People don't even ask me where the Yellowstone hotspot was hanging out before it got to Wyoming I'm going to tell you about it in an upcoming post, though! The questions I get most frequently about America's most famous volcanic National Park are these:. Those questions honestly make me sad, because there's so much exciting stuff about it, and it all gets buried under a metric crapton of sensationalism and misinformation, delivered near daily by various press outlets and television specials.
Has Yellowstone experienced enormous eruptions in the past? It definitely has, repeatedly. Will it erupt on those huge scales again? Quite possibly! But we're going to see why the volcanologists at Yellowstone Volcano Observatory aren't placing their bets on a Big One happening any time soon even on a geologic timescale , and why civilization as a whole will probably survive the blast even if it does.
Yes, it will! But the next eruption is likely to be pretty small, just a bit of lava extruding with maybe minor amounts of ash.
And with all of the equipment we've got the volcano wired with, we'll have ample notice. If the next enormous eruption happens in our lifetimes, there will of course be death and destruction, but not enough to destroy the United States, or even just the American West.
Civilization as we know it will survive. The true story of Yellowstone isn't anywhere near as terrifying and dramatic as the breathless articles and dire documentaries would have you believe. But in the science world, reality rules. And it's not like an enormous caldera blown in the northwest corner of Wyoming, sitting atop a large and active magma chamber, filled with hydrothermal activity, can in any way be boring! Let's adjust our expectations and set some rumors to rest.
In terms of large explosions, Yellowstone has experienced three -- at 2. This comes out to an average of about , years between eruptions.
That being the case, we still have about , years to go, but this number is based on very little data and so is basically meaningless would you base any conclusion on the average of just two numbers?
The point, however, is that if someone, or some article or documentary, says that Yellowstone erupts every , years, you know right off the bat that they are full of baloney With rare exceptions, volcanoes do not accumulate magma at a constant rate in the few cases where that does happen, eruptions can be somewhat regular. Instead, volcanoes erupt when there is a sufficient supply of liquid magma in the subsurface and sufficient pressure to cause that magma to ascend to the surface.
This does not generally happen on a schedule. Okay, but, when it does go, it'll wipe out humanity, or at least most of North America, right? I know, I know, you're really hoping for something epic disaster-movie worthy, but I'm afraid the science says No, Yellowstone isn't going to wipe out humanity.
YVO gets a lot of questions about the potential for Yellowstone, or some other caldera system, to end all life on Earth. So, we'll answer that question right off the bat—no, a large explosive eruption at Yellowstone will not lead to the end of the human race most Yellowstone eruptions do not fit this worst-case scenario anyhow, but rather are lava flows. Search Search. Natural Hazards. Apply Filter.
What is a supervolcano? What is a supereruption? The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index VEI , meaning that at one point in time it erupted more than 1, cubic kilometers cubic miles of material.
When was the last time Yellowstone erupted? The most recent volcanic activity at Yellowstone consisted of rhyolitic lava flows that erupted approximately 70, years ago. Why are there so many earthquakes at Yellowstone?
Almost all earthquakes at Yellowstone are brittle-failure events caused when rocks break due to crustal stresses. Though we've been looking at Yellowstone for years, no one has yet identified "long-period LP events" commonly attributed to magma movement. How far would ash travel if Yellowstone had a large explosive eruption? Knowledge about past eruptions of Yellowstone combined with mathematical models of volcanic ash dispersion help scientists determine where and how much ashfall will occur in possible future eruptions.
During the three caldera-forming eruptions that occurred between 2. How big is the magma chamber under Yellowstone? Yellowstone is underlain by two magma bodies. The shallower one is composed of rhyolite a high-silica rock type and stretches from 5 km to about 17 km 3 to 10 mi beneath the surface and is about 90 km 55 mi long and about 40 km 25 mi wide. The deeper reservoir is composed of basalt What type of eruption will Yellowstone have if it erupts again? The most likely explosive event to occur at Yellowstone is actually a hydrothermal explosion —a rock-hurling geyser eruption—or a lava flow.
Hydrothermal explosions are very small; they occur in Yellowstone National Park every few years and form a crater a few meters across. Every few thousand years, a hydrothermal explosion will form a crater as Can we drill into Yellowstone to stop it from erupting?
In some cases, limited scientific drilling for research can help us understand magmatic and hydrothermal hot water systems; however, drilling to mitigate a volcanic threat is a much different subject with unknown consequences, high costs, and severe environmental impacts. In addition to the enormous expense and technological difficulties in What is the difference between "magma" and "lava"?
