In her article “The Cool Beginnings of a Volcano’s Supereuption,” Shannon Hall dissects a recent analysis of crystals from the ash deposit of an ancient supervolcano. This analysis concluded that before eruption, this specific volcano laid on a chunk of solid magma. This eruption occurred almost 765,000 years ago, and scientists state that when the volcano erupted, all of the biota within 50 kilometers was wiped out. The eruption was powerful, releasing large amounts of ash and hot gas, and leaving a volcanic depression 20 miles long and 10 miles wide, called the Long Valley Caldera. Although this Caldera is not expected to erupt soon, scientists have been analyzing the crystals from the ash deposit to better understand upcoming eruptions. Nathan Andersen, a geologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, found that about half of the crystals contained argon older than the eruption by 16,000 years. This was a bewildering discovery because hot crystals cannot contain argon, so it was expected that the argon would not be older than the eruption. This 16,000 year difference meant that the crystals were not in a hot environment before the eruption. Argon can only be stored in crystals that are surrounded by less than 500 degrees Celsius magma. This temperature is very cold, especially when considering that only solid magma can exist in this temperature. It is important to note that when the supereruption occurred, the magma had to be 738 degree Celsius. For this to be possible, the scientists concluded that the magma was cold, but quickly heated in a short span of time, allowing the argon to be retained, and pushing the volcano to erupt. This short span of time is predicted to have been a few decades, very short in geology terms (Hall, 2017).

     This information is now being used to analyze the characteristics that may spur eruptions. In this case, this volcano was in a cool state before it began to heat and eventually erupt. Although no other research has found that this is a common occurrence in many volcanic eruptions, it is a very new finding that baffled previous predictions on the ways volcanoes work. The machinery used to analyze the argon in the crystals was a multicolor mass spectrometer, which the researchers proclaimed led to “increasingly precise data” (Andersen). It is clear that more research needs to be done before using this data for predictions of upcoming volcanos, as this could have been a phenomenon only observed once in nature. Nonetheless, an important lesson to note from this discovery is that not everything is understood in geology, and there is much more to be uncovered beneath the Earth’s surface than meets the eye.

 

Works Cited:

Andersen, N. L., Jichaa, B. R., & And, B. S. (n.d.). Nathan L. Andersen. Retrieved November 5, 2017, from   http://www.pnas.org/content/114/47/1240

Hall, S. (2017, November 06). The Cool Beginnings of a Volcano’s Supereruption. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/science/the-cool-beginnings-of-a-volcanos-supereruption.html