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The Supervolcano Under Yellowstone is Alive and Kicking
Nautilus ^ | 8/29/15 | Shannon Hall

Posted on 08/29/2015 5:30:26 PM PDT by markomalley

The wind shifts. The stench of rotten eggs makes it nearly impossible to breathe and the hot fog clouds my view. I hold my breath and close my eyes, imagining the fog growing thicker, crushing me. Then without warning the wind clears and I’m enveloped once again in the cold, dry air. The heat feels like a lost dream. I shiver as I analyze my surroundings.

Before me lies a steaming blue spring with concentric rings of green, yellow and dark red. I turn around to see another pool. But the rising fog is so dense, I can only guess at the existence of blue water below. Sometimes I glimpse bubbles boiling from some unknown source. The pools are a small sampling of the 10,000 geothermal features that dot Yellowstone’s caldera and hint at a mysterious hot spot beneath the crust.


Yellowstone National Park: The Grand Prismatic Spring

It’s this alien landscape that makes it surprisingly easy to believe that northwestern Wyoming sits directly above a supervolcano — a behemoth far more powerful than your average volcano, with the capacity to eject more than 240 cubic miles of material.

But why do scientists believe there is a supervolcano hidden below? When I asked Henry Heasler, a park geologist at Yellowstone this question, he waxed philosophical. “Good science is nothing more than a progress report,” he said. “It’s what we know at a certain time with the data that we have.”

And this year scientists provided one of the most impressive progress reports yet: They peered deep beneath the Earth’s surface and created the first three-dimensional image of the supervolcano’s plumbing. Although they had already imaged a plume, which brings molten rock up from deep below the mantle to a region about 60 kilometers below the surface, and a magma chamber about 10 kilometers below the surface, the new work had found the missing link between the two.

A second, 11,200-cubic-mile magma chamber connects the plume to the shallower magma chamber. It’s 4.5 times larger than its shallow companion and has enough hot rock to fill the Grand Canyon nearly 14 times.

Hsin-Hua Huang, a seismologist from the University of Utah and his colleagues used earthquake data to capture this astonishing image. It’s similar to an ultrasound, said Heasler. “We have the skin of a surface—of a person—but we want to see what’s inside.” When earthquakes travel through dense, hot spots they slow down. So if a seismic wave reaches a sensor later than expected, scientists know there’s a low-velocity, and hence denser and hotter, region hidden deep within the Earth.

“If we were just using one pathway—so one earthquake and one seismometer—we couldn’t be able to tell where along that path that low velocity body was. We’d have no idea,” said co-author Jamie Farrell from the University of Utah. That’s where multiple earthquakes and sensors come into play. Huang’s team used 4,849 earthquakes, originating from all parts of the earth, plus 80 seismographs across Yellowstone and beyond, to create a rough three-dimensional picture.

Their study was also the first to combine both worldwide and local earthquakes. Distant earthquakes allow scientists to image deep structures (any earthquakes originating under India or China will first travel through the Earth’s core before reaching the U.S.) and local earthquakes allow for shallow structures. Combining the two let the team image the deep magma chamber for the first time. Given that natural earthquakes, however, are relatively rare events—even in one of the most active areas in the world—they had to collect 30 years worth of data.

But seismic tomography isn’t the only way to peer deep underground. GPS satellites can scour the area searching for any ground movement; gravity satellites can look for any changes in the density below; and ground instruments can sample the heat and gases rising from the geothermal features.

All methods point to a supervolcano that’s very much alive. From 1976 to 1984, GPS satellite data showed that the caldera floor was swelling upward. Magma was flowing from the deeper chamber into the shallow reservoir, causing the above ground to inflate. This influx of hot material, which happens to be less dense, was also reflected in gravity data. To a satellite orbiting directly above the inflow, the Earth will seem to pull on it a little less than expected. Meanwhile ground instruments measured increasing heat and gases rising from the active features.

Then from 1985 to 1995 the caldera sunk back down about 5.5 inches. Magma was either moving out of the system laterally or the shallow reservoir was simply cooling and contracting, letting gases seep through the surface. Later measurements show that the caldera floor is continuing to swell and sink. But scientists still don’t understand the complex interplay between the supervolcano’s moving parts.

“I think our next step—hopefully—is to be able to look at some smaller scale features of how these bigger features are connected to each other,” said Farrell. If scientists can determine how the large magma chambers interact with each other, they will better understand how fluids and heat move the Earth. “Then we can start looking at how long it would take for enough material to get from the deep to the shallow [reservoirs] and maybe where we are in the volcanic cycle of eruptions. But we’re not quite there yet.”

