An active super volcano lying underneath Yellowstone Nation Park.

Essay by beaboatmanHigh School, 11th gradeA-, May 2003

download word file, 2 pages 5.0

Recent geological studies have pointed to an active super volcano lying underneath Yellowstone Nation Park.

A super volcano is a volcano that will produce a huge catastrophic eruption and has a giant caldera. A caldera forms when magma rises from the mantle to create a boiling reservoir in the Earth's crust. This makes a chamber of boiling hot liquid rock also known as magma.

These calderas begin to grow very slowly while building up an enormous amount of pressure. After Laying seemingly dormant for thousands of years It violently erupts sending ash, dust, and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, reflecting the sun's rays and creating a cold wave that could last for years.

Scientists have revealed that Yellowstone Park is were one of these super volcanoes exist. Volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimeters this century.

Which means that as the pressure and the heat in the caldera begins to increase the land starts to rise. Volcanologists also say that the first eruption occurred about 2.1 million years ago. The eruption removed so much magma from its original caldera that the ground above it collapsed into the magma chamber and left a gigantic depression in the ground. This depression is larger than the state of Rhode Island. This huge crater, known as a caldera, measured as much as 80 kilometers long, 65 kilometers wide, and hundreds of meters deep, extending from outside of Yellowstone National Park into the central area of the Park.

The last eruption occurred about 650,000 years ago and produced a caldera 53 x 28 miles across in what is now Yellowstone National Park . During that eruption huge masses of hot volcanic ash, pumice, and gases swept...