
Scientists see deeper Yellowstone magma - interconnector
http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/scientists-see-deeper-yellowstone-magma/
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lifeisstillgood
Awesome - do watch the videos linked at the bottom of the article - and
realise that the whole state is just a portion of the vast chamber underneath.
What with Hubble photos and this, I am rediscovering humanity's very small
place in the world :-)

~~~
cossatot
Yay for geologic perspectives on humanity! The lack of anthropocentrism in
geologic study can be pretty refreshing.

A possibly-related, even more brain melting (to me) event is the Columbia
River flood basalts[1].

The erupted material is ~5x greater than the current hot rock in the
Yellowstone chamber, so ~50x more than the current amount of melt. What amazes
me, in addition to the enormous volume of the eruptions, is that some of the
flows traveled hundreds of kilometers, in sheet-like flows, above 1000°C.
Unlike the current Yellowstone magmatic system which generally has explosive
eruptions, these basaltic flows were much hotter and more fluid--imagine an
enormous river of lava flowing at ~10 mph.

To do some super back of the envelope calculations, the wikipedia source
mentions an average volume of 500 km^3, and that some of the flows were
erupted in a week (it has to be a relatively quick, high-volume thing to flow
that far without cooling below 1000°C). This is about 4 times the average flow
of the Amazon[2]. Of molten f-ing rock pouring out of a crack in the earth.

"Well honey, I guess we're not driving to that Seahawks game."

The CRBs are mostly Miocene, ~15 million years ago, but similar volcanism has
covered southern Idaho, and it's younger. The youngest flows are at (IIRC)
Craters of the Moon and Hell's Half Acre parks, and are ~2000 years old, but
they're basically burps well after the main event. Basically any geologic
event that happened 2000 years ago could happen again tomorrow; I really
really hope that we get a chance to observe some (minor) flood basalt
volcanism.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River_Basalt_Group](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River_Basalt_Group)
[2]:
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+km^3+per+week+to+c...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+km^3+per+week+to+cubic+feet+per+second)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Just to clarify - the U.S. Suffered (major) volcanic lava flows in the Plains
area at the time of Christ. So has that been factored into things like the
development of human civilisation in the U.S. (Ie Mexican farming started a
little after that - did we lose a civilisation or a chance of one then?)

