The Secret of the Supervolcanoes
The destructive power of supervolcanoes is many times greater than that of ordinary volcanoes. They’re sleeping monsters, whose existence few people know about.
The outbreak of a supervolcano regularly has devastating consequences. A typical eruption, like that of Mount St. Helens in 1980, hurls lava and ash into the atmosphere up to a cubic kilometer.
Supervolcanoes, on the other hand, have already reached 5,000 cubic kilometers in the past. Considering that Mount St. Helens claimed 57 lives in 1980 and completely devastated the entire surrounding area of the volcano, one can roughly measure how destructive an event must be that is many thousands of times more powerful.
What are Supervolcanoes and how many are there?
Supervolcanoes are fundamentally different from the volcanoes we all know from school lessons and television. Characteristic is the absence of a visible eruption cone. Ordinary volcanoes are visible from afar and are usually easy to identify as volcanoes, whereas supervolcanoes are generally only visible on aerial photographs from great heights.
That’s because of the way supervolcanoes erupt. The magma chambers of supervolcanoes spread…
