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Scientists have speculated that should the Yellowstone super volcano erupt, it would be an epic catastrophe for North America. Now, researchers have discovered the missing link in the volcano's plumbing:
The new report fills in a missing link of the system. It describes a large reservoir of hot rock, mostly solid but with some melted rock in the mix, that lies beneath a shallow, already-documented magma chamber. The newly discovered reservoir is 4.5 times larger than the chamber above it. There's enough magma there to fill the Grand Canyon. The reservoir is on top of a long plume of magma that emerges from deep within the Earth's mantle.
This system has been in place for roughly 17 million years, with the main change being the movement of the North American tectonic plate, creeping at the rate of roughly an inch a year toward the southwest. A trail of remnant calderas can be detected across Idaho, Oregon and Nevada, looking like a string of beads, marking the migration of the tectonic plate. A similar phenomenon is seen in the Hawaiian islands as the Pacific plate moves over a hot spot, stringing out volcanoes, old to new, dormant to active.
Incidentally, here is explanation on the mechanism of geyser eruptions.
The lead researcher was said to bear a striking resemblance to Woody Harrelson...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Monday April 27 2015, @06:47PM
Scientists have speculated that should the Yellowstone super volcano erupt, it would be an epic catastrophe for North America.
TFA took a long time to get around to addressing this topic:
The big Yellowstone eruptions occur on time scales of many hundreds of thousands of years. Smith said the repeat time for a caldera explosion at Yellowstone is roughly 700,000 years. But the smaller eruptions, with lava flowing over the surface, are more frequent. There have been at least 50 such smaller eruptions since the caldera exploded 640,000 years ago. The most recent was about 70,000 years ago.
So little eruptions can be expected every 12,800 years, which means a little eruption might be seriously of overdue.
Often little eruptions decrease the chance of a big eruption, by revealing pressure.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Monday April 27 2015, @09:14PM
Often little eruptions decrease the chance of a big eruption, by revealing pressure.
There is a truck-load of assumptions in this statement, first and foremost is assumption that anyone knows how and even IF there is pressure build up to cause an eruption. Pressure that cause eruptions are not even in the crust, but come from hundreds of kilometers below the surface. We don't have an idea as to what causes pressures to escalate, so assuming that small eruptions release pressure, well, that could be completely wrong.
For a car analogy, if your engine starts to leak oil because a seal fails it does not mean that it is releasing pressure. It only means that you are losing oil.
The current state of vulcanism is equivalent to saying that if you start to see oil around seals of your engine block, that you will soon start to see oil stains on the floor of your garage. And that's all they are able to detect anyway - seal broken and initial, subsurface and shallow magma flows.