If you went to school in the western United States, you might have been traumatized by your middle school science teacher telling you we will all die in a supereruption due any minute from the Yellowstone caldera.
Well, we have some good news for you!
Scientists used advanced techniques to more accurately map the magma lying beneath the surface of the park. They found that an eruption is unlikely to occur, and their research was published in the journal Nature on New Year’s Day.
“Nowhere in Yellowstone do we have regions that are capable of eruption,” lead author Ninfa Bennington, a research geophysicist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, told The Washington Post. “It has a lot of magma, but the magma is not connected enough.”
Supereruptions at Yellowstone
Yellowstone is known for being one of the largest active volcanoes in the world. The last supereruption happened about 640,000 years ago. That eruption was large enough to cause the ground to collapse into the magma reservoir, creating a giant caldera.
Today, the caldera measures at 30 x 45 miles, encompassing almost the entirety of the park. Since then, the most recent volcanic eruption at Yellowstone was a lava flow that occurred 70,000 years ago.
With previous supereruptions occurring at about 600,000 to 800,000 years apart, the narrative that Yellowstone is “overdue” for a supereruption has been tossed around for years — primarily by dramatic documentarians and middle school science teachers. But volcanologists at the U.S. Geological Service assert that “volcanoes do not work in predictable ways and their eruptions do not follow predictable schedules.”
Volcanoes only erupt when there is a sufficient amount of liquid magma and enough pressure to cause that magma to be pushed to the surface. Without sufficient concentration, the volcano is unlikely to erupt.
“By no means is Yellowstone ‘due for an eruption,’ ” Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at Denison University who was not involved with the study, told The Washington Post. “There will be eruptions, but it will probably be thousands of years before we can expect an eruption.”
New research gives insight on timing
This most recently published research found that the magma chambers beneath Yellowstone are more segregated than scientists previously thought. Using a less common method called magnetotellurics, the researchers were able to image the magma formations.
There are two types of magma found in Yellowstone, basaltic and rhyolitic. And the scientists found that rather than one large reservoir of magma, it was stored in separate regions throughout Yellowstone.
Furthermore, the percentage of magma in those separate reservoirs is quite low, according to Bennington. So none of the individual reservoirs are capable of producing their own eruption anytime soon.
Their research found that the concentration of volcanic activity is slowly shifting to the northeast area of the park. But volcanic activity is unlikely to majorly affect visitors’ experience at the park in the foreseeable future.
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