Yellowstone national park is considered to be one of the most beautiful places in the United States. Beautiful landscape, incredible creatures, and home to amazing geysers. Despite all that beauty, Yellowstone has the potential to be a catastrophic killer. What could make Yellowstone National Park a threat lies beneath the all the beauty on the surface. Yellowstone is home to a massive super volcano. Super volcanos sound frightening but that makes one wonder. What exactly is a super volcano? What are the requirements to make a volcano of that magnitude erupt? Could the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park erupt in our lifetime and what is the likelihood of it?
For a volcano to earn the name of “supervolcano,” the volcano must be …show more content…
Being a supervolcano means that the volcano has “had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI)” (Program, 2015). The VEI is a commonly used scale that ranks eruptions from 0 to 8. It uses multiple characteristics of an explosion to give it a classification. The volume of ejecta (the products of an explosion: ash, pumice, and lava) and column height are the most commonly used criteria. Volcanoes that measure on the VEI scale as 7 and 8 eruptions are normally explosive and they tend to unleash 100 to 1000 km3 of ash deposits. These tend to create what we know as a super-eruption. ‘Super-eruption’ is “is an informal term referring to volcanic events in which at least 300 km3 of magma are explosively evacuated from a subsurface magma chamber deposited on the countryside as pyroclastic (i.e. fire-fragmental) materials—ash, pumice and rock fragments” (Lowenstern, 2006). When all of these materials come out rapidly it causes the ground that is over the magma chamber to collapse inward creating a volcanic caldera that can span “more than 30 km in diameter” (Lowenstern, 2006). One would think that after a supervolcano creates this big dip in the earth that one would be able to
For a volcano to earn the name of “supervolcano,” the volcano must be …show more content…
Being a supervolcano means that the volcano has “had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI)” (Program, 2015). The VEI is a commonly used scale that ranks eruptions from 0 to 8. It uses multiple characteristics of an explosion to give it a classification. The volume of ejecta (the products of an explosion: ash, pumice, and lava) and column height are the most commonly used criteria. Volcanoes that measure on the VEI scale as 7 and 8 eruptions are normally explosive and they tend to unleash 100 to 1000 km3 of ash deposits. These tend to create what we know as a super-eruption. ‘Super-eruption’ is “is an informal term referring to volcanic events in which at least 300 km3 of magma are explosively evacuated from a subsurface magma chamber deposited on the countryside as pyroclastic (i.e. fire-fragmental) materials—ash, pumice and rock fragments” (Lowenstern, 2006). When all of these materials come out rapidly it causes the ground that is over the magma chamber to collapse inward creating a volcanic caldera that can span “more than 30 km in diameter” (Lowenstern, 2006). One would think that after a supervolcano creates this big dip in the earth that one would be able to