Yellowstone and its latent supervolcano

Yellowstone National Park is located in the USA, in the Rocky Mountains, in the northeast of Wyoming and bordering with Montana and Idaho.

It was the first place in the world that received the treatment of National Park. It was named this way by Theodor Roosevelt in 1872.

Under the Yellowstone Park there's a geological phenomenon called supervolcano. A supervolcano is a kind of volcano that produces bigger and more devastating eruptions. A simple volcano, when erupts, becomes a great danger that can destroy with its rivers of lava and sulfuric vapours all that encounters in its way. A supervolcano is thousands times more dangerous. It can destroy everything in hundreds of miles around it, alter the global climate of the planet, and become a cataclysm for all the Earth, similar to a nuclear winter.

The supervolcano located in Yellowstone is the biggest in the world. This supervolcano had 3 big known eruptions. The last one was 640,000 years ago. The time between those eruptions was from 600,000 to 900,000 years. So if the last one was 640,000 years ago, the next one can happen now or in a very distant future.

One of the biggest eruptions of a supervolcano was the Lake Toba eruption (Sumatra, Indonesia). It made planet Earth enter into an Ice Age, that lasted for 1,000 years, and 60% of human population died. The Lake Toba supervolcano was much smaller than the Yellowstone one. The Yellowstone supervolcano is the biggest in the world.

It must be said that who best senses the natural phenomenons are animals. So if you find yourself in Yellowstone Park and you notice strange behaviors on animals like stampedes... run, run as fast as you can, and pray all that you know.

With all these data, it's not strange that Yellowstone National Park has so much geothermal activity: geysers, thermal waters, small mud volcanoes...

In the Yellowstone fauna it can be found bears, deers, buffaloes, elks, coyotes, and wolves. Wolves were extinct in 1926, but they were reintroducted in 1973.

Yellowstone inspired the Jellystone Park, where the adventures of Yogi Bear happen.

Here's a fun video of a real Yogi as greedy as in the cartoon. This is an Alaskan bear (Kodiak) and you must never forget that bears are big wild animals and as all wild animals, they are unpredictable. So "don't do this at home" :)


Its dream landscape makes of Yellowstone Park a mythical place that everybody would like to visit. Even me, as I must confess that since my childhood I wish to visit Yellowstone Park.

Enjoy this video about this National Park.

-Emma Alvarez-

© 2008 by Emma Alvarez. Link to this post without copying the text.



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2 comments:

Tony said...

Very interesting and somewhat worrying. I didn't know that a glacial age could come from a supervolcano eruption, and now I am really amazed of this. It could be a serious challenge for humanity if it happens.

Emma Alvarez said...

When we analyze these environmental phenomenons, we can appreciate how small is human genre. Before men destroys the Earth, I think that the Earth will destroy men.
I think the best is to live in harmony with the environment.

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