Forget Yellowstone… Snake River Plain’s volcano is a MUCH BIGGER threat to America

FOR those that thought Yellowstone super-volcano was one of the biggest natural threats to the USA, think again.

Eruptions at Snake River Plain in Idaho were “significantly larger” than geologists had previously thought.

Scientists from the University of Leicester discovered there were a staggering 12 massive eruptions over the course of four million years, beginning 12 million years ago.

The massive eruptions helped to form the 100 kilometre-wide Snake River Basin, with one of the most powerful eruptions occurring 8.1 million years ago. The eruption’s volume exceeded 1,900 km3 and created a 1.3km thick caldera.

Furthermore, the Snake River Plain is situated on the Yellowstone Hotspot track, a region which spans from Nevada, through Oregon and Idaho and then to Wyoming where Yellowstone Volcano is located.

Read more

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. ( Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s