge impact," said Dr. Floyd W. McCoy, a University of Hawaii geologist who has studied the eruption for decades and recently proposed that it was much more violent than previously thought.
Jan E. Adlmann, Santa Fe, N.M. A. The island of Stromboli, about 40 miles north of Sicily, has been in continuous eruption for 2,000 to 2,500 years -- and even more, according to some volcanologists.
Other Information on the Web: You can survey the changes in Mount St. Helens' eruption for yourself by visiting the Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam (//www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/), a static view of the volcano that automatically updates every five minutes.
What marks this generation of disaster adventure as new is that the catastrophes are more natural than manmade -- an eruption, for instance, rather than a tragic miscalculation on a mountaintop or a fishing boat -- and that usually they are historical.
