A team of University of Utah seismologists discovered and made images of a reservoir of hot, partly molten rock about 19 to 45 km (12 to 28 miles) beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano, and it is 4.4 times larger than the shallower, long-known magma chamber.
The hot rock in the newly discovered, deeper magma reservoir would fill the 1 000-cubic-mile Grand Canyon 11.2 times, while the previously known magma chamber would fill the Grand Canyon 2.5 times, says postdoctoral researcher Jamie Farrell, a co-author of the study published yesterday in the journal Science.
“For the first time, we have imaged the continuous volcanic plumbing system under Yellowstone,” says first author Hsin-Hua Huang, also a postdoctoral researcher in geology and geophysics. “That includes the upper crustal magma chamber we have seen previously plus a lower crustal magma reservoir that has never been imaged before and that connects the upper chamber to the Yellowstone hotspot plume below.”
