Super Volcano In Yellowstone National Park

It is little known that lying underneath one of America's areas of outstanding natural beauty - Yellowstone Park - is one of the largest super volcanoes in the world. Scientists have revealed that it has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago…so the next is overdue. The next eruption could be 2,500 times the size of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

And the sleeping giant is breathing: volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimeters this century.

Normal volcanoes are formed by a column of magma - molten rock - rising from deep within the Earth, erupting on the surface, and hardening in layers down the sides. This forms the familiar cone shaped mountain we associate with volcanoes.

Supervolcanoes, however, begin life when magma rises from the mantle to create a boiling reservoir in the Earth's crust. This chamber increases to an enormous size, building up colossal pressure until it finally erupts. The explosion would send ash, dust, and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, reflecting the sun's rays and creating a cold wave lasting several years. Crops in many areas would fail and many species of animals and plants would face extinction.

The most recent caldera-forming eruption about 650,000 years ago produced a caldera 53 x 28 miles (85 x 45 kilometers) across in what is now Yellowstone National Park (Figure 2). During that eruption, ground-hugging flows of hot volcanic ash, pumice, and gases swept across an area of more than 3,000 square miles. When these enormous pyroclastic flows finally stopped, they solidified to form a layer of rock called the Lava Creek Tuff. Its volume was about 240 cubic miles (1,000 cubic kilometers), enough material to cover Wyoming with a layer 13 feet thick or the entire conterminous United States with a layer 5 inches thick. The Lava Creek Tuff has been exposed by erosion at Tuff Cliff, a popular Yellowstone attraction along the lower Gibbon River.

The eruption also shot a column of volcanic ash and gases high into Earth's stratosphere. This volcanic cloud circled the globe many times and affected Earth's climate by reducing the intensity of solar radiation reaching the lower atmosphere and surface. Fine volcanic ash that fell downwind from the eruption site blanketed much of North America. This ash layer is still preserved in deposits as far away as Iowa, where it is a few inches thick, and the Gulf of Mexico, where it is recognizable in drill cores from the sea floor. Lava flows have since buried and obscured most of the caldera, but the underlying processes responsible for Yellowstone's tremendous volcanic eruptions are still at work.

MADISON - Reading the geochemical fine print found in tiny crystals of the minerals zircon and quartz, scientists are forming a new picture of the life history - and a geologic timetable - of a type of volcano in the western United States capable of dramatically altering climate sometime within the next 100,000 years.

With insight gained from new analytical techniques to study crystals of zircon and quartz, minerals that serve as veritable time capsules of geologic events, a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has proposed a new model for the origin of volcanism in young calderas.

These are volcanoes that occur over "hot spots" in the Earth and they erupt every few hundred thousand years in catastrophic explosions, sending hundreds to thousands of cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere and wreaking climatic havoc on a global scale.

In a series of papers, UW-Madison geologists Ilya N. Bindeman and John W. Valley present a life history of the hot spot volcanism that has occurred in the Yellowstone basin of the western United States over the past 2 million years. Their findings suggest a dying, but still potent cycle of volcanism, and a high probability of a future catastrophic eruption sometime within the next million years, and possibly within the next hundred thousand years.

Today's Yellowstone landscape represents the last in a sequence of calderas - the broad crater-like basins created when volcanoes explode and their characteristic cones collapse - that formed in regular progression over the past 2 million years. The near-clockwork timing of eruptions there - 2 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago and 600,000 years ago - suggests a pattern that may foreshadow an eruption of catastrophic proportions, said Bindeman and Valley.

Beneath Yellowstone and its spectacular landscape of hot springs and geysers is a hot spot, an upwelling plume of melted rock from the Earth's mantle. As the plume of hot, liquid rock rises in the Earth, it melts the Earth's crust and creates large magma chambers.

"These magmas usually erupt in a very catastrophic way," said Bindeman. "By comparison, the eruption of Mount St. Helens sent about two cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere. These catastrophic types of eruptions send thousands of cubic kilometers of ash skyward."

The hot spot deep beneath Yellowstone acts like a burner, said Bindeman. "It's a constant source of heat that acts on the upper crust and forms magma chambers that contain tens of thousands of cubic kilometers" of molten rock.

One of the massive plates that helps make up the crust of the Earth, the North American plate, is slowly moving over the hot spot, said Bindeman. "The plate has been moving across the heat source which makes it seem like the volcanoes are moving across the continent. Moreover, we have a progression of explosive eruptions which seem to have some periodicity."

Bindeman and Valley studied rocks that span the entire 2-million-year long eruptive sequence at Yellowstone with a special emphasis on lavas that erupted the last time one of the massive volcanoes popped off creating what geologists call the Yellowstone Caldera. Their conclusion is that the volcanic cycle is waning, but that there is still a very real potential of an eruption of massive proportions sometime in the near geologic future.

