Posted on 04/23/2015 3:19:16 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A massive chamber holding enough magma to fill the Grand Canyon more than 11 times over is hiding beneath the steaming volcanic system of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
We knew of a smaller magma chamber closer to surface, holding some 10,000 cubic kilometres of magma and feeding heat upwards. The newly discovered reservoir sits under it and has a volume of 46,000 cubic kilometres. Together, the two form the largest known magma reservoir in the world.
"We can't say definitively that this is the biggest magma reservoir in the world, but we currently don't know of any other that has been imaged that is as large as the two we see beneath Yellowstone," says Fan-Chi Lin of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
The discovery of the much larger reservoir at a depth of 20 to 50 kilometres helps to solve a long-running puzzle relating to the carbon dioxide spewing out from the huge steaming caldera volcano at Yellowstone, creating ripples of tiny earthquakes it does so. The problem is that the upper magma chamber is much too small to account for the 45 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide discharged daily.
"If you combine the upper and lower crustal magma reservoirs, it better accounts for the amount of carbon dioxide coming out of the ground at Yellowstone," says Lin.
... So how did we not notice this chamber before?
...
Features at the depths where the new chamber was found have been difficult to study because the speed of waves from below are dictated by rock closer to the surface. Lin's team got round this by combining readings from local, shallower, and distant, deeper tremors, allowing the distorting effects of the rocks nearer the surface to be filtered out.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Me too. I’m still waiting for the one about the La Brea tarpits erupting to wipe out LA.
Yep. No use thinking about it.
Yea, kind of like killing Grendel only to come across his mother.
We’re talking about the mother of all magma!
Is VOLCANO the re-release of KRAKATOA, EAST OF JAVA? or a different movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa,_East_of_Java
Personally I liked FAIR WIND TO JAVA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Wind_to_Java
Yes, and we had our chance with the Chinese for an even trade for our debt. :(
Don't think the blast itself will do the trick. Especially if the "blast" is anything UNlike St Helens or Krakatoa.
What movie is that from ?
Whoa.... 30 posts before Dr. Evil showed up. We are getting slow here.
I liked Volcano, where Anne Heche pretended to be Tommy Lee Jones’s love interest.
2012
Bush’s fault. Only the UN can save us.
I read an interesting novel written a long time ago in which Yellowstone was threatening to have a supervolcano eruption, so a novel solution was used to try and cool it down.
To start with, a gigantic reservoir was built to take the headwaters of the Missouri river and artificial rivers from Canada. Then when it was full, it was opened right when some underground nuclear explosives detonated, creating huge, underground chambers next to, but not overlapping with the magma chamber. The end result was a river pouring into a very hot chamber, generating an immense wall of steam.
For several hundred years. The vast amount of evaporated water then strongly increased the amount of rain falling in the Midwest and plains, making it far greener and fertile.
Bush’s fault.
ping
Well, according to this idiot, erf has a “planetary carrying capacity.”
Or you could stay where you are and get quick-fried by a nuke from, say, Iran, North Korea, Russia,.....
It’s called “Magma PI”.
Tom Selleck. Phone call for Tom Selleck.
Why isn’t Mother Nature not in the dock already.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.