Advertisement

Yellowstone super volcano just got scary large, but what danger does it pose?

Yellowstone super volcano just got scary large, but what danger does it pose?

One of the most dangerous volcanoes in South America blew its top for the first time in nearly half a century this week in Chile when Mount Calbuco began spewing a giant ash cloud more than 15 kilometres into the atmosphere, rattling the residents in the region.

While Calbuco is considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in South America, it is small potatoes compared to what a potential eruption might occur if Yellowstone Park’s super volcano in the western United States ever erupted.

And now, geologists have made an unsettling discovery of a giant reservoir of magma underneath the 40 mile-wide crater basin that covers most to he national park that no one new ever existed before.

The discovery announced in the journal Science Express last week describes the newly imaged hidden chamber that has an unbelievable size of 46,000 cubic kilometers, containing enough hot lava to fill the Grand Canyon eleven times over and has the same volume as New York’s Long Island.

The reservoir is about 12 to 28 miles underground and is nearly four-and-half times larger than a previously-known magma chamber above it. This surprising discovery promises to shed some light on the mysteries still surrounding the inner clockwork of how Yellowstone super volcano functions and help define just what kind of danger it actually poses.

“Our new seismic image of the Yellowstone volcanic system reveals a lower crustal magma reservoir beneath the previously-known shallow upper crustal magma reservoir beneath the Yellowstone caldera,” explained co-author and seismologist Jamie Farrell at the University of Utah in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.

“This new image and study provides key information on how the entire magmatic system works from the mantle plume to the surface as a continuous volcanic feature.”

A hot plume of mantle lies just beneath Yellowstone National Park and it’s the heat from the mantle that melts the overlying rocks forming what is known as volcanic hotspots, which can erupt. In fact Yellowstone is considered the world’s largest super volcano.

It has had three titanic eruptions (luckily all in the prehistoric past) some 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago. Each event spread at least a thousand cubic kilometers of ash and lava.

Smaller Yellowstone eruptions, mostly consisting of just slow moving lava flows, have occurred more frequently. Researchers estimate that there may be a one in ten thousand chance of these occurring any given year.

The last time Earth had a super volcano pop its top was nearly 27,000 years ago in New Zealand.

And when these slumbering giants do awaken, they can wreak havoc over large regions of a continent.

One recent study estimates that a full blown eruption at Yellowstone would blanket North America in ash, as much as meter deep in some areas.

A catastrophic eruption of this super volcano would be hundreds of times larger than Mount St, Helens back in 1980 and produce a pronounced cooling effect on the climate for many years after, simply because of the chocking particles and toxic gases released into the upper atmosphere where winds would blow it around the globe.

At this point in time, researcher believe that a super-eruption is not likely any time soon (not for a few thousand years or so) at Yellowstone, however these estimates have been partly based on our previous knowledge of the size of the magma reservoirs.

“While the upper crustal magma reservoir is consistent with previous observations, the lower crust magma reservoir, we now uncovered, has never been imaged before so the total size of the Yellowstone magma system being observed now is actually larger than what we knew before,” said Farrell.

“However, this lower [newfound] crustal magma reservoir has existed for a long time, at least as long as the giant volcanism of Yellowstone two million years old, we just couldn’t see it until now.”

The fact that that this region sports steaming geysers and a bulging titanic underground chamber of magma says that Yewllowstone’s super volcano may be sleeping, but it’s still very much alive.