These things gotta happen every five million years or so, ten million years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood.
These things happen once every million or so years. Four years is nothing.
These things gotta happen every five million years or so, ten million years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood.
Is it true that the next caldera-forming eruption of Yellowstone is overdue?
No. First of all, one cannot present recurrence intervals based on only two values. It would be statistically meaningless. But for those who insist... let’s do the arithmetic. The three eruptions occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million and 0.64 million years ago. The two intervals are thus 0.8 and 0.66 million years, averaging to a 0.73 million-year interval. Again, the last eruption was 0.64 million years ago, implying that we are still about 90,000 years away from the time when we might consider calling Yellowstone overdue for another caldera- forming eruption. Nevertheless, we cannot discount the possibility of another such eruption occurring some time in the future, given Yellowstone’s volcanic history and the continued presence of magma beneath the Yellowstone caldera.
From: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/yellowstone_sub_page_55.html