China News Service, Beijing, January 2 (Reporter Sun Zifa) A recent geological paper published in the internationally renowned academic journal Nature stated that researchers conducted a new study to investigate the nature of the crust beneath the caldera of Yellowstone Park in the United States, one of the largest volcanic systems on Earth, and believed that the volcanic magma underground in the Yellowstone Park area may be moving northeast.
The paper introduces that the Yellowstone caldera is one of the largest volcanic systems on Earth. The system has experienced three major eruptions in the past 2.1 million years, each accompanied by the ejection of thousands of cubic kilometers of lava and ash. Past attempts to describe the distribution of magma under the Yellowstone volcano have been limited by methods because, in addition to melt, changes in other characteristics of the crust (such as temperature) can also affect the distribution of magma.
In this study, the first author and corresponding author of the paper, N. Bennington of the U.S. Geological Survey, together with colleagues and collaborators, used an electromagnetic geophysical method to simulate the distribution of magma under Yellowstone Park, which relies on changes in the Earth’s magnetic field to infer the conductive structure of the crust. Subsequently, the research team identified at least seven areas with relatively high magma content in Yellowstone Park, some of which are interconnected, with depths ranging from 4 to 47 kilometers (where the crust and mantle meet).
According to the latest research, the authors also inferred that the volcanic activity in the western part of Yellowstone Park may be weakening, while the magma reservoir in the northeast may trigger the eruption of rhyolite (a unique form of lava) in the future. They estimated that the maximum volume of melt underground in the northeast of Yellowstone Park is about 440 cubic kilometers, which is similar to the scale of the eruption that formed the Yellowstone Mesa Falls caldera about 1.3 million years ago.
The authors conclude that while Yellowstone’s caldera has experienced large-scale eruptions in the past, further research is needed to estimate when the northeastern magma reservoir will erupt.