According to American volcanologists, the eruption of the largest volcano in the world, the Yellowstone Caldera, which is located in Yellowstone National Park, can begin at any moment. The volcano has not erupted for about 600 thousand years and its eruption can destroy two-thirds of the US territory, which may even begin a world catastrophe.

A super-volcano under Yellowstone National Park in the US state of Wyoming began to grow at a record rate since 2004 and will explode with a force a thousand times more powerful than the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens (St. Helens) in Washington state on May 18, 1980.

According to forecasts of volcanologists, lava will rise high into the sky, ash will cover nearby areas with a layer of 3 meters and a distance of 1600 kilometers.

Two-thirds of the US territory could become uninhabitable due to toxic air - thousands of flights will have to be canceled, millions of people will have to leave their homes.

Experts predict that the volcanic eruption will occur in the near future and will be no less powerful than all three times when the volcano has erupted over the past 2.1 million years.

Robert B. Smith, professor of geophysics at the University of Utah, noted that the magma came so close to the earth's crust in Yellowstone Park that it literally emits heat that cannot be explained by anything other than the imminent eruption of a huge volcano.

Sometimes it seems that only heavenly punishment can stop the United States in their desire to impose “freedom and democracy” on the world by carpet bombing, unleashing civil wars and revolutions. Those who believe in evil fate hanging over America have a very serious argument. In the very center of this country, in its most fertile corner, a natural disaster is brewing. Known for its forests, grizzly bears, and hot springs, Yellowstone National Park is actually a bomb that will go off in the coming years.

If this happens, the entire North American continent may perish. And the rest of the world will not seem enough. But it won't be the end of the world, don't worry.

And it all started with joy. In 2002, several new geysers with healing hot water were simultaneously clogged in the Yellowstone Nature Reserve. Local tourism companies immediately hyped the phenomenon, and the number of visitors to the park, which is usually about three million people a year, has increased even more.

However, strange things soon began to happen. In 2004, the US government tightened the regime for visiting the reserve. On its territory, the number of guards has increased dramatically, and some areas have been declared closed to the public. But seismologists and volcanologists became frequent in them.

They have worked in Yellowstone before, because the entire reserve with its unique nature is nothing but a huge patch on the mouth of an extinct supervolcano. Actually, hence the hot geysers. On the way to the surface of the earth, they are heated by magma sizzling and gurgling under the earth's crust. All local sources were known back in those days when the white colonialists conquered Yellowstone from the Indians, and here you have three new ones! Why did it happen?

Scientists are worried. One after another, commissions for the study of volcanic activity began to visit the park. What they dug up there was not reported to the general public, but it is known that in 2007, a Scientific Council was created under the Office of the President of the United States, endowed with emergency powers. It included several of the country's leading geophysicists and seismologists, as well as members of the National Security Council, including the secretary of defense and intelligence officials.

The monthly meetings of this body were personally chaired by George W. Bush.

In the same year, Yellowstone National Park moved from departmental subordination to the Department of the Interior to the direct control of the Science Council. Why would such an attention of the American authorities to a simple resort?

And the thing is that the ancient and, as it was believed, safe supervolcano, on which the paradise valley is located, suddenly showed signs of activity. The springs that miraculously filled became its first manifestation.

Further more. Seismologists have discovered a sharp rise in soil under the reserve. Over the past four years, she has swollen by 178 centimeters. This is despite the fact that over the previous twenty-five years, the rise of the soil amounted to no more than 10 centimeters.

Mathematicians joined the seismologists. Based on information about previous eruptions of the Yellowstone volcano, they developed an algorithm for its vital activity. The result was shocking.

The fact that the intervals between eruptions are constantly shrinking has been known to scientists before. However, given the astronomical duration of such intervals, this information had no practical significance for humanity. Well, in fact, the volcano erupted 2 million years ago, then 1.3 million years ago, and the last time 630 thousand years ago.

The Geological Society of America expected its awakening not earlier than in 21 thousand years. But based on the new data, the computers produced an unexpected result. The next catastrophe should be expected in 2075. However, after some time it became clear that events are developing much faster. The result had to be corrected again.

The terrible date is approaching. Now it looms between 2014 and 2016, with the first figure looking more likely.

It would seem - just think, an eruption, especially since it is known in advance. Well, the Americans are evacuating the population from a dangerous area, well, then they will spend money on restoring the destroyed infrastructure ...

Alas, only those who are not familiar with supervolcanoes can argue this way.

