It comes after scientists raised the alarm over a “distant relative” of the supervolcano that is reportedly brewing beneath the US. The Yellowstone volcano, also called the Yellowstone Caldera, is the supervolcano located in Yellowstone National Park in the US. It is one of 20 known ‘supervolcanoes’ — a volcano that has had an eruption with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of eight.
It has erupted three times in the past 2.1 million years, with the most recent at least 1,000 times bigger than Mount St. Helens’ eruption that devastated America in 1980.
Those eruptions formed calderas — large cauldron-like hollows that form upon the emptying of a magma chamber.
Dr. Loÿc Vanderkluysen, an associate professor of volcanology at Drexel University has stressed that while the impacts may be catastrophic for the US, it may not result in a “Pompeii-style” eruption.
Mount Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD, which buried the ancient city of Pompeii in metres of volcanic ash and pumice.
Bur Dr Vanderkluysen did warn that it could result in “severe disruption”.
He said: “It would cause severe disruption.
“A typical super-eruption at Yellowstone would probably be able to dump about an inch or two of ash all the way to Philadelphia if it were to erupt again.
He also sent a terrifying warning that anyone in the volcano’s “kill zone” would die if they were not evacuated.
He said: “Because these larger eruptions tend to also have a lot of warning signs, we would be able to evacuate people or majority of people, but we’re talking about massive scale evacuation across the Mountain West region of the U.S.
“Deer, beavers, raccoons and all the other wildlife that exist there would be wiped out completely.”
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Professor Vadim Levin, a geophysicist, told Fox News: “The upwelling we detected is like a hot-air balloon, and we infer that something is rising up through the deeper part of our planet under New England.”
But while scientists still closely monitor Yellowstone for any signs that it is preparing to explode, but it thought that any eruption in the next 10,000 years is highly unlikely.