Some 640,000 years ago, the supervolcano that lies beneath Yellowstone National Park erupted, covering the continental U.S. in volcanic ash, magma, and other debris. Scientists now have research estimating when and where it could happen again.
The national park is known for its massive supervolcano—which has experienced some of the largest eruptions on the planet. A supervolcano is one 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 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of material,” according to the USGS.
Previous research hinted at a large amount of magma beneath the Yellowstone Caldera. However, more recent research—which used a different form of tracking—found much less concentrated magma. As a result, scientists revealed that Yellowstone National Park likely won’t experience a supervolcano eruption within the same timeframe they once believed.
“When we used magnetotellurics, we were able to see, actually, there’s not a lot there,” Ninfa Bennington, lead author on the study and a research geophysicist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, said in a new edition of the journal Nature.
“There are these segregated regions where magma is stored across Yellowstone, instead of having one sort of large reservoir,” Bennington added.
These smaller “reservoirs” likely won’t be producing an eruption in the near future. In fact, experts hypothesize there won’t be one for hundreds of thousands of years.
At least that’s one less natural disaster to worry about in this lifetime.
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