A typical volcano, as we imagine it, is a cone-shaped hill with a crater from which lava, ash and gases erupt. It is formed like this.

Deep in the bowels of our planet, magma constantly boils, which from time to time breaks upward through cracks, faults and other "defects" of the earth's crust. As it rises, the magma releases gases, turning into volcanic lava, and pours out through the top of the fault, usually called a vent. Freezing around the vent, the products of the eruption build up the cone of the volcano.

Supervolcanoes, on the other hand, have a feature that, until recently, no one even suspected of their existence. They are not at all like the cone-shaped “caps” with a vent inside that are familiar to us. These are vast areas of thinned earth's crust, under which hot magma pulsates. A simple volcano is like a pimple, a supervolcano is like a huge inflammation. On the territory of a supervolcano, there may be several ordinary volcanoes. They may erupt from time to time, but these emissions can be compared to the release of steam from an overheated boiler. But imagine that the boiler itself will explode! After all, supervolcanoes do not erupt, but explode.

What do these explosions look like?

From below, the pressure of magma on the thin surface of the earth gradually increases. A hump several hundred meters high and 15–20 kilometers in diameter is formed. Numerous vents and cracks appear along the perimeter of the hump, and then its entire central part collapses down into the fiery abyss.

Collapsed rocks like a piston sharply squeeze out giant fountains of lava and ash from the bowels.

The force of this explosion exceeds the charge of the most powerful nuclear bomb. According to the calculations of geophysicists, if the Yellowstone mine explodes, the effect will exceed a hundred Hiroshima. The calculations are, of course, purely theoretical. During its existence, Homo sapiens has never encountered such a phenomenon. The last time it went boom was during the time of the dinosaurs. Maybe that's why they died out.

A few days before the explosion, the earth's crust above the supervolcano will rise several meters. In this case, the soil will heat up to 60-70 degrees. The concentration of hydrogen sulfide and helium will increase sharply in the atmosphere.

The first thing we will see is a cloud of volcanic ash, which will rise into the atmosphere to a height of 40-50 kilometers. Pieces will be tossed to great heights. Falling, they will cover a gigantic territory. In the first hours of a new eruption in Yellowstone, an area within a radius of 1000 kilometers around the epicenter will be subjected to destruction. Here, residents of almost the entire American Northwest (the city of Seattle) and part of Canada (the cities of Calgary, Vancouver) are in immediate danger.

On the territory of 10 thousand square kilometers, streams of hot mud will rage, the so-called pyroclastic wave - the most deadly product of the eruption. They will arise when the pressure of the lava hitting high into the atmosphere weakens and part of the column collapses into the surroundings in a huge avalanche, burning everything in its path. It will be impossible to survive in pyroclastic flows of this magnitude. At temperatures above 400 degrees, human bodies will simply boil, the flesh will separate from the bones.

Hot slurry will kill about 200 thousand people in the first minutes after the start of the eruption.

But these are very small losses compared to those that America will suffer as a result of a series of earthquakes and tsunamis that the explosion will provoke. They will take tens of millions of lives. This is provided that the North American continent does not go under water at all, like Atlantis.

Then the ash cloud from the volcano will begin to spread in breadth. Within a day, the entire territory of the United States to the Mississippi will be in the disaster zone. Volcanic ash - only sounds harmless, but in fact it is the most dangerous phenomenon during an eruption. Ash particles are so small that neither gauze bandages nor respirators protect them from them. Once in the lungs, the ash mixes with mucus, hardens and turns into cement ...

Territories located thousands of kilometers from the volcano may be at greatest risk. When the layer of volcanic ash reaches a thickness of 15 centimeters, the load on the roofs will become too great and the buildings will begin to collapse. It is estimated that between one and fifty people in each house will die or be seriously injured. This will be the main cause of death in the bypassed areas around Yellowstone, where the ash layer will be no less than 60 centimeters.

Other deaths will follow from poisoning. After all, the precipitation will be extremely toxic. It will take two to three weeks for the clouds of ash and cinders to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, and after a month they will cover the Sun all over the Earth.

Once upon a time, Soviet scientists predicted that the most terrible consequence of a global nuclear conflict would be the so-called “nuclear winter”. The same thing will happen as a result of the explosion of a supervolcano.

Two weeks after the sun hides in dust clouds, the air temperature on the earth's surface will drop in different parts of the globe from -15 degrees to -50 degrees or more. The average temperature on the Earth's surface will be about -25 degrees.

