One of my friends is absolutely obsessed with this, so I know a little something about it already. Lots more at the link:
Currently, the Yellowstone caldera shows no signs of preparing for a super eruption. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t regular earthquakes in the area — that’s just a natural part of being in a volcanic region. And the caldera itself rises and falls all the time, the ground moving up and down as pressure increases and decreases in the magma reservoir below. “It rose about 27 centimeters max over the past 6 years,” Lowenstern said. “Calderas are big and hot, so they don’t break very easily and they just move up and down. It’s the way heat and gas get out of these deep systems — the system breathes.”
He added that if a super eruption were coming, “you’d need extraordinary activity,” something that went way beyond centimeters of movement and a few small quakes. Right now, the Yellowstone caldera is breathing normally, exhibiting behaviors typical of any massive hydrothermal system. Lowenstern and the team of scientists at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory are constantly studying the caldera, looking for changes and working on projections of what the next eruption might be like.
An eruption could “come at any time,” Lowenstern admitted. But would it be a super eruption? Probably not. And even if it were, the damage wouldn’t be the inferno you might be expecting. Instead of fleeing from hell on Earth, you’d just be slogging through lots and lots of ash cleanup.
