There's more to Yellowstone National Park than meets the eye. Much more, as it turns out.
You
might already know that a supervolcano dominates the famous park that
is situated on land in Wyoming and Montana. A shallow subsurface magma
chamber has long been known.
But now a second, much larger
reservoir of partially molten rock has been discovered by researchers at
the University of Utah. There's enough magma inside, they say, to fill
the Grand Canyon more than 11 times.
Seismologists at the university, publishing in the journal Science, say the magma reservoir sits below the other, shallower (and smaller) one already known. But the new one is 4 1/2 times larger.
According
to Science, researchers had already known about a plume that brings
molten rock up to within about 37 miles of the surface that contains
about 2,400 cubic miles of magma. The new find represents "the missing
link between the mantle plume and the shallow magma chamber," Peter
Cervelli, a geophysicist in Anchorage, Alaska, who works at the U.S.
Geological Survey's Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, was quoted by Science as saying.
"For
the first time, we have imaged the continuous volcanic plumbing system
under Yellowstone," first author Hsin-Hua Huang, also a postdoctoral
researcher in geology and geophysics, is quoted by a University of Utah
statement as saying. "That includes the upper crustal magma chamber we
have seen previously plus a lower crustal magma reservoir that has never
been imaged before and that connects the upper chamber to the
Yellowstone hotspot plume below."
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