As a new faculty member at SMU, I am interested in the research being done by my colleagues. In the spirit of things, I have subscribed to the SMU Research Blog [1]. I was interested to see a recent post about the discovery of a fossil supervolcano in the Italian Alps [2]. Learning about the lifespan of a supervolcano is critical, since the United States is home to one which has not erupted in about 1/2 million years.
I bring this up because it’s a recent step in the furthering of research into vulcanism. Many communities in the U.S. and around the world are built around volcanos. Understanding the life-cycle of these common features on the earth is critical to warning communities about impending eruptions, and educating them about the risk of living near a volcano.
The difference between a run-of-the-mill volcano and a supervolcano is first that we ALL live near the Yellowstone Supervolcano and should it erupt again, it has the power to drastically change the climate of the earth for a long period of time. Much like the “nuclear winter” scenarios in the post-1945 nuclear age, a supervolcano puts so much debris in to the atmosphere it causes drastic cooling on a global scale, in addition to scorching the landscape.
Just one more neat thing going on at SMU.
[1] http://blog.smu.edu/research/index.html
[2] http://blog.smu.edu/research/2009/07/rosetta_stone_of_supervolcanoe.html
