First, let's describe what a super eruption is.
It's just a very, very large eruption.
An eruption of at least 240 cubic miles
of molten material.
And usually that molten material is forcefully
vented into the atmosphere.
It's not just one large explosion,
but through time there's a lot of molten material
vented into the atmosphere.
In Yellowstone's past there have been two super eruptions.
One at 2.1 million years ago
that was about 600 cubic miles of molten material,
and one 640,000 years ago
that was 240 cubic miles.
To put that in comparison,
the eruption of Mount St. Helens was about
.1 cubic miles.
So, the super eruptions are very large.
They do change basically world climate,
temperatures, everything else
due to the volcanic ashes and gases
that are expelled.
Do we know if there will ever be another
super eruption of Yellowstone?
No, we don't.
The volcano experts who study Yellowstone,
the volcanologