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Yellowstone Supervolcano Making Strange Rumblings
Frosty Piss writes "Supervolcanoes can sleep for centuries or millennia before producing incredibly massive eruptions that can drop ash across an entire continent. One of the largest supervolcanoes in the world lies beneath Yellowstone National Park. Significant activity continues beneath the surface. And the activity has been increasing lately, scientists have discovered. In addition, the nearby Teton Range of mountains is somehow getting shorter. The findings, reported this month in the Journal of Journal of Geophysical Research, suggest that a slow and gradual movement of a volcano over time can shape a landscape more than a violent eruption."
Yellowstone is a different type of volcano than Mt. St. Helens, though, and it may not give as much warning. We know there's a magma chamber there, and all it needs is the right kind of crack in the crust to expose the magma to atmospheric pressure, at which point the gas dissolved in the magma causes an explosion. I think the grandparent has a point, in that the events we're seeing now could in fact be a prelude to an upcoming eruption, but they could also just be normal activity. We may not know for sure which it is, ahead of time, because we've never observed a volcano like this erupting before.
Of course, IANAVolcanologist, all I know is what I saw on the one BBC show about it.