Yellowstone: The World's Most Massive Supervolcano
Pastor Dale Morgan
March 09, 2010
Yellowstone: The World's Most Massive Supervolcano
Hiking through Yellowstone's pristine backcountry peaks and alpine valleys, you would never realize that you're traveling atop of the world's most massive active volcano. Only when you got down to the boiling thermals of Firehole River and the Geyser Basin whould you realize that you're a stranger in a strange land.
Some 600,000 years ago there was a colossal caldron of magma, a supervolcano, that exploded with such violence that it left an ash layer almost ten feet deep a thousand miles away in eastern Nebraska killing all plant life and covering almost all of the United States west of the Mississippi. Modern geological surveys have shown that this supervolcano erupts catastrophically every 600,000 years, and the land that supervolcano is trapped in was called by Blackfoot Indians 'the land of evil spirits' -what we call today, Yellowstone National Park.
John Colter, the legendary montain man who first discovered Yellowstone, wandered in there with an arrow in his back seeking refuge from pursuing Blackfeet. Colter didn't know that he and his horse were trotting over a 2.2 million acre caldera that forms the world's highest plateau that caps a seething magma chamber forty-five miles across-the size of Rhode Island- and eight miles thick of hot molten rock that rises up from 125 miles down toward the Earth's core. When Yellowstone explodes, and it will someday, Hiroshima will look like a 4th of July display. What no knows for sure is: when.
To monitor Yellowstone's potenial hazard, the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory was formed in 2000, administered by the University of Utah, the Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey.