What do you know about the Yellowstone supervolcano?

[Panich52]

What do you know about the Yellowstone supervolcano?
Feb 02, 2015
by Deanna Conners in FAQs » Earth

Echinus Geyser, Yellowstone National Park. Image Credit: National Park Service.

Beneath Yellowstone National Park lies a volcanic hotspot. The most recent enormous eruption occurred 640,000 years ago. What’s going on now?

Beneath Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, lies a hot, upwelling plume of mantle. Heat from the mantle melts the overlying rocks and the resulting magma pools close to Earth’s surface. Areas such as these are known as volcanic hotspots.

Occasionally, molten rock from a hotspot will erupt.

Three enormous eruptions occurred at the Yellowstone hotspot 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago. Two of these released so much material that the area is often referred to as a supervolcano.

Will the Yellowstone supervolcano erupt in your lifetime?

According to the U.S. Geological Survey,

A supervolcano is a volcano that at one point in time erupted more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of deposits.

That is enough material to fill up Lake Erie twice; Lake Erie is one of the Great Lakes, and it has a volume of 480 cubic kilometers.

The eruption at Yellowstone 2.1 million years ago is thought to have released about 2,450 cubic kilometers of material, whereas the eruption at Yellowstone 640,000 years ago is thought to have released about 1,000 cubic kilometers of material. Scientists can obtain estimates of releases from historic eruptions by looking at the thickness of deposits surrounding the volcano.

The last known eruption of a supervolcano on Earth occurred at Lake Taupo in New Zealand 26,500 years ago.

Given the incredible power of supervolcanoes, such an eruption at Yellowstone would have catastrophic consequences. One recent study estimates that another supervolcanic eruption at Yellowstone would blanket North America in ash, and some areas close to the hotspot could be covered by more than a meter of debris. Supervolcanoes can also have pronounced cooling effects on the climate for several years after an eruption because of the sulfur dioxide that is released to the atmosphere. The sulfur dioxide forms aerosols that block incoming sunlight. Eventually, the sulfur dioxide from the eruption will wash out of the atmosphere and the climate cooling effect will subside.

Many scientists think that it is unlikely that another supervolcanic eruption will occur at Yellowstone any time soon, for example, in the next few thousand years. Experts also say that a supervolcanic eruption at Yellowstone is not necessarily imminent. One new study has even estimated that if another supervolcanic eruption were to occur at the Yellowstone hotspot, it likely would not happen for another 1 to 2 million years from now. These estimates were based, in part, upon knowledge of the size, contents, and activity of the magma reservoir underneath Yellowstone.

The Yellowstone hotspot is being monitored with numerous instruments that can detect precursors to eruptions such as earthquake swarms that indicate magma is moving beneath the surface. The monitoring data are posted to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory website and can be viewed at the link here. http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/yellowstone_monitoring_47.html Scientists think that they would be able to detect precursory activity to a catastrophic eruption by at least a few weeks or months prior to the event, thus giving them time issue any necessary warnings.

Yellowstone supervolcano would cover North America in ash http://earthsky.org/earth/yellowstone-supervolcano-would-cover-north-america-in-ash

EarthSky has more links:

http://earthsky.org/earth/what-do-you-know-about-the-yellowstone-supervolcano?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=52ca21b9d6-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-52ca21b9d6-393525109

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[TexasProgresive]

1. We all have to die one day.

If it's from an eruption of the Yellowstone volcano at least it would be quick like for the people of Pompeii. One thing is for sure all the worry and concern about Yellowstone will not hasten or prevent it happening. There's much more stuff that needs our attention.

[Warpy]

2. Dying from silica ash and/or superheated poisonous gas is not on my list

of least horrible ways to check out. People at the caldera or within a few miles might be able to hope for quick incineration but the rest of us would check out slowly and in agony. If we have respirators, we'd still have to watch our dogs and cats suffocate slowly.

If we were in an area of the country that escaped the ash fall, we could look forward to famine as the entire grain belt and most of the meat producing areas were wiped out under a thick blanket of ash.

The North American Plate is moving to the southwest. If there is a warning of a new supereruption, it will come from northeast of the present caldera. As of now, the plume has a kink in it, delivering magma under the caldera to cool slowly as it raises the floor. At some point, that hot spot will experience an updraft, an increased quantity of superheated magma, and the kink will be bypassed for a direct route, fracturing and them blowing apart the land and mountains directly over it.

Let's hope we're all long gone by the time it happens.

[TexasProgresive]

3. Yes let's hope but there is little gain in worry. n/t

[tularetom]

4. Actually I hope organized religion is gone by the time it erupts

At the rate the US is regressing, if it blew in the next few decades, we'd have politicians passing bills to toss a few virgins into it. And religious nuts claiming the eruption was validation of the biblical prediction that the earth would ultimately be destroyed by fire.

[Kablooie]

5. There is a series of books about life after the Yellowstone eruption.

The Ashfall Trilogy

It's about a 16 year old boy who is trying to survive and find his family after Yellowstone erupts, turning the US into a dark, freezing, lawless dystopia.
It's pretty terrifying and makes for a great post apocalyptic adventure.

http://www.amazon.com/Ashfall-Trilogy-Book-1-ebook/dp/B005TJNMV6/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1JV65B2TT3AZ7QKS3XZS

[NaturalHigh]

9. That sounds like an interesting series.

My queue is pretty full right now, but I'm going to put that on my "to read" list.

[PADemD]

6. 26,500 years

a measurement of precession.

[jakeXT]

8. Farallon Slab Caused Ancient Eruptions, Not Yellowstone Supervolcano, Scientists Claim

Ancient giant eruptions in the Pacific Northwest may actually have been caused by the tearing of a titanic slab of rock and not the supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park, scientists now suggest.

Supervolcanoes are capable of eruptions dwarfing anything ever recorded by humanity. There are roughly a dozen supervolcanoes on Earth today, one of which sits beneath Yellowstone National Park.

Volcanism at Yellowstone is thought to have started with the Steens-Columbia River flood basalts. A flood basalt is the result of a large volcanic eruption that covers vast areas with lava, and the Steens–Columbia River flood basalts erupted more than 55,000 cubic miles (230,000 cubic kilometers) of molten rock over approximately 2 million years, spewing out more than 1 million times the notorious Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980.

Flood basalts are thought to typically occur when the head of a giant mushroom-shaped upwelling of hot rock rising from near the Earth's core, known as a mantle plume, reaches the surface. Now researchers suggest a new way for these massive eruptions to form -- a breach in a massive slab of the Earth's crust.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/farallon-slab-ancient-eruptions-yellowstone_n_1282918.html