Yellowstone supervolcano discovery-where will it erupt?
NEW YORK. September 26. KAZINFORM The natural beauty of Yellowstone National Park may appear serene, but it's rooted in a violent volcanic past. Now, geologists have identified which parts of the park are most likely to erupt again someday.
Yellowstone's next major eruption will probably be centered in one of three parallel fault zones running north-northwest across the park, a new study predicts.
Two of these areas produced large lava flows the last time the supervolcano was active-174,000 to 70,000 years ago-while the third has had the most frequent tremors in recent years.
Knowing this will help scientists determine which areas of the vast park to monitor most carefully, said study lead author Guillaume Girard, a visiting professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
The Yellowstone region is often referred to as a "supervolcano" because it has spewed more than 240 cubic miles (a thousand cubic kilometers) of ash and lava in a single event. The most recent of these massive blasts occurred some 640,000 years ago.
Smaller eruptions occur more frequently, said Girard, but the chance of one happening in any given year is still less than one in ten thousand. He described these eruptions as lava flows, which are not explosive: "They have very, very high viscosity and flow very, very slowly."
Similar flows have fed the slow-growing lava dome at Mount St. Helens in the years after that volcano's major eruption, but Yellowstone's lava flows occur on a much grander scale, Kazinform has learnt from National Geographic.
"Some of these flows traveled up to 20 miles [32 kilometers]," said Girard, whose study appeared in the September issue of GSA Today. "We have never seen a rhyolite eruption of this magnitude in human history."
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