Scientists use the term magma for molten rock that is underground and lava for molten rock that breaks through the Earth's surface. What are some examples of supervolcanoes? Volcanoes that have produced exceedingly voluminous pyroclastic eruptions and formed large calderas in the past 2 million years include Yellowstone, Long Valley in eastern California, Toba in Indonesia, and Taupo in New Zealand. The lava flows themselves would be contained within a relatively small radius within the park — say, 40 miles or so.
In fact, only about one-third of the material would actually make it up into the atmosphere. The main damage would come from volcanic ash — a combination of splintered rock and glass — that was ejected miles into the air and scattered around the country. In their new paper , Lowenstern and his colleagues looked at both historical ash deposits and advanced modeling to conclude that an eruption would create an umbrella cloud, expanding even in all directions. This was actually a surprising finding.
A super-eruption could conceivably bury the northern Rockies in three feet of ash — devastating large swaths of Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, and Utah. Meanwhile, the Midwest would get a few inches of ash, while both coasts would see even smaller amounts. The exact distribution would depend on the time of year and weather patterns:. Mastin et al Any of those scenarios would be terrible news. That much volcanic ash is capable of killing people, plants, and animals and crushing buildings.
Even a few inches of ash which is what much of the country can get can destroy farms, clog roadways, cause serious respiratory problems, block sewer lines, and even short out transformers.
Air travel would have to shut down across much of North America. An eruption that big would also cool the planet temporarily. A volcanic eruption that big would also have major effects on the global climate.
Volcanoes can emit sulfur aerosols that reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere cool the climate. These particles are short-lived in the atmosphere, so the effect is only temporary, but it can still be dramatic. The Tambora eruption in cooled the planet enough to damage crops around the world — possibly leading to famines in some areas. And those were relatively tiny eruptions compared to what a supervolcano is, in theory, capable of.
Right now, there's no sign of a pending eruption. Yellowstone park does continue to get earthquakes, and the ground continues to rise and fall, but that's nothing out of the ordinary. The USGS also notes that, if you simply took the past three eruptions, the odds of Yellowstone erupting in any given year are 0.
But even that's not a good estimate, since it's not at all certain that Yellowstone erupts on a regular cycle or that it's "overdue" for another eruption. In fact, there might never be a big eruption in Yellowstone again. That's not a sure thing," says Lowenstern. It may not even see a fourth eruption. Volcanoes, after all, do die out.
The magma chamber below Yellowstone is being affected by two opposing forces — the heat welling up from below and the relative cold from the surface. If less heat comes in from below, then the chamber could conceivably freeze, eventually turning into a solid granite body. In the next few hundred years, Skip to main content. Search Search. Natural Hazards.
Apply Filter. When will the next large earthquake occur in Yellowstone? Earthquakes cannot be predicted yet, but modern surveillance conducted with seismographs instruments that measure earthquake locations and magnitudes and Global Positioning System GPS instruments that measure slow ground movements help scientists understand the state of stress in the Earth's crust.
Those stresses could trigger earthquakes as What is a supervolcano? What is a supereruption? The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index VEI , meaning that at one point in time it erupted more than 1, cubic kilometers cubic miles of material.
Why are there so many earthquakes at Yellowstone? Almost all earthquakes at Yellowstone are brittle-failure events caused when rocks break due to crustal stresses. Though we've been looking at Yellowstone for years, no one has yet identified "long-period LP events" commonly attributed to magma movement. When was the last time Yellowstone erupted? The most recent volcanic activity at Yellowstone consisted of rhyolitic lava flows that erupted approximately 70, years ago.
How much volcanic activity has there been at Yellowstone since the most recent giant eruption? Since the most recent giant caldera-forming eruption , years ago, approximately 80 relatively nonexplosive eruptions have occurred. Of these eruptions, at least 27 were rhyolite lava flows in the caldera, 13 were rhyolite lava flows outside the caldera, and 40 were basalt vents outside the caldera.
The most recent volcanic eruption at How big is the magma chamber under Yellowstone? Yellowstone is underlain by two magma bodies. The shallower one is composed of rhyolite a high-silica rock type and stretches from 5 km to about 17 km 3 to 10 mi beneath the surface and is about 90 km 55 mi long and about 40 km 25 mi wide.
The deeper reservoir is composed of basalt
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