“Decadal to monthly timescales,” Singer notes. “It could be centuries or even longer, which implies that we’d have a longer time prior to the eruption” to worry about the effects of the rising magma.
Singer concurs on the importance of understanding the relationship of magma flows, instability and eruption, and says the crystal analysis is gaining traction in volcanology.
That’s just as well, since giant caldera-forming volcanoes may be frighteningly common. The one at Yellowstone, for example, released 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock 640,000 years ago. Wouldn’t you want to know if something like that was building on your continent?
— David J. Tenenbaum
Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; Molly Simis, project assistant; David J. Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive
- Decadal to monthly timescales of magma transfer and reservoir growth at a caldera volcano, T. H. Druitt et al, Nature, 2 Feb. 2012. ↩
- Volcanology: Greek inflation circa 1600 BC, News and Views, Jon Blundy & Alison Rust, Nature, 2 Feb. 2012. ↩
- 1815: Mt. Tambora and the year without summer. ↩
- What would happen if the Yellowstone super-volcano erupted? ↩
- A super-volcano’s fallout: mass extinction. ↩
- The intense impacts of volcanic ash ↩
- Explore the world’s volcanoes ↩