Winter will last at least a year and a half. This is enough to change the natural balance on the planet forever. Vegetation will die due to long frosts and lack of light. Since plants are involved in the production of oxygen, very soon it will become difficult for everyone living on the planet to breathe. The animal world of the Earth will die painfully from cold, hunger and epidemics. The human race will have to move from the surface of the earth underground for at least three years, and then who knows...

But, in general, this sad forecast mainly concerns the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. Residents of other parts of the world, including Russians, have a much higher chance of surviving. And the consequences will probably not be so catastrophic. But for the population of North America, the chances of survival are minimal.

But if the American authorities are aware of the problem, why are they not doing anything to prevent it? Why hasn't information about the upcoming catastrophe reached the general public yet?

It is not difficult to answer the first question: neither the States themselves nor humanity as a whole can prevent the impending explosion. Therefore, the White House is preparing for the worst-case scenario. According to CIA analysts, “As a result of the catastrophe, two-thirds of the population will die, the economy will be destroyed, transport and communications will be disorganized. In the conditions of an almost complete cessation of supply, the military potential remaining at our disposal will be reduced to a level sufficient only to maintain order on the territory of the country..

As for alerting the population, the authorities recognized such actions as inappropriate. Well, in fact, it is possible to escape from a sinking ship, and even then not always. And where to run from the broken and burning mainland?

The US population is now approaching the three hundred million mark. In principle, there is nowhere to put this biomass, especially since after the catastrophe there will be no safe places on the planet. Each state will have big problems, and no one wants to aggravate them by accepting millions of refugees.

In any case, the Scientific Council under the President of the United States came to this conclusion. According to its members, there is only one way out - to leave the majority of the population to the will of fate and attend to the preservation of capital, military potential and the elite of American society. So a few months before the explosion, the best scientists, military, high-tech specialists, and, of course, the rich will be taken out of the country. There is no doubt that every billionaire has a reserved place in the future ark. But it is no longer possible to vouch for the fate of ordinary millionaires. They will save themselves.

Actually, the above information became known thanks to the efforts of the American scientist and journalist Howard Huxley, who has been dealing with the problems of the Yellowstone volcano since the 80s, has well-established connections in the circles of geophysicists, like many well-known journalists, was associated with the CIA and is a recognized authority in scientific circles.

Realizing what the country was heading towards, Howard and his associates created the Civilization Saving Fund. Their goal is to warn humanity of an impending catastrophe and give everyone a chance to survive, not just members of the elites.

Over the years, the Foundation staff have accumulated a lot of information. In particular, they figured out exactly where the cream of American society will go after the disaster.

An island of salvation for them will be Liberia, a small state in western Africa, traditionally following in the footsteps of American politics. For several years now, massive cash injections have been going into this country. It has a network of excellent roads, airports, and, they say, an extensive system of deep, well-maintained bunkers. In this hole, the American elite will be able to sit out for several years, and then, when the situation stabilizes, begin to restore the destroyed state and its influence in the world.

In the meantime, there are still a few years left, the White House and the Science Council are trying to solve urgent military problems. There is no doubt that the coming catastrophe will be perceived by most religious people as God's punishment for America. Surely many Islamic states will want to finish off the "shaitan" while he licks his wounds. You can't think of a better excuse for jihad.

Therefore, since 2003, preemptive strikes have been carried out against a number of Muslim countries in order to destroy their military potential. Whether the American war machine will have time to neutralize these threats before the X hour, God knows.

A vicious circle formed. In connection with the aggressive policy, the United States has more and more ill-wishers, and there is less and less time left to neutralize them.

There is still a danger of the death of our entire civilization, many scientists admit. The fact is that the inevitable processes inside our planet, taking place before our eyes, are recognized by experts as a global threat that can wipe entire continents off the face of the Earth. Seismologists say that the Yellowstone Caldera is the most destructive force on our planet.

One of the last eruptions of this magnitude occurred in Sumatra 73 thousand years ago, when the explosion of the Toba supervolcano reduced the population of the Earth by about 15 times. Then only 5-10 thousand people survived. The number of animals decreased by the same amount, three-quarters of the flora of the Northern Hemisphere died. At the site of that explosion, a pit with an area of ​​​​1775 square meters was formed. km, which could fit two New York or London.

Against this background, it is difficult to imagine what could happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted, which is twice the size of Toba! “Against the backdrop of a supervolcano eruption, everyone else seems to be dwarfs, and its power is a real threat to everyone living on this planet,”- said Bill McGuire, professor of geophysics, climate change specialist from London University College.

