The Yellowstone caldera is a volcano in the Yellowstone national park USA. It is a super volcano. This case study should contain a descriptive detail about how it was formed, the short term and long term effects of it and what type of volcano it is.
Yellowstone, lies over a hotspot where light, hot, molten mantle rock rises towards the surface. While the Yellowstone hotspot is now under the Yellowstone Plateau, it previously helped create the eastern Snake River Plain (to the west of Yellowstone) through a series of huge volcanic eruptions. Although the hotspot's apparent motion is to the east-northeast, the North American Plate is really moving west-southwest over the stationary hotspot in the Earth's mantle. The Yellowstone is a cladera volcano, this is when it frmed by the collapse of land following an eruption.
Over the past 17 million years or so, this hotspot has generated a succession of violent eruptions and less violent floods of basaltic lava . Together these eruptions have helped create the eastern part of the Snake River Plain from a once-mountainous region. At least a dozen of these eruptions were so massive that they are classified assupereruptons . Volcanic eruptions sometimes empty their stores of magma so swiftly that they cause the overlying land to collapse into the emptied magma chamber, forming a geographic depression called a caldera. Calderas formed from explosive supereruptions can be as wide and deep as mid- to large-sized lakes and can be responsible for destroying broad swaths of mountain ranges.
The term 'supervolcano' has been used to describe volcanic fields that produce exceptionally large volcanic eruptions. This defined, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is the volcanic field which produced the latest three supereruptions from the Yellowstone hotspot. The three super eruptions happened 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago, the short term effects where wildlife gone and trees but the long term effect was the forming the Island Park Caldera, the Henry's Fork Caldera, and Yellowstone calderas, respectively. There were no reported casualtys because we don’t know if there were people living there. Scientists suspect not The Island Park Caldera supereruption (2.1 million years ago), which produced the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, was the largest and produced 2,500 times as much ash as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. The next biggest supereruption formed the Yellowstone Caldera (640,000 years ago) and produced the Lava Creek Tuff. The Henry's Fork Caldera (1.2 million years ago) produced the smaller Mesa Falls Tuff but is the only caldera from the SRP-Y hotspot that is plainly visible today.
The last full-scale eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, the Lava Creek eruption which happened nearly 640,000 years ago, released approximately 240 cubic miles (1,000 km3) of rock and dust into the sky.
Geologists are closely monitoring the rise and fall of the Yellowstone Plateau, which measures on average 0.6 inches (1.5 cm) yearly, as an indication of changes in magma chamber pressure.
The upward movement of the Yellowstone caldera floor—almost 3 inches (7.6 cm) each year between 2004 and 2008—was more than three times greater than ever observed since such measurements began in 1923. From mid-Summer 2004 through mid-Summer 2008, the land surface within the caldera moved upwards, as much as 8 inches (20 cm) at the White Lake GPS station. By the end of 2009, the uplift had slowed significantly and appeared to have stopped. In January 2010, the USGS stated "that uplift of the Yellowstone Caldera has slowed significantly" and uplift continues but at a slower pace. The U.S. Geological Survey, University of
