The Transformers: About That Volcano…

Story by @GIJoeRepairShop

I wasn’t going to write this article. I thought that maybe I was the only one who hadn’t really understood how the Autobot’s ship, The Ark, had lain undetected on Earth for over four million years with no one ever seeing it until 1984. From circa 3,998,016 BC to 1984 AD, why had no one ever noticed this huge ship embedded in and sticking out of a Mount St. Hilary?

Some quick googling provided the answer. But, it also showed that a lot of folks were under the same misperception as me. Still, I wasn’t going to write an article on this topic until I saw a post on Twitter/X this week asking the same exact questions.
It turns out that both the comic and the Saturday morning cartoon tell exactly the same story (in different illustration styles). The detail that you may have missed as a child is that the Ark crashed into a volcano so hard that it was completely buried by that volcano for 4 million years. It was only during an eruption in 1984 that the ship was unearthed and the Transformers awoken.

Case closed. This makes total sense, right? Well, let’s think about this for a second. Vulcanologists lump volcanos into three categories: active, dormant (could erupt but have not in a long time), and extinct (will not erupt again). Mount St. Hilary can certainly be classified as a dormant volcano. However, more than four million years between eruptions seems like a few orders of magnitude less active than actual dormant volcanos. For example, the Yellowstone dormant volcano has not erupted in approximately 70,000 years. Mount St. Helens was dormant for a period of about 7,000 years before becoming active again and very frequently erupting.

Then, there’s the issue of lava. Where’s the lava? Surely, if the Ark embedded itself so deeply into the volcano, why didn’t it penetrate the lava beneath it? Moreover, why wasn’t the Ark damaged at all by the eruption? One could argue that the Ark is made out of unknown Cybertron alloys that protected it from the intense heat of the lava.

Finally, there’s the issue of natural erosion, geographic landscape movement over millions of years, and plate tectonics. Natural movement of rock over millions of years would most-likely have either crushed the Ark (and the Transformers inside) or tore the ship apart. It’s also unlikely that the Ark would have stayed completely covered over so many millions of years.

My advice is to not think too deeply about any of these details in the Transformers origin story. Just enjoy the drama and the heroics that followed!