If an explosion occurs, then, according to the vision of scientists, the picture will be worse than the description of the Apocalypse. Everything will start with a sharp rise and overheating of the earth in Yellowstone Park. And when the huge pressure breaks through the caldera, thousands of cubic kilometers of lava will pour out of the resulting vent, which will resemble a huge pillar of fire. The explosion will be accompanied by a powerful earthquake and lava flows, developing speeds of several hundred kilometers per hour.

The eruption will continue for several days, but people and animals will mostly die not from ash or lava, but due to suffocation and hydrogen sulfide poisoning. During this time, the air in the entire western United States will be poisoned so that a person can hold out for no more than 5-7 minutes. A thick layer of ash will cover almost the entire territory of the United States - from Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, which will be wiped off the face of the Earth, to Iowa and the Gulf of Mexico. The ozone hole over the mainland will grow to such a size that the level of radiation will approach Chernobyl. All of North America will turn into scorched earth. The southern part of Canada will also be seriously affected. Scientists do not deny that the Yellowstone giant will provoke the eruption of several hundred ordinary volcanoes around the world. At the same time, oceanic volcanic eruptions will generate many tsunamis that will flood the coasts and all island states. The long-term consequences will be no less terrible than the eruption itself. And if the main blow is taken by the States, then the whole world will feel the effect.

Thousands of cubic kilometers of ash thrown into the atmosphere will block out the sunlight - the world will plunge into darkness. This will cause a sharp drop in temperature, for example, in Canada and Norway in a couple of days the thermometer will drop by 15-18 degrees. If the temperature drops by 21 degrees, as during the last eruption of the Toba supervolcano, all territories up to the 50th parallel - Norway, Finland or Sweden - will turn into Antarctica. A "nuclear winter" will come, which will last about four years.

The incessant acid rain will destroy all crops and crops, kill livestock, dooming the surviving people to starvation. The billionaire countries India and China will suffer the most from hunger. Here, up to 1.5 billion people will die of starvation in the coming months after the explosion. In total, every third inhabitant of the Earth will die in the first months of the cataclysm. The only region that can survive is the central part of Eurasia. Most people, according to scientists, will survive in Siberia and the Eastern European part of Russia, located on earthquake-resistant platforms, remote from the epicenter of the explosion and protected from the tsunami.

Some time ago, information appeared that the Yellowstone volcano, which is located on the territory of the United States of America, began to show extraordinary activity.

Experts attribute this to the fact that recently there was an earthquake in Alaska. Residents of the country are worried about the actions of the supervolcano. However, experts from the United States are ready to prevent the impending disaster.

So, scientists intend to act in two ways. You need to cool the lava with cold water or make wells near the base of the caldera. Thus, the pressure in the volcano will be reduced. The main reason that holds back scientists is the lack of money. The planned project will cost about three and a half billion rubles.

For quite a long time, NASA experts have been trying to implement their plan to prevent a catastrophe that the largest volcano in the world can bring. AT recent times alarm bells began to appear that warn that something large-scale is approaching.

In some places, seismic activity is increasing, which indicates that the volcano is starting to wake up. In addition, there is an increase in temperature at the bottom of the lakes in the reserve. Animals began to move from their permanent territory.

If the volcano nevertheless explodes, there will be no comforting forecasts for the inhabitants of the United States of America. Lava can burn everything that gets in its way, and its divergence radius will be quite large.

After that, "volcanic winter" will come. Ashes will cover a large area, which will lead to the fact that nothing living can live. Since the sun will be covered with ash, breathing in such conditions will be unrealistic.

Currently, scientists are worried that bison have completely disappeared from the reserve, the site reports. Even though they were behind a fence, park guards still can't find them.

In addition, it became known that the national park has been closed since the twenty-second of January. After an earthquake occurred in Alaska, special sensors showed that the magma in the volcano began to move more actively. Many Americans are worried about the current situation.

Scientists noted that the situation is quite tense. On January 23, an earthquake was recorded near the state of Montana. The source was located at a depth of five kilometers. Now experts are asking people not to panic, because there is no exact information about the eruption.

However, some scientists believe that the explosion of the volcano may be a harbinger of the end of the world, although this fact remains controversial among scientists from around the world.

In September last year, one hundred and fifteen earthquakes were recorded in the national park. However, the first earthquake took place in the early summer of that year.

