With over 2.2 million acres of land to explore, the fact that Yellowstone National Park is sitting in a volcanic caldera breathes excitement and generates mystery in our minds. Because the ever increasing knowledge that Yellowstone sits on an dormant volcano site, the question isn't so much IF it will erupt again - it's simply WHEN. With the dawning of 2012, doomsday and end-of-the-world movies and tv shows like "2012" and "Supervolcano", there is much focus on Yellowstone National Park.
There are three main caldera's in Yellowstone: Huckleberry Ridge (approximately 2.1 million years ago), Island Park Caldera (approximately 1.3 million years ago) and the most recent, Lava Creek (approximately 650,000 years ago). It is estimated that the volume of volcanic rock emitted from the Huckleberry Ridge eruption was nearly 2500 times more than was recorded with Mt. Saint Helens.
Calderas are created when an eruption empties its magma chamber so quickly that the surface area around the chamber colapses and creates a large pit. The magma chamber is an underground pool of molten rock under the earth's crust and is under great pressure. Changes in this pressure from within this chamber creates the Yellowstone Plateau to move. It is this movement that spurred much of the recent disaster media. The US Geological Survey updates this activity on their web site. http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/about/
Beginning in the early 1920s, scientists began to monitor the Yellowstone Plateau movement. The typical annul change is just shy of an inch each year. During a period between 2004 and 2008, the changes were nearly 3 times of what was benchmarked as normal activity. Scientists and the development of GPS flocked to Yellowstone to study this activity. However, in 2009, this growth pattern appears to have stabilized and has returned to more of a typical growth pace.
The geological forces that created this amazing and mystical place are sometimes quite incomprehensible. Trying to imagine Yellowstone National Park as a place of barren and lifeless landscape is a stretch of the imaginiation. But then again, a lot happens in hundreds of thousands of years. What we see and experience is simply a fleeting moment in time.
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