'Stirring' Secrets Of Deadly Supervolcanoes Uncovered
Pastor Dale Morgan
'Stirring' Secrets Of Deadly Supervolcanoes Uncovered*
ScienceDaily (May 30, 2008) — Researchers from McGill University and the
University of British Columbia (UBC) have simulated in the lab the
process that can turn ordinary volcanic eruptions into so-called
“supervolcanoes,” with potentially devastating worldwide impact.
The study was conducted by Dr. Ben Kennedy and and Dr. Mark Jellinek of
UBC’s Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, and Dr. John Stix, chair
of McGill University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Their
results were published May 25 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Supervolcanoes are orders of magnitude greater than any volcanic
eruption in historic times. They are capable of causing long-lasting
change to weather, threatening the extinction of species, and covering
huge areas with lava and ash.
Using volcanic models made of plexiglass filled with corn syrup, the
researchers simulated how magma in a volcano’s magma chamber might
behave if the roof of the chamber caved in during an eruption.
“The magma was being stirred by the roof falling into the magma
chamber,” Stix explained. “This causes lots of complicated flow effects
that are unique to a supervolcano eruption.”
“There is currently no way to predict a supervolcano eruption,” said
Kennedy, a post-doctoral fellow at UBC. “But this new information
explains for the first time what happens inside a magma chamber as the
roof caves in, and provides insights that could be useful when making
hazard maps of such an eruption.”
The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 – the only known
supervolcano eruption in modern history – was 10 times more powerful
than Krakatoa and more than 100 times more powerful than Vesuvius or
Mount St. Helens. It caused more than 100,000 deaths in Indonesia alone,
and blew a column of ash about 70 kilometres into the atmosphere. The
resulting disruptions of the planet’s climate led 1816 to be christened
“the year without summer.”
“And this was a small supervolcano,” said Stix. “A really big one could
create the equivalent of a global nuclear winter. There would be
devastation for many hundreds of kilometres near the eruption and there
would be would be global crop failures because of the ash falling from
the sky, and even more important, because of the rapid cooling of the
climate.”
There are potential supervolcano sites all over the world, most famously
under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the setting of the 2005
BBC/Discovery Channel docudrama Supervolcano, which imagined an
almost-total collapse of the world economy following an eruption.