Specialists from the Geological Survey of the United States of America said that in October last year, the volcano showed practically no activity. According to experts, during all this time there have been more than two and a half thousand earthquakes.

The tremors that occur due to the volcano could indicate that a huge fireball filled with magma will soon wake up. Its depth is at least eight thousand kilometers, and the temperature of the melt is more than eight hundred degrees.

Currently, the Yellowstone volcano is the most dangerous for our planet. Experts believe that if he wakes up, all life within a radius of one hundred kilometers will be destroyed.

It's hard to predict the behavior of a volcano, but the Geological Survey watch what happens and note any changes in the volcano's behavior.

Some say that the dust and gas from the volcano is enough to block out the sun and start a "volcanic winter".

Currently, strange things are happening in the park, rivers are boiling, and the earth is rising. The animals that live in the park are worried. They feel that danger is coming, so they try to run away.

Experts believe that the awakening of the supervolcano was strongly influenced by the seismic activity of the Long Valley volcano, which is located in California. In the early autumn of last year, its activity was noticed here, after which there were more earthquakes.

Did you know that there is a supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park? Perhaps you have heard that the eruption can occur much earlier than expected, within a few months or even days?

Researchers at Arizona State University have spent weeks studying fossilized ash deposits from the Yellowstone volcano and recently shared their findings. The minerals in these deposits showed that the critical changes in temperature and composition that precede an eruption accumulate over decades rather than thousands of years as previously thought.

"It's shocking how little time it takes for a volcanic system to be calm and unaltered until the moment of eruption," said Hannah Shamlu, an Arizona State University graduate student who worked on the study.

The good news is that scientists are likely to be able to predict an eruption a decade in advance.

Sometimes knowledge about the world around us makes us better control our life and survival. And sometimes such knowledge only emphasizes how small and helpless we are before the forces.

Here are some facts about the Yellowstone supervolcano:

Is Yellowstone the only supervolcano to worry about?

No, of course not. There are about 20 other supervolcanoes around the world. While Yellowstone has not had a super-eruption in 631,000 years, others have been active more recently. On the Phlegraean Fields, a supervolcano in Italy, the last largest eruption occurred 12,000 years ago. According to the researchers, the Phlegraean fields are in a "critical state". The August 22, 2017 eruption that killed several women and injured several people was a minor event compared to the most powerful known eruption 39,000 years ago. Then there was the release of more than 200 km³ of magma, which probably contributed to the disappearance of the Neanderthals and led to the prosperity of modern people in Europe and Asia.

Which regions will be affected by the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano?

If this supervolcano erupts, more than 1000 km³ of rock and ash will enter the atmosphere. This is five times more than during the super-eruption of the Phlegrean fields in Italy. An eruption in Yellowstone will create a cloud of volcanic ash more than 800 km wide, extending over almost all of the western United States.

The explosion can be so strong that there is a possibility of a volcanic winter on the entire planet. This means it will be impossible to grow crops, and the current food stores will last only 74 days, according to a United Nations estimate in 2012 (although progress in agriculture is allowing plants to be grown underground).

Does an eruption mean the end of the world?

According to NASA, volcanic eruptions pose a greater danger to life on Earth than any asteroid. Fortunately, NASA has a plan to neutralize the threat from supervolcanoes, which consists in drilling the volcano to a depth of 10 km to release heat and avoid a potentially dangerous eruption.

Thanks to this, a supervolcano can cool for hundreds or even thousands of years. There is another bonus: drilling will provide a source of geothermal energy. But there are also significant risks. Such interference can also provoke an unexpected eruption.

What is the probability of the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting?

While a new study confirms the possibility of favorable conditions for a Yellowstone volcano eruption to occur within a few decades, the likelihood of you personally seeing an explosion of this magnitude is still very low.

According to the US Geological Survey, the chances of a supervolcano erupting during this year are 1 in 730,000. Here's a little comparison: that chance is vastly better than your chances of winning the lottery, and only slightly worse than your chances of being struck by lightning. .

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Scientists warn of an imminent cataclysm, which will be the largest in the history of human development. How will the eruption affect Russia, will the country face a catastrophe?

According to research by specialists from the University of Arizona, in less than a hundred years, a supervolcano will erupt in Yellowstone. Yellowstone volcano is a huge depression with a diameter of 80 by 40 km, formed as a result of several super-eruptions over millions of years. The last time the volcano erupted lava was 640 thousand years ago, and it is possible that we will soon witness this event.

