Horrible today:Live footage of Yellowstone supervolcano eruption, an unstoppable disaster
Yellowstone National Park sits right on top of a giant, still-active volcano. That’s a concern. Yellowstone has been a national park since 1872, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that scientists realized the scale of the volcano — it’s 44 miles wide — and it wasn’t until the 1980s that they realized that it was still active and still threatening to erupt catastrophically. Yellowstone is capable of an eruption thousands of times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
The northern Rocky Mountains would be buried in feet of ash. Ash would rain down on nearly everyone in the United States. It would be a bad day. So geologists want to understand what’s really going on beneath all those hot springs and geysers that the volcano is fueling. Obviously, they want to know if and when Yellowstone will erupt again, and at what rate.
A major eruption would be a low-probability but high-impact event, like a Black Swan , something that could impact society and the planet. The problem for scientists is that these massive “supervolcano” eruptions are rare, and the most important action lies unseen, miles beneath the surface, involving chaotic forces, complex chemistry, and puzzling geological features.
A new study has provided insight into Yellowstone’s hidden architecture. It models how magma rises from deep within the Earth and creates two large chambers of partially molten rock beneath the surface of the national park. The two chambers are stacked on top of each other, separated by a layer (called a “sill,” like a windowsill) of unmelted rock.
The magma rising from the Earth’s mantle flows easily and doesn’t contain much gas. It cools and solidifies as it collides with the relatively cool crust, forming the sill, the top of which is about six miles below the surface. Above the sill is the upper magma chamber, with thick, sticky magma that contains a lot of gas — which makes the magma in the upper chamber explode. Like an unopened can of soda that has been shaken.
The new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters , explains how this two-tiered, geochemically diverse architecture might have emerged over time. “Someday, we might have a model that shows what the system looks like when there’s enough melting to have a big eruption,” lead author Dylan Colón, a doctoral candidate in earth sciences at the University of Oregon, told The Washington Post.
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