Artist’s impression of the magma chamber of a supervolcano with partially molten magma at the top. (ESRF/Nigel Hawtin)
Scientists have discovered what causes cataclysm-inducing supervolcanoes to erupt, and the answer offers little reassurance. Their eruptions are caused by magma buoyancy, which makes them less predictable and more frequent than previously thought.
A team of geologists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) modeled a supervolcano – such as Yellowstone in Wyoming – using synthetic magma heated up with a high-energy X-ray to see what could create a powerful discharge. A separate international team, led by Luca Caricchi of the University of Geneva, conducted more than 1.2 million computer simulations of eruptions.
Both groups have arrived at similar conclusions, with two studies simultaneously published in Nature Geoscience magazine.
“We knew the clock was ticking but we didn’t know how fast: what would it take to trigger a super-eruption?” said Wim Malfait, the lead author of the ETH study.
“Now we know you don’t need any extra factor – a supervolcano can erupt due to its enormous size alone.”
It was previously thought that supervolcanoes – which spew out hundreds more times of lava and ash than ordinary ruptures – could be triggered by earthquakes or other outside tectonic phenomena.
It was also clear that these volcanoes do not operate like ordinary eruptions, which rely on magma filling their chambers, and spurting through an opening, once the pressure gets to a certain point, since the chambers of supervolcanoes are too large to be over pressurized to the same degree.
Now, the studies have identified the unique supervolcano mechanism that makes their discharge more like powerful explosions than normal eruptions.
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