What will happen to humanity?

According to experts from the US Geological Survey, the consequences of a volcanic eruption will be comparable to a nuclear explosion. As a result of the release of hot magma to a height of 50 kilometers, the entire western American coast will be a dead zone covered with a one and a half meter layer of ash. Nothing alive will remain within a radius of 500 km, and 90% of people and nature will die 1200 kilometers from the eruption point.

According to estimates, about one hundred thousand people will become victims of asphyxiation and hydrogen sulfide poisoning. In a day, acid rain will fall in the United States, from which all vegetation will die. And in a month, the Earth will plunge into darkness, as the Sun will hide behind clouds of ash and cinders.

The climate will change dramatically, there will be a sharp cooling of 10-20 degrees. Because of this, oil and gas pipelines, railways will fail. The ozone hole will grow, killing the remaining living organisms. Because of the awakened volcano in Yellowstone, lava and other volcanoes will begin to erupt. Because of this, many tsunamis will arise, washing away the cities in their path.

Which countries will be affected the most?

Not only the United States will suffer, but most countries. Most of all will get to China, India, the Scandinavian countries and the north of Russia. Life will stop there. The number of victims in the first year of the global catastrophe will reach two billion people. Southern Siberia will suffer the least. The period, which scientists have already called "volcanic winter", will last four years. And humanity will have to cope with the consequences for a very long time. Over the next century, the Earth will return to the Middle Ages again, plunged into savagery and chaos.

Can the Earth be saved?

The only consolation is that many serious scientists reject such a scenario and doubt that such an apocalypse is possible not only in the near future, but ever. According to Aleksey Sobisevich, head of the laboratory at the Institute of Physics of the Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences, a volcanic eruption in Yellowstone is possible not earlier than in hundreds of thousands of years. And, in the end, it is not so scary, because our distant ancestors managed to survive three such super-eruptions. At the same time, scientists do not exclude that the supervolcano can wake up with the help of earthlings themselves.

The attack on the volcano is one of the methods of terror, which can become the most dangerous. The volcano can be detonated artificially by blowing up the lid of the magma chamber using megaton-class warheads.

Probably, many will be surprised that in some Soviet films the special effects were no worse than in many foreign films of that time. Take, for example, the sci-fi films Road to the Stars and Planet of Storms directed by Pavel Klushantsev: how smoothly and believably dynamic objects move in space in them. Something similar was realized by Stanley Kubrick in the legendary film "2001: A Space Odyssey" only ten years later in 1968.

In order to show spaceships in a naturalistic way, designers and decorators built special layouts, working through every detail. After that, the operator moved the camera, so that it seemed as if the ship was floating in space. Sometimes models were hung on a thin line and rotated by hand against the background of the starry sky. It sounds ridiculous, but in fact it turned out to be a very realistic picture.

To recreate objects against the backdrop of a landscape, a professional artist stepped in. For example, for a castle standing on top of a cliff, they took a real mountain, put glass in front of it and painted a medieval building on it, combining it with the outline of the landscape. Then the operator brought the camera so that it “looked” at the glass through the eyes of the artist, and from there he shot a take.

And if you need to realistically film a whole flotilla of sailing ships the way Peter I saw it? For this, many small, but very realistic models of ships were built and launched into the water. The operator, using the principle of perspective, did a real miracle and at the exit the Soviet viewer would never have guessed that the sailboats were actually fake. By the same principle, films were made with aircraft and military equipment.

The period of the 1970s was marked by the release of such masterpieces of Soviet cinema as Tarkovsky's Solaris with its extremely realistic planet-ocean and Richard Viktorov's Moscow-Cassiopeia with its incomparable scenes of astronauts being in a state of weightlessness. The secret of the plausibility of the graphics in these films is ridiculously simple - perfectly selected locations, carefully created scenery, masterful camera work, and, of course, the talent of the director.

For example, in order to convey the effect of weightlessness in the film "Moscow - Cassiopeia", the scenery of the spaceship rotating 360 degrees was built from scratch in the Yalta film studio. According to Novate.ru, the camera was rigidly fixed to the platform and rotated along with the corridor. The astronauts were hung on a thin cable so that it seemed as if they were floating in space.

But since the 1980s, Soviet special effects in the pursuit of Lucas' Star Wars have noticeably slowed down. It is enough to watch the film "Orion's Loop" to be convinced that the school of combined photography of the USSR took a big step back, and even Richard Viktorov's cult film "Through hardships to the stars" could not save the situation.

