Super Volcanoes informative paper
What if I told you that something like the volcano that is thought to have killed all but 15,000 members of the human population 74,000 years ago is underneath the U.S. as I speak? “Lucky for all of us humans,” we may have to face another volcano like this soon, since there is a historically destructive one in Yellowstone National Park. The volcano that possibly killed a majority of the human species and the volcano that currently resides in Yellowstone are both a special kind of volcano called a super volcano, which you will be informed about today. A super volcano is defined as a volcano capable of spewing more the 1000 km3 of ash, pumice, or lava when it erupts. -according to the US geological survey, Volcano eruptions are measured using a unit called the VEI. To be exact, the VEI is used to represent the explosiveness, amount of material ejected, and height of column from a volcano. To be a super volcano, a volcano must have a VEI of 8. A volcano with this much power doesn’t usually look like an average volcano. Instead of a cone shape, the lava in a super volcano resides underneath the earth and the volcano resembles a large crater with a slight bulge in the center. This large crater around the center of the volcano is a caldera. A caldera is a large basin-shaped volcanic depression resulting from the explosion of a center of a volcano. When a super volcano erupts, a few things happen. First, a magma pool must form underground. The magma rises to the earth’s crust but cannot break through, causing pressure. When the pressure becomes too great, the crust bursts, allowing the lava to escape. The area where the lava resided becomes the caldera. There are more than 1900 active volcanoes in the world today according to National Geographic.com, but only a handful of them are super volcanoes. Many of them are in North America, the most famous being the Yellowstone Caldera. The Yellowstone Caldara has been active for about 2.1 million years according to NPR.