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Supervolcano in Utah: The Eruption of Wah Wah Springs and 20 Others Ancient Supervolcanoes Discovere
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Elderberry:
By Strange Sounds -Feb 11, 2020
Supervolcano in Utah: The Eruption of Wah Wah Springs and 20 Others Ancient Supervolcanoes Discovered Near the Utah-Nevada Border Was 5,000 Times Larger Than the 1980 Mount St. Helens Eruption
For 30 years, BYU geologists have searched for the volcano that produced thousands of cubic kilometers of pyroclastic flow on the Utah-Nevada border.
Piecing together the geologic evidence from five different mountain ranges across hundreds of miles, they report the discovery of a massive 30-million-year-old supervolcano in Utah.
One of the largest documented supervolcanoes worldwide sits in Utah. And I am pretty sure you didn’t know about it.
The ancient caldera, which would have been several miles deep, is no longer visible as it has eroded and filled with pyroclastic flow many years ago.
The original Wah Wah Springs pyroclastic deposit associated with this caldera covered an area of ~12,000 square miles and had a volume of 5,900 cubic kilometers or ~1,400 cubic miles.
That is 5,000 times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption that emitted just one cubic kilometer of material.
Meanwhile, it seems that a super-eruption is actually overdue.
Discovery of the supervolcanoes in Utah-Nevada
Brigham Young University geologists found evidence of some of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth’s history right in their own backyard.
These supervolcanoes aren’t active today, but 30 million years ago, more than 5,500 cubic kilometers of magma erupted during a one-week period near a place called Wah Wah Springs.
More: https://strangesounds.org/2020/02/supervolcano-utah-nevada-geology-video.html
Smokin Joe:
Neat! https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/geosights-pine-park-and-the-ancient-supervolcanoes-of-southwestern-utah/ has a map which shows the chain of calderas from Southern California, across Nevada and into Utah. These calderas are part of that.
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