Closer to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first digital special effects began to be used in our cinematography, but by that time Western technology had advanced a lot in technical terms. "Terminator", "Back to the Future" - these and other legendary films left no chance for Soviet directors. On the other hand, in the USSR they did not try to focus on entertainment - our films fell in love with hundreds of viewers for something completely different.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT, OR THE IMAGE OF THE METROPOLIS

The first film experiments on the transformation of reality were still not free from the burden of their ancestors - the theater and the circus. It is no coincidence that the former circus performer Georges Méliès became the founder of cinema fiction. He used complex movable scenery and mechanisms (mounted in his studio near Paris in a huge building of the former greenhouse). Lunar landscapes and revived constellations, sea depths and polar icebergs - these huge backdrops were conventional in a theatrical way, which, however, did not destroy the deliberately farcical style of the “movie shows”.

The same deliberate theatricality distinguished the "Soviet" Mars ("Aelita", 1924), in the style of productions by Meyerhold and Tairov. But here the avant-garde artists Isaac Rabinovich and Alexandra Ekster used mock-up scenery with might and main. And subsequently, all the same lunar landscapes (the German “Woman on the Moon”, the Soviet “Space Flight”) or the grandiose cities of the future (“Metropolis” by Fritz Lang, “The Image of the Future” by G. Wells) began to be designed on a reduced scale.

And if necessary, to combine actors and models in one frame, they began to use purely cinematic methods: “perspective combination”, “RIR projection”, “wandering mask”.

Perspective Alignment: Shooting two or more objects at a sufficient distance from a point where the objects appear to be side by side - this distorts the visual perception of the size of the objects. Gandalf visiting Bilbo (The Fellowship of the Ring) is a perfectly executed old trick with perspective alignment. RIR-projection: Shooting objects against the background of the screen, which displays panoramic plans. The “blue room” (or “green wall”) method used in all modern films is the result of the evolution of the RIR projection in the digital age. Wandering mask: Superposition of foreground objects “cut out” of the frame on the background, which was filmed separately. Car chases (with a view of the characters in the car) were often depicted in older films using this method. In the famous Imperial speeder race through the forests of Endor (Star Wars: Return of the Jedi), traces of a wandering mask are visible.

The masters of fantastic scenery were sometimes more talented than the rest - after all, they took science fiction seriously, unlike, for example, administrators who did not favor this genre.

The post-war space theme boom spawned a whole cinematic solar system world. American George Pal and Russian Pavel Klushantsev with documentary accuracy (and similarity to each other) created caravans of silver rockets transporting astronauts in all-metal spacesuits to toroidal orbital stations. It even came to curiosities of rockets invented by the artist, it was forbidden to shoot so as not to divulge military secrets (!) (By the way, the same problem arose before - with Goebbels' censorship in "Woman on the Moon").

But who remembers today the films “Direction - the Moon”, “Road to the Stars”, “Space Conquest”, “Dream to Meet” (try to guess which of these trivial names were invented in the USSR, and which ones - in the USA!) ... American the models are stored in the museum, and ours - after the death of the artist Yuliy Shvets - were decommissioned and destroyed.

But it was then that many witty tricks were developed that were later used in the classics: “Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick and “Teens in the Universe” by Richard Viktorov. For example, a rotating decoration of the station, simulating walking in magnetic boots on the walls and ceiling.

It took a quarter of a century for filmmakers to begin to appreciate the used material and create all kinds of "Disneylands" in which the film sets returned to their original - theatrical-farce - function.

Bulky backdrops have outlived their time, and all sorts of optical tricks have appeared, allowing you to make the flat voluminous, and the small - gigantic. Otherwise, there would be no such spectacles as Star Wars. Special effects master John Dykstra became a full co-author of George Lucas. Mars"...

And the use of computer graphics generally mixed the criteria of illusion and objective reality...

OBJECT TRANSFORMATION, OR INCREDIBLE KONG

All the same Méliès created the first movie monster - a life-size giant ("To Conquer the Pole"), who grabbed people with mechanical hands and swallowed them with a mechanical mouth. This bulky attraction was still of purely fair origin. However, it was Méliès who discovered purely cinematic tricks. For example, a freeze frame that allowed the Selenites to disappear when they exploded on impact in Journey to the Moon.

