'Geospeedometer' Confirms Super-eruptions Have Surprisingly Short Fuses (vanderbilt.edu)

Science_afficionado writes: Super-eruptions – you know, those gigantic prehistoric volcanic outbursts that throw 100 times more superheated gas, ash and rock into the atmosphere than run-of-the-mill eruptions like Mt. St. Helens — tend to pop-off within a few hundred years after their underground body of magma reaches a high enough proportion of molten rock and low enough proportion of crystallization to become explosive. That's a much shorter time than geologists had thought. That means if the hot spot under Yellowstone, for example, were to turn explosive, then we would only have couple hundred years to prepare for an eruption that could blanket the entire continent with up to 3,600 cubic miles of ash and rock!

Comments

Re:Where did that 3600 cubic miles figure come fro

[khallow]

Where did the 3,600 cubic miles of ash and rock figure come from?

It's probably based on the size of the magma chambers underneath Yellowstone which are much larger in volume than the eruptions from Yellowstone.

While you are currently right about the estimated size of known, possibly single volcanic eruptions, it's worth noting that ongoing volcanic eruptions can be much larger, such as the Siberian Traps, which are thought to originally have been as high as seven million cubic km of lava over a million year period.