Scientists Have Announced A Decrease In The Strength Of The Yellowstone Supervolcano - Alternative View

Scientists Have Announced A Decrease In The Strength Of The Yellowstone Supervolcano - Alternative View
Scientists Have Announced A Decrease In The Strength Of The Yellowstone Supervolcano - Alternative View

Video: Scientists Have Announced A Decrease In The Strength Of The Yellowstone Supervolcano - Alternative View

Video: Scientists Have Announced A Decrease In The Strength Of The Yellowstone Supervolcano - Alternative View
Video: Yellowstone Scientists Have Just Announced A Huge Sudden Uplift Inside The Park's Volcano System 2024, March
Anonim

The Yellowstone National Park supervolcano feeds a network of famous geysers, mud patches and fumaroles, but new evidence suggests that the volcanic caldera is weakening. Scientists have discovered two colossal super-eruptions that occurred about 9 million years ago, which show that a massive volcano, on average, erupts once every 500,000 years.

But over the past three million years, the park has experienced only two such events, so experts are concerned that it is experiencing a very serious recession. While such a super-eruption is expected to occur in the future, new research suggests we could have up to 900,000 years before another eruption of this magnitude occurs.

Thomas Knott, a volcanologist at the University of Leicester in the UK and lead author of the study, said: “We found that sediments previously thought to belong to several, smaller eruptions were in fact colossal layers of volcanic material from two previously unknown super-eruptions around 9.0 and 8.7 million years ago."

The earlier of these erupted 8,800 square miles of hot volcanic glass in an area similar to the size of modern New Jersey. It is now the largest recorded event in the entire volcanic province of Snake River Yellowstone and one of the five largest of all time.

These two eruptions led the team to investigate the supervolcano, leading them to speculate that it might be dying out. In their analysis, the team used a combination of techniques, including chemistry, magnetic data, and radioisotope dates, to correlate volcanic deposits scattered over tens of thousands of square miles. Both of these super-eruptions occurred during the Miocene, a geologic time span spanning 23 to 5.3 million years ago.

In those days, super-eruptions occurred on average once every 500,000 years. Now the frequency of eruptions has significantly decreased and is about 1.5 million years. And since the last super-eruption was 630,000 years ago, it can be assumed that we could have up to 900,000 years before another eruption of this magnitude occurs.

At the same time, scientists emphasize that their data is speculation and that the area is being carefully monitored to warn in advance of any problems.

Nikolaeva Maria

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