LONDON: Yellowstone National Park is the home of one of the world’s largest volcanoes, one that is inactive for the moment but capable of erupting with catastrophic violence at a scale never before witnessed by human beings.
In a big eruption, Yellowstone would eject 1,000 times as much material as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. This would be a disaster felt on a global scale, which is why scientists are looking at this thing closely.
On Thursday, a team from the University of Utah published a study in the journal Science that for the first time offers a complete diagram of the plumbing of the Yellowstone volcanic system.
The report fills in a missing link of the system. It describes a large reservoir of hot rock, mostly solid but with some melted rock in the mix, that lies beneath a shallow, already-documented magma chamber. The newly discovered reservoir is 4½ times larger than the chamber above it. There’s enough magma there to fill the Grand Canyon. The reservoir is on top of a long plume of magma that emerges from deep within the Earth’s mantle.
