yellowstone (Page 3)

In earthfiles.com, our Dreamland science reporter Linda Howe writes that after many warnings, it’s finally happened: Yellowstone has become dangerously restless. But it’s not the volcano eruption that has long been anticipated, it’s an “intense earthquake swarm,” consisting of 250 separate quakes, that could lead to an eruption.

Linda writes, “This energetic sequence of events was most intense on December 27, when the largest number of events of magnitude 3 and up to 3.9 occurred. The Yellowstone Caldera erupted about 640,000 years ago in a ‘super volcano’ that produced 240 cubic miles of ash distributed in a radial pattern from Lava Creek around the caldera.”
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Almost a year ago, we asked the question, when will Yellowstone blow? The Yellowstone “supervolcano” has risen at a record rate since mid-2004. A blob of molten rock that size of Los Angeles that has been discovered 6 miles beneath the slumbering volcano could be the problem.

Seismologist Robert B. Smith reassures us that “there is no evidence of an imminent volcanic eruption or hydrothermal explosion. That’s the bottom line. A lot of calderas [giant volcanic craters] worldwide go up and down over decades without erupting. Our best evidence is that the crustal magma chamber is filling with molten rock, but we have no idea how long this process goes on before there either is an eruption or the inflow of molten rock stops and the caldera deflates again.”
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Our National Parks may be changing radically?very soon. One of the world’s largest supervolcanoes is beneath Yellowstone National Park. It’s “sleeping” right now, but if it “wakes up,” it could destroy parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, and there is a lot of activity going on, deep beneath the surface. For some reason, the nearby Teton Mountain Range has gotten shorter. But the government is playing this down in order to avoid panic. In LiveScience.com, which is a NASA website, Sara Goudarzi quotes researcher Robert Smith as saying, “I don’t believe this is evidence for an impending volcanic eruption, but it would be prudent to keep monitoring the volcano.”
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There are mysterious forces agitating deep beneath Yellowstone National Park, sending up geysers of water in unexpected places. Much of the park is actually a dormant volcano, but it may not be dormant for much longer.

Bjorn Carey writes in LiveScience.com that in the past 10 years, this volcano has risen almost 5 inches, which indicates that molten rock is flowing deep under the earth. This leads to vent holes, which sent out smoke, gas and water. Some of the water geysers in the park, such as the one called the Steamboat, are the largest geysers in the world.
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