A cross section of a quartz crystal obtained from rocks near Yellowstone. Crystals of quartz and zircon harbor geochemical clues to past -- and future -- volcanic eruptions in the Yellowstone caldera. In the past, eruptions over this "hot spot" in the Earth have been of a magnitude that would have severely altered Earth's climate.
Image credit: Ilya Bindeman and John Fournelle, remastered in Adobe Illustrator by Mary Diman

Such an eruption would disrupt global climate by injecting millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere. Some of the ash would remain in the atmosphere for years, reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet, significantly affecting life. In addition, a blanket of ash over a meter thick would be deposited in nearby regions and effectively smother life there.

The most recent caldera is 600,000 years old and encompasses an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers. When it erupted, it blasted 1,000 cubic kilometers of volcanic rock into the atmosphere and it settled as ash over more than half of the United States.

After that last major eruption, volcanism in Yellowstone continued in a quieter fashion with another, much smaller eruption occurring 70,000 years ago.

Today's spectacular geysers and hot springs at Yellowstone are the most visible part of the volcanic system there. They contain heated snow and rainwater which leave a geochemical record that provides insight into the region's geologic activity. Prior to the last catastrophic eruption at Yellowstone 600,000 years ago, an even more spectacular geothermal landscape existed there, said Bindeman.

"The unique thing about Yellowstone is that the volcanic rocks that erupted following the collapse of the big calderas contain up to 50 percent oxygen which was ultimately derived from rain waters," Bindeman said. "The zircon and quartz tell us that rocks near the surface were altered by heated snow and rainwater. These rocks were then remelted to become magmas."

This scenario changes the view of magmatism at Yellowstone and other calderas as representing new magma coming from deep in the Earth. On the contrary, Bindeman and Valley make a case for the total remelting and recycling of previously erupted surface rocks.

Their findings have been published in a series of papers, the first in the August 2000 edition of the journal Geology. Another paper is to appear this month (July) in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and another is scheduled for publication next month (August) in the Journal of Petrology.

Would make Krakatoa look like a complete joke...hundreds or thousands of times more material ejected and explosive power.

Read below the explosive force of Krakatoa. Your claim of hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than Krakatoa would mean the end of the world.

.............Krakatau erupted in 1883, in one of the largest eruptions in recent time. Krakatau is an island volcano along the Indonesian arc, between the much larger islands of Sumatra and Java (each of which has many volcanoes also along the arc). There is a very fine book about the Krakatau eruption by Tom Simkin and Richard Fiske, so if you really want to know about the eruption you should go to the nearest bookstore or library to find that.

Here are some highlights from their summary of effects:

1. The explosions were heard on Rodriguez Island, 4653 km distant across the Indian Ocean, and over 1/13th of the earth's surface.

2. Ash fell on Singapore 840 km to the N, Cocos (Keeling) Island 1155 km to the SW, and ships as far as 6076 km WNW. Darkness covered the Sunda Straits from 11 a.m. on the 27th until dawn the next day.

3. Giant waves reached heights of 40 m above sea level, devastating everything in their path and hurling ashore coral blocks weighing as much as 600 tons.

4. At least 36,417 people were killed, most by the giant sea waves, and 165 coastal villages were destroyed.

5. When the eruption ended only 1/3 of Krakatau, formerly 5x9 km, remained above sea level, and new islands of steaming pumice and ash lay to the north where the sea had been 36 m deep.

6. Every recording barograph in the world ducumented the passage of the airwave, some as many as 7 times as the wave bounced back and forth between the eruption site and its antipodes for 5 days after the explosion.

7. Tide gauges also recorded the sea wave's passage far from Krakatau. The wave "reached Aden in 12 hours, a distance of 3800 nautical miles, usually traversed by a good steamer in 12 days".

8. Blue and green suns were observed as fine ash and aerosol, erupted perhaps 50 km into the stratosphere, circled the equator in 13 days.

9. Theree months after the eruption these products had spread to higher latitudes causing such vivid red sunset afterglows that fire engines were called out in New York, Poughkeepsie, and New Haven to quench the apparent conflagration. Unusual sunsets continued for 3 years.

10. Rafts of floating pumice-locally thick enouth to support men, trees, and no doubt other biological passengers-crossed the indian Ocean in 10 months. Others reached Melanesia, and were still afloat two years after the eruption.

11. The volcanic dust veil that created such spectacular atmospheric effects also acted as a solar radiation filter, lowering global temperatures as much as 1.2 degree C in the year after the eruption. Temperatures did not return to normal until 1888.

"Their findings suggest a dying, but still potent cycle of volcanism" - Article

"This one might give YEC the willies" - Junior

YEC would agree with the findings of a "dying" cycle of volcanism, but not with the timeframes espoused. The idea of increased volcanism during the time of the flood and decreasing ever since occurs frequently in YEC writings.

It won't give us the willies. That's nothing compared to what we expect...If you want the willies, read this....

rev 6:12 ...there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; 13 And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,...14 And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

Rev 7:1 And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.

Rev 8:7 The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. 8 And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; 9 And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed. 10 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; 11 And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. 12 And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise. 13 And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!

Rev 16:2 ... and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. 3 And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. 4 And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. ... 8 And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. 9 And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory. 10 And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain, 11 And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds. 12 And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared. 13 And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. 14 For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. 15 Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. 16 And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. 17 And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. 18 And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. 19 And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. 20 And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. 21 And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.

Rev 21:1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

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