Supervolcanoes that could destroy humanity
Super-eruptions from massive volcanoes with the power to destroy
humanity could take much less time to form than scientists previously
thought, it was reported.
Supervolcanoes are a huge but little understood natural disaster
waiting to happen.
Only a handful of such volcanoes exist in the world, but should one
erupt the effect would be devastating. It is thought the sound of a
super-eruption would be heard all over the planet, black rain would fall
and the sky would darken across the earth.
They are thought to be second only to a massive asteroid impact in
terms of the devastation they would visit on the earth. The huge
volcanoes are fuelled by massive magma pools that build up deep beneath
the ground. They were previously thought to take between 100,000 to
200,000 years to build up enough pressure for the massive eruption to
take place.'
Journal,
However research published in the online journal, Public Library of
Science ONE, now suggests the process could take just thousands or even
hundreds of years.
The research has found that the giant magma pools may actually only
exists for a few thousand or even hundred years before they explode. The
new discovery could prove extremely bad news for Yellowstone National
Park in the US which has a magma reservoir six miles beneath it.
The reservoir has been rising at record speeds since 2004. The park
in Wyoming is directly above a huge plume of molten rock around 300
miles across at its highest point - 30 miles beneath the ground. The
build-up of hot and molten rock begins at least 400 miles below the
surface of the earth.
The Yellowstone Caldera resembles the lid of a cooking pot, and
formed when the last super-eruption in that area happened 600,000 years
ago. Scientists believe it could be due to erupt again.
The supervolcano has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million
years.
Eruption
The most recent supervolcano to erupt was Toba 74,000 years ago in
Sumatra. It was ten-thousand times bigger than Mt. St Helens and was a
global catastrophe.
Lead scientist Dr Guilherme Gualda, from Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, Tennessee said “Our study suggests that when these
exceptionally large magma pools form they are ephemeral and cannot exist
very long without erupting.
“The fact that the process of magma body formation occurs in
historical time, instead of geological time, completely changes the
nature of the problem.”
- The Independent
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