Posted on 12/22/2016 7:41:58 PM PST by JimSEA
The Italian name for the caldera — Campi Flegrei, or “burning fields”— is apt. The 7.5-mile-wide cauldron is the collapsed top of an ancient volcano, formed when the magma within finally blew. Though half of it is obscured beneath the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean, the other half is studded with cinder cones and calderas from smaller eruptions. And the whole area seethes with hydrothermal activity: Sulfuric acid spews from active fumaroles; geysers spout water and steam and the ground froths with boiling mud; and earthquake swarms shudder through the region, 125 miles south of Rome.
And things seem to be heating up. Writing in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, scientists report that the caldera is nearing a critical point at which decreased pressure on rising magma triggers a runaway release of gas and fluid, potentially leading to an eruption.
Forecasting volcanic eruptions is a famously dicey endeavor, and right now, it's impossible to say if and when Campi Flegrei might erupt, according to lead author Giovanni Chiodini, a volcanologist at the National Institute of Geophysics in Rome. But now more than ever, the caldera demands attention: An eruption would be devastating to the 500,000 people living in and around it.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Oh, you can. The cone is just in the way.
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Yes, but the plug is what causes the pressure to build up to allow the super explosion. Besides, the cone provides a large percentage of the projecta (i.e. ash).
The Yellowstone Caldera says your suspicions are incorrect.
Typically, Caldera eruptions start with a collapse. .
An eruption would be CAUSED by Global Warming.
believe what happens is after the eruption empties the magma chamber below the erupting volcano, the roof of the magma chamber collapses,forming a caldera.
Bush’s fault err no Trumps fault, global warming err global cooling, fake news??
Nope. The Magma chamber expands to the point that the overlying rock fails mechanically, collapsing into the chamber and causing explosive venting. . .
the magma chamber/reservoir is like a soda mix, but the gas level is way higher because the medium (molten rock) is so much denser. Additionally, the added pressure of depth allows more to be entrained.
Recall the article mentioning the area shares a common magma source with Vesuvius ~ 20 miles away? Now imagine that a large area of the land between those two areas thinned and stressed a bunch over the magma chamber at the same time as the chamber got a good recharge of extra gas rich magma and a significant fraction of it blew out. That’s “supervolcano”.
Mt St. Helens was something like 0.8 cubic mile of ejected material with a portion of it being the cone blowing out. They’re saying here this was previously in the 50 cubic mile range (rough conversion from km).
Check this out to get an idea of how unstable gas entrained magma is and how little it takes to set it off. It’s a bag of garbage penetrating the crust on the crater lake of lava.
If it erupts on Jan 20, 2017, it will be Trump’s fault; and maybe a little bit of Bush’s as well.
How do you get a collapse with a structure to collapse? The two biggest examples we have are Krakatoa & Mount Tambora, both of which had major edifices before the explosions.
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