Hah! Suck it yellowstone!Follow

Our volcano can beat up your volcano!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227124.700-supervolcano-may-be-brewing-beneath-mount-st-helens.html

IS A supervolcano brewing beneath Mount St Helens? Peering under the volcano has revealed what may be an extraordinarily large zone of semi-molten rock, which would be capable of feeding a giant eruption.

Magma can be detected with a technique called magnetotellurics, which builds up a picture of what lies underground by measuring fluctuations in electric and magnetic fields at the surface. The fields fluctuate in response to electric currents travelling below the surface, induced by lightning storms and other phenomena. The currents are stronger when magma is present, since it is a better conductor than solid rock.

Graham Hill of GNS Science, an earth and nuclear science institute in Wellington, New Zealand, led a team that set up magnetotelluric sensors around Mount St Helens in Washington state, which erupted with force in 1980. The measurements revealed a column of conductive material that extends downward from the volcano. About 15 kilometres below the surface, the relatively narrow column appears to connect to a much bigger zone of conductive material.

The column below Mount St Helens appears to connect to a huge zone of conductive material
This larger zone was first identified in the 1980s by another magnetotelluric survey, and was found to extend all the way to beneath Mount Rainier 70 kilometres to the north-east, and Mount Adams 50 kilometres to the east. It was thought to be a zone of wet sediment, water being a good electrical conductor.

However, since the new measurements show an apparent conduit connecting this conductive zone to Mount St Helens - which was undergoing a minor eruption of semi-molten material at the time the measurements were made - Hill and his colleagues now think the conductive material is more likely to be a semi-molten mixture. Its conductivity is not high enough for it to be pure magma, Hill says, so it is more likely to be a mixture of solid and molten rock.

Gary Egbert of Oregon State University in Corvallis, who is a magnetotellurics specialist but not a member of Hill's team, is cautious about the idea of a nascent supervolcano where Mount St Helens sits. "It seems likely that there's some partial melt down there," given that it is a volcanic area, he says. "But part of the conductivity is probably just water."

If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park.

Every few hundred thousand years, such chambers can erupt as so-called supervolcanoes - the Yellowstone one did so about 640,000 years ago. These enormous eruptions can spew enough sunlight-blocking ash into the atmosphere to cool the climate by several degrees Celsius.

Could Mount St Helens erupt like this? "A really big, big eruption is possible if it is one of those big systems like Yellowstone," Hill says. "I don't think it will be tomorrow, but I couldn't try to predict when it would happen."

Further measurements probing the structure of the crust beneath the other volcanoes in the area could help determine if the zone connects to them all, Hill says. He presented his team's results on 27 May at the Joint Assembly geophysics meeting in Toronto, Canada.

Also, I'm fairly certain Yellowstone is predicted to erupt any day now.

Granted, it's any day now in the next 100K years or something, but in geological terms that's like next week.

Edited, Jun 11th 2009 4:29am by Omegavegeta

Bet that'll be a whizz.

Humanity already has enough nukes to turn the planet into a barren and lifeless rock, so i really couldn't care less about other countries getting nukes. Nuclear war is innevitable, the question is who gets the first shot off.

One of these super volcanoes has a potential force that dwarfs the combined military force of the entire world. Nuclear war can be avoided, quite easily I might add since anyone with the capability isn't stupid enough to use them these days. An erupting super volcano is about as unstoppable as it gets.

A collision with a trampoline is more energetic than a collision with a bullet. Guess which is more harmful?

I mean, I wouldn't call nuclear war inevitable, but detonating nukes around the world would be far more deadly than yellowstone erupting.

Since you already got the nuke, I thing you should go bake me some more .

Making are far better then trying to have enough nuclear weapons to send us back to the stone age.

This post brought to you so I can increase post count +1

If it is true about Mt. Saint Helens, then the US has 2 Super volcanoes... That is just freaky and what are the odds on two super volcanoes on the same continent???

Edited, Jun 14th 2009 6:47am by SimpleMajority

Just FYI, we technically are still at war with North Korea, we just agreed to stop shooting at each other. NK seems unstable enough to shoot a nuke at someone, and with global relations the way they are right now, it wouldn't take much to start WW3 (which will probably turn into a nuclear war).

Edited, Jun 14th 2009 9:08am by Zaikimaliki

I thought the Yellowstone supervolcano was the result of a "hotspot" and not in the vicinity of any major faultlines or plate boundaries? Similar to the situation that is responsible for Hawaii.

It's why I said probably, and not that they definitely were.

(I figured since they were relatively close to each other, that it didn't surprise me if St. Helens turns out to be a super volcano.)