Well, Some Island Sure Looks Empty Now

This is in regards to the abrupt appearance of an active volcano in the middle of Chicago in last month's Shadowpact.

See I was reading through a recent JSA Classified (the one starring Jakeem Thunder), and the issue had this whole big thing about how magic is about balance, and you can't magically repair one block of housing, without somehow removing the structural stability from an equally large block of housing somewhere else. I guess it's like the Law of Equivalent Exchange from Full Metal Alchemist. Although I believe that concept was always violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, since if you try and make something into something else, you should lose some of the mass as heat energy, but they, supposedly, were not. I think because they were drawing on the life forces of people from a parallel reality (or something, the end of the series kind of lost me, which happens frequently, as they try to explain the batshit insane stuff going on).

Anyway, so if Dr. Gotham "made" a volcano in the middle of Chicago, then it stands to reason he would have drawn the necessary components from elsewhere? Sure, there is magma under Chicago, if you go deep enough, but it isn't a tectonically active area with passages that the magma can use to reach the surface on a regular basis. So Dr. Gotham (that name seems incredibly stupid to me right now, while it really didn't before) would have to make such things occur, and at a drastically accelerated rate. So, long thought short, is there now a volcanically active region somewhere on New Earth (assuming this is New Earth, or Earth-52, or whatever), that, well, isn't volcanically active anymore?

That might not be all bad, if the people living near it have to live in a state of awareness, ready to evacuate when the volcano got active, but people like to visit volcanoes, whether it's tourists or scientists, and with the volcano gone, that could hurt the locale's economy. Though I suppose more people might move in with the threat of lava destroying their home reduced, and the scientists would probably stick around to try and figure out what happened, so maybe it would help in the long run. Of course, if he drew from a volcanic island, it might not exist anymore, which would make what he did a double whammy of murdering evilness. And all just because he got stabbed with a spear (which was seriously oversold as being bad ass, when it couldn't put down a second-rate Mordru?).

Maybe he just drew it from a undersea volcano, and so all he did was prevent the formation of a future land mass. Then again, the earth kind of seems to be in a balance, since there are places where new land emerges, and places where it submerges (subduction zones, hey I remembered something from geology, hooray!), so if he messed with that. . . hmm.