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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 22 2015, @06:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-should-find-the-snooze-button dept.

After someone learns about the massive, devastating eruptions that have been unleashed from the Yellowstone Caldera, their usual response is two-fold: Will that happen again? And how much warning would we get? In addition to those incredible events, however, Yellowstone and other calderas like it see smaller eruptions of lava much more frequently. These "small" eruptions are still about the size of the largest eruptions the world has seen in the last century—like Mount Pinatubo. So how much warning can we expect for them?

These eruptions spit up rhyolite lavas that are cooler but much more viscous—and therefore violent—than the familiar, chemically distinct, and comparatively tame Hawaiian volcanoes. Magmas vary in chemistry and evolve over time as minerals with lower melting points separate from others that are still solid. For stagnant magmas hovering around those melting points, a fresh shot of hot melt can sometimes stir the pot and cause an eruption. For many of the lava eruptions at Yellowstone, some of which have followed long periods of calm, that kind of rejuvenation is responsible.
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Regardless, all this means that it didn't take Yellowstone long at all to wake up. Prior to this eruption, Yellowstone had been quiet for 220,000 years. But just a handful of months or years after fresh magma stirred things up, it burped up 2 to 3 cubic kilometers of lava.

Odds are good that this will be the type of eruption that occurs next at Yellowstone rather than the rarer "super-eruptions" that inspire Discovery Channel animations. "Fortunately," the researchers write, "any significant rejuvenation of the reservoir is likely to be associated with deformation or seismicity and identifiable by geophysical monitoring." So we should have a useful amount of warning that something angry is brewing down in Yellowstone's volcanic guts. Just not as much warning as we might like.

A super eruption at Yellowstone is a popular doomsday scenario.


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  • (Score: 2) by Alfred on Wednesday July 22 2015, @02:21PM

    by Alfred (4006) on Wednesday July 22 2015, @02:21PM (#212324) Journal
    It seems to me that the water in the caldera could add to the problem. When the thing blows there will be a lot of hot lava/magma that will start to vaporize that water. I'm not thinking the slow trickle of lava into the ocean that Hawaiian tourists go see, but a lot of lava with a lot of heat energy that transfers to the water quickly causing an explosion of steam. As if the volcanic explosion wasn't enough. If the right ground conditions exist and the water could move down into the heat source in great enough quantity, it could make a steam explosion without a full volcanic eruption but then maybe triggering one.

    side note: Remember, you can drink lava, once.
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