Yellowtone National Park Volcano Research Paper

Living in the Midwest, we don’t really think about volcanos. But, we actually live about 1000 miles from an active volcano that is overdue for a massive eruption. Scientists call this volcano a Supervolcano, “a supervolcano is any volcano capable of producing a volcanic eruption with an ejecta volume greater than 1,000 km3 (240 cu mi). This is thousands of times larger than normal volcanic eruptions.”

Yellowstone National Park, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming was created millions of years ago, when a hotspot formed in the earth's mantle. The hotspot pushed magma towards the earth's surface, causing the crust to move upwards. Yellowstone has had 3 eruptions that we know about 2.1 million years ago, 1.2 million years ago and 640,000 years ago.

“The volume of material ejected during this first eruption is estimated to have been 6,000 times the size of the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington, and ash has been found as far away as Missouri.” It’s heat melted rocks in the earth’s crust, which created a magma chamber of partially molten and solid rocks. The hot magma caused part of the earth’s crust to expand and rise, stress also caused rocks overlying the magma to break, which caused earthquakes and it formed faults, which eventually reached deep in the magma chamber.

Water would be pumped through the borehole into the heatrock, then returned to the surface at a temperature of about 600 degrees fahrenheit. Once it cools down, the water will be pumped back underground to subtract more