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The Castle Geyser at Yellowstone National Park is a dramatic manifestation of a giant magma reservoir — which turns out to be two and a half times larger than previously thought.
The reservoir of molten rock underneath Yellowstone National Park in the United States is at least two and a half times larger than previously thought. Despite this, the scientists who came up with this latest estimate say that the highest risk in the iconic park is not a volcanic eruption but a
huge earthquake.
Yellowstone is famous for having a 'hot spot' of molten rock that rises from deep within the planet, fuelling the park's geysers and hot springs
1. Most of the magma resides in a partially molten blob a few kilometres beneath Earth's surface.
New pictures of this plumbing system show that the reservoir is about 80 kilometres long and 20 kilometres wide, says Robert Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
"I don't know of any other magma body that's been imaged that's that big," he says.
Smith reported the finding on 27 October at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado.
Yellowstone lies in the western United States, where the mountain states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho converge. The heart of the park is a caldera - a giant collapsed pit left behind by the last of three huge volcanic eruptions in the past 2.1 million years.
Comment: This article adds one more piece to the newly emerging consensus on the direction that our climate seems to be heading. Those scientists who carefully observe the reality on the ground and scrutinize the available facts see what is coming our way in the not so distant future: the return to an Ice Age.