Instead, the chamber is likely to simply expel the excess magma in a series of normal, relatively harmless eruptions over the course of tens of thousands of years.This is good news for anyone who is planning on visiting Yellowstone in the next several hundred centuries, as Gregg says the Yellowstone caldera is still a long ways off from building up the sort of pressure needed to replicate its last super-eruption, the Huckleberry Ridge eruption about two million years ago.
The volcanoes at the top of Edwards’ personal watch list include Katla and Hekla in Iceland, Villarrica and Llaima in Chile, Klyuchevskoy in Russia, Veniaminof in Alaska, and Etna in Sicily. Gregg said only those volcanoes located near populated areas of first-world countries, such as the United States, Japan, and Italy, are monitored on a regular basis.
In terms of knowing which volcanoes are currently more apt to explode than others, Edwards said we should be watching all volcanoes that have experienced eruptions within the past 10,000 years. The eruptions are at least a thousand times worse than any volcanic eruption in recorded history, with the most recent occurring about 26,500 years ago. “It seems to have experienced potentially damaging eruptions every couple of thousands of years and its last hazardous eruption was about 2,200 years ago,” she said. The supervolcano's chamber needs huge influxes of magma to heat up the surround rock and make it malleable enough for the chamber to start growing into the surrounding rock. Surprisingly, eruptions appear to have a lot less to do with what's going on "You can compare it to cracks forming on the top of baking bread as it expands. We've long struggled to understand what causes these unimaginable eruptions... but now, there might be an answer. Those of us who actually study these phenomena have known for a long time that these eruptions are not simply scaled-up Mt. Eventually, the cracks grow in size and propagate downward toward the magma chamber. A supervolcano is a large volcano that has had an eruption with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 8, the largest recorded value on the index. "Now we know you don't need any extra factor - a supervolcano can erupt due to its enormous size alone... Once you get enough melt, you can start an eruption just like that." “However, even a small eruption of Rainier could cause significant damage to property.”No doubt, Mount Rainier considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, and with its copious amounts of glacial ice, is considered a significant threat to the entire Puyallup River valley and the 3.7 million residents of the Seattle area. There are only a handful of known supervolcanos, with the most famous probably being the one beneath Yellowstone National Park. According to Macquarie University volcanologist Heather Handley, another volcano in Indonesia, Mount Agung is known to be an active volcano, … Like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions are almost impossible to predict. A supervolcano eruption is at its highest possibility for 300 years and one could even go off in the next 80 years - devastating the planet - experts have warned. What’s more, the suggestion that some volcanoes are more “overdue” than others is a notion that resides in the eye of the beholder.“Overdue in human terms is very different than overdue in geologic terms,” Ben Edwards, a professor of earth sciences at Dickinson College, told Gizmodo. As the magma chamber pressurizes at depth, cracks form at the surface to accommodate the doming and expansion. “Remember how Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991? The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning that at one point in time it erupted more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of material. It sucks for the people suffering through the event to but in terms of what sort of loss of life a Volcano can potentially do its actually minor. In the case of very large volcanoes, when the cracks penetrate deep enough, they can rupture the magma chamber wall and trigger roof collapse and eruption. Because we have so little direct knowledge of these eruptions, geologists have found it difficult to determine the precise causes of these eruptions.Now researchers at Oregon State University have developed a model that could explain what triggers this super-eruptions. When the Huckleberry Ridge eruption took place, the uplift of the whole Yellowstone region would have been hundreds of meters high, and perhaps as much as a kilometer. Before we list our planet’s most “overdue” volcanoes, it’s important to establish some perspective.