From here there was one step to frame-by-frame shooting and a new genre - animation. This step was taken by our compatriot Vladislav Starevich in the film “Beautiful Lucanida”, who animated (i.e. put the “anima” - the soul) insect dolls, so skillfully that the audience was sure that they were trained living creatures. Apparently, this was the first time in the history of cinema when fiction became indistinguishable from the truth and “fantastic reality” was born.

True, soon animation became a separate kingdom. Big cinema began to use the possibilities of combining live actors and puppets. And there was, for example, "New Gulliver" by Alexander Ptushko with plasticine midgets. And in the USA, Willis O'Brien, half a century before Spielberg, created his own “Jurassic Park” - first in the silent adaptation of “The Lost World”, and then in the immortal “King Kong” (1933). Ray Harryhausen continued his school in the series about Sinbad and "A Million Years B.C.".

The galaxy of modern "monster-creators" is no longer single handicraftsmen, but the heads of special laboratories for the creation of monsters. The most prominent of them is the Italian Carlo Rambaldi, who began with the mythological “peplums” (“Perseus and Medusa”) and “spaghetti horrors” (“Dark Red”), collaborated with Andy Warhol on films about Frankenstein and Dracula, and then became a father (literally, "Papa Carlo") for Spielberg's characters the ET ("E.T.") and his closest "relatives" ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind").

But Spielberg's dinosaurs were created by another "sorcerer of the twentieth century" - Phil Tippett. For him, these were seeds - after that huge tribe of aliens that he invented for the Star Wars trilogy, two dragons (Dragon Slayer and Dragon Heart), Howard the Duck, and many others.

Today, computer actors are already beginning to outplay the living (for example, in new episodes of Star Wars) and often become the title characters of films (The Incredible Hulk), from objects becoming subjects.

When they opened the close-up, they remembered the make-up. At first, the actors had to make up themselves. By the way, this is what Lon Chani became famous for. During the period of silent Hollywood, he outplayed all the screen freaks - vampires, werewolves, Quasimodo, the Phantom of the Opera - for which he received the nickname "The Man with a Thousand Faces". Chaplin is credited with the authorship of the famous joke: "Be careful not to crush the cockroach, it may be Chani in a new make-up."

But then professional make-up artists appeared - sometimes genuine artists. For example, Jack Pierce to do the ancient funeral rites. But his image became canonical and repeated from film to film. Pierce later created the no less classic wolfman and mummy.

Although the natural data of the actor also played an important role. Not wanting to offend the masters of cinema, I note that even without makeup, Karloff looked like a dead man, and our Georgy Millyar looked like Babu Yaga. It was technically more difficult to make a visual transformation of a man into a monster in one frame. The simplest method was a double exposure (re-shooting on a photographic plate / film), but it did not give a complete illusion, and new methods were invented, often keeping them secret. So, to this day, it is not known how deep wrinkles appear on the face of Dr. Jekyll before turning him into Mr. Hyde in the 1932 film. They are talking about color filters, but the secret is lost ...

Today, with the mass production of plastic tentacles and plastic fangs, keeping secrets is difficult, and not so relevant. After all, a modern make-up artist does not want to remain in the shadows, and sometimes overshadows the actor, becoming a star himself. Like, for example, Rob Bottin, who began by disguising an actor as a monkey (King Kong, 1976), as a werewolf (Howl), as gnomes and goblins (Legend), with the effects of distortion and decay of living flesh (The Thing , "The Witches of Eastwick", "Inner Space"). But his finest hour struck when he came up with a simple, like all ingenious, "knight of the XXI century" - armored "Robot Police". Subsequently, Bottin became indispensable as a master of “invisible” makeup, that is, such that the viewer did not notice him, in the thriller “Seven” and the action movie “Mission Impossible”.

IMAGE TRANSFORMATION, OR CREATOR'S STEP

The emergence of computer technology in cinema is comparable in epochalism to the invention of sound. Today, of course, you can shoot the old fashioned way. But at the same time, one must be aware of the deep periphery where such a cinema will be located.

The computer helped bypass a whole stage of film production - the materialization of miracles from improvised means in front of the camera (in order to immortalize them on film and immediately throw them into a landfill). Now any, the most incredible ideas can be born directly on the screen.

Cinema has finally ceased to be the only Screen Art, standing in line with television and the computer. And the fantastic image has finally ceased to be just a display of sham reality, and has become itself - an invention, completely independent of the frailty of cinematic life.

Man has come even closer to the rank of the Creator. One more step, and... But that's a completely different story.