Doomsday101
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Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming (CNN) -- It's hard not to stand in complete awe of everything the Earth has to offer when you're in the middle of Yellowstone National Park.
Its most famous geyser, Old Faithful, shoots up into the sky as crowds tilt their heads just to see how high it really can go. The saturated blues and greens of geothermal pools appear to be otherworldly.
Towering mountains wrap themselves around the park, providing shelter for wild animals to roam. But below the beauty of Yellowstone, is a volcano powerful enough devastate most of the United States and change the entire world.
"Yellowstone and other volcanoes around the world are called supervolcanoes and the reason is they're like a super sized drink. It means it's just big," says Hank Hessler, a geologist at Yellowstone in the U.S. state of Wyoming.
Supervolcano describes a geological phenomenon never witnessed by man. Supervolcanoes are off the charts big when comparing them to a normal volcanic eruption.
On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens in the northwest corner of the United States erupted. It killed 57 people and expelled one cubic kilometer of ash.
The first Yellowstone supervolcanic eruption 2.1 million years ago was at least 25,000 times larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption. Two other Yellowstone super eruptions 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago, though smaller than the first one, would still dwarf any normal volcanic eruption.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/30/us/wus-supervolcanoes-yellowstone/index.html?hpt=hp_c3
Its most famous geyser, Old Faithful, shoots up into the sky as crowds tilt their heads just to see how high it really can go. The saturated blues and greens of geothermal pools appear to be otherworldly.
Towering mountains wrap themselves around the park, providing shelter for wild animals to roam. But below the beauty of Yellowstone, is a volcano powerful enough devastate most of the United States and change the entire world.
"Yellowstone and other volcanoes around the world are called supervolcanoes and the reason is they're like a super sized drink. It means it's just big," says Hank Hessler, a geologist at Yellowstone in the U.S. state of Wyoming.
Supervolcano describes a geological phenomenon never witnessed by man. Supervolcanoes are off the charts big when comparing them to a normal volcanic eruption.
On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens in the northwest corner of the United States erupted. It killed 57 people and expelled one cubic kilometer of ash.
The first Yellowstone supervolcanic eruption 2.1 million years ago was at least 25,000 times larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption. Two other Yellowstone super eruptions 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago, though smaller than the first one, would still dwarf any normal volcanic eruption.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/30/us/wus-supervolcanoes-yellowstone/index.html?hpt=hp_c3
