Thursday, January 16, 2025

How are supervolcanoes formed?

A really, really long time ago, say a billion years ago, Earth began cooking up something huge below its crust.

Supervolcanoes are very powerful.

When huge magma chambers, bigger than most cities, form deep underground, these monsters are born.

When tectonic plates hit each other or when hot spots in the Earth's mantle form huge pools of molten rock that push upward and stretch the crust like a balloon about to burst, the process begins.

They need three main things: a large source of lava, weak spots in the Earth's crust, and enough pressure to break the surface open wide.

It takes thousands of years for these spaces to fill up and turn into mountains.

When they do, they also make huge calderas, which are depressions in the ground that can be miles wide.

The most powerful super-eruption ever was Toba in Indonesia, which happened 74,000 years ago and sent out enough ash to almost wipe out all life on Earth.

La Garita in Colorado had the largest known super-eruption in Earth's history. It threw out 5,000 cubic kilometers of rock and dirt about 28 million years ago.

There have also been three big blasts at Yellowstone that covered half of North America in ash.

Scientists are keeping an eye on a number of possible troublemakers for the future.

Yes, Yellowstone is still active, but the talk of the town is now Campi Flegrei, which is near Naples, Italy.

This restless giant has been getting bigger since the 1950s, and new information shows that there are more earthquakes.

It's also not quiet in New Zealand's Taupo Volcanic Zone. 

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