A new Yellowstone Supervolcano study just dropped. Should we be worried?
Beneath Yellowstone National Park is a massive supervolcano… and that’s pretty much all we know about it. Scientists have never fully understood its mechanics and what exactly drives it. The most prominent theory held that Yellowstone was fueled by a deep mantle plume, a sort of vertical column of superheated material rising from deep within the Earth. There is a logic to that. But didn’t quite explain how the entire park is apparently a giant bubbling cauldron of heat.
New research published in Scienceprepared by a team of researchers from the headquarters of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, suggests that Yellowstone’s heat may come from much shallower depths than previously thought, and is largely driven by tectonic movements that stretch and stretch the Earth’s outer shell.
The researchers believe that rather than a single upward surge of heat supplying the volcanic system with its energy, the system is likely a tangled web of underground magma highways that distribute the heat across the park and power its geysers and hot springs.
The Yellowstone Supervolcano is exceedingly rare
Scientists built a 3D model of the region, including the Yellowstone caldera and the nearby Eastern Snake River Plain, to simulate how magma forms and moves. If you imagined a giant underground bubbling cauldron with what essentially amounts to a series of straws sticking into it leading to the surface, that’s not quite it. It’s actually closer to an ant farm’s twisted network of tunnels.
Magma appears to originate in the upper mantle, in the asthenosphere, then migrates through cracks and reservoirs created by tectonic stress before eventually fueling volcanic activity at the surface.
Since Yellowstone is one of only 20 known and active supervolcanoes on Earth, scientists need to understand its deeper machinery so we can better predict an eruption. We already know that the Yellowstone supervolcano is capable of eruptions that can make even the most violent we’ve seen in our lifetimes look like a baby’s tantrums. It is the last super eruption, the one that formed its massive 30 x 45 mile wide caldera, which happened about 630,000 years ago. Fortunately, scientists don’t think we’ll have another one anytime soon.
