| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Yellowstone Volcano eruption: Is US government working on secret evacuation plan?
One of the most dangerous volcanoes erupted for the first time in 42 years when Mount Calbuco in Chile on April 22, 2015 blew its top and began spewing a giant ash cloud more than 15 kilometres into the atmosphere, rattling the residents in the region.
While Calbuco is considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in South America, it is small potatoes compared to what a potential eruption might occur if Yellowstone Park’s super volcano in the western United States ever erupted. And now, geologists have made an unsettling discovery of a giant reservoir of magma underneath the 40-mile-wide crater basin that covers most of the national park that no one knew ever existed before.
The discovery announced in the journal Science Express last week describes the newly imaged hidden chamber that has an unbelievable size of 46,000 cubic kilometers, containing enough hot lava to fill the Grand Canyon 11 times over and has the same volume as New York’s Long Island.
The reservoir is about 12 to 28 miles underground and is nearly four-and-half times larger than a previously-known magma chamber above it. This surprising discovery promises to shed some light on the mysteries still surrounding the inner clockwork of how Yellowstone supervolcano functions and help define just what kind of danger it actually poses. “Our new seismic image of the Yellowstone volcanic system reveals a lower crustal magma reservoir beneath the previously-known shallow upper crustal magma reservoir beneath the Yellowstone caldera,” explained co-author and seismologist Jamie Farrell at the University of Utah in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.
