Paricutin!

Job 37:5 

God thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend.

Less than 80 years ago there lived a farmer in the small village of Paricutin, Mexico. He had a problem area in his field where the earth was dipped down and crops never grew well. He had tried to fill in the soil at that place, but it always sunk down. On February 20, 1943 a crack opened up there and fire-y ash and cinders started spitting out of the ground! A volcano was born! The man and his wife fled the field in fear. They and the people of the village watched that day and through the night as the explosive out bursts of lava and burning particles built a mountain before their very eyes! In the first 24 hours the volcano grew to 50 meters high. At the end of a week there was a 100 meter volcano in Paricutin. What did they name the volcano? Paricutin! 

My five year old son is interested in learning about volcanoes. This is a picture he drew of the Earth with lava flowing to the volcanos on Earth's surface. :)

I was fascinated by this story when I read about it earlier this year in February. I was reading a childrens picture book about volcanoes. One page in the book mentioned Paricutin. It basically said that a farmer noticed a crack in his field in 1943 and now a mountain is there. I was amazed! How could a mountain grow that fast, and so recently, and I never had been told about it? I looked on the internet for information. I found a blog post with a lot of neat pictures and other information about Paricutin. You can read it HERE. (Be warned there is some millions of years garbage on that page, but there are also a lot of links for further reading on the subject.) The pictures are unreal! The mountain looks so out of place that it almost looks fake!

I watched a short, black and white video with some actual footage of Paricutin when it was active.

This is the one I saw:

https://youtu.be/I2r7RTQ6SNk

Paricutin was active for around 10 years. Reaching it's final hight of 425 meters (about 1394 feet) in 1952.

I don't understand very much about plate tectonics. This story has spurred me to learn more on the subject. I am finding it to be very interesting! I am still not sure what circumstances made the Paricutin volcano erupt like it did. I thought it was a really neat story, though, and wanted to tell my readers about it.  

Have you heard about Paricutin before? Are you amazed by the story like I am? I hope you enjoyed reading this post!