Although past eruptions dot the Earth’s surface from Oregon to Wyoming, it’s hard to infer anything about a future eruption. And Farrell isn’t convinced another super-eruption will happen at all. “The system might be dying,” he said. “The Yellowstone hot spot is moving into thicker, colder continental crust. And it takes a lot more energy to burn through that crust than it did the thinner crust that it’s been burning through for the last 17 million years.”

But as I watch Yellowstone’s surface boil over before my very eyes it’s hard to believe that the system deep beneath my feet might one day fade away. And as a geyser before me erupts, shooting steam and water tens of feet into the air, I have to wonder if it’s instead slowly building toward another super-eruption. After all, despite Farrell’s uncertainty, he continued to say: “It’s happened in the past, it could happen in the future.”


TOPICS: Science
KEYWORDS: catastrophism; supervolcano; yellowstone
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1 posted on 08/29/2015 5:30:26 PM PDT by markomalley
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To: markomalley

Blow already!


2 posted on 08/29/2015 5:32:28 PM PDT by hal ogen (First Amendment or Reeducation Camp?)
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To: markomalley

Don’t let the EPA know about this. They will want to set it off and establish another super site.


3 posted on 08/29/2015 5:33:07 PM PDT by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults)
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To: markomalley

It may blow up within the next 100,000 years, or not.


4 posted on 08/29/2015 5:35:18 PM PDT by Snickering Hound
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To: markomalley

Latest polls show Trump beating everyone except Supervolcano.


5 posted on 08/29/2015 5:37:52 PM PDT by Rastus
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To: Snickering Hound

Unless there is a way of stopping it from eventually happening, no point in thinking about it.


6 posted on 08/29/2015 5:38:09 PM PDT by dp0622
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To: markomalley
scientists still don’t understand the complex interplay between the supervolcano’s moving parts.

But they do know manmade global warming is a crisis.

7 posted on 08/29/2015 5:38:37 PM PDT by MUDDOG
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To: hal ogen
Blow already!
You really don't want that to happen. It would be real bad.
8 posted on 08/29/2015 5:38:50 PM PDT by dainbramaged (Get out of my country now)
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To: markomalley

Any geologists out there? Can some of the new oil reserves we are finding with fracking attributable to this type of phenomena?


9 posted on 08/29/2015 5:39:36 PM PDT by LRoggy (Peter's Son's Business)
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To: dainbramaged

Maybe that would knock some sense into this country’s “leaders”.


10 posted on 08/29/2015 5:41:22 PM PDT by hal ogen (First Amendment or Reeducation Camp?)
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To: markomalley

That would leave a helluva carbon footprint.


11 posted on 08/29/2015 5:43:05 PM PDT by lightman (O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance, giving to Thy Church vict'ry o'er Her enemies.)
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To: LRoggy

Good one!


12 posted on 08/29/2015 5:43:06 PM PDT by MUDDOG
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To: hal ogen
Blow already!

You first.
13 posted on 08/29/2015 5:43:24 PM PDT by Resettozero
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To: hal ogen

14 posted on 08/29/2015 5:45:55 PM PDT by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either satire or opinion. Or both.)
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To: hal ogen

That would be bad in a way that would make the Krakatoa eruption look like dinner theater. It would make Mt St Helen look like a controlled burn. It would look like the alternate ending to _Armageddon_; heck, it would be Armageddon.


15 posted on 08/29/2015 5:48:14 PM PDT by ctdonath2 (The world map will be quite different come 20 January 2017.)
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To: markomalley; Kartographer

We are all gonna die PING!


16 posted on 08/29/2015 5:48:29 PM PDT by DCBryan1 (No realli, moose bytes can be quite nasti!!)
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To: ctdonath2

Sweet.


17 posted on 08/29/2015 5:49:24 PM PDT by hal ogen (First Amendment or Reeducation Camp?)
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To: markomalley


18 posted on 08/29/2015 5:55:22 PM PDT by JoeProBono (SOME IMAGES MAY BE DISTURBING VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED;-{)
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To: dainbramaged

Maybe it is time for a massive reset


19 posted on 08/29/2015 5:56:49 PM PDT by al baby (Hi Mom)
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To: JoeProBono

kinda looks hw the testicals and penis work


20 posted on 08/29/2015 5:57:45 PM PDT by al baby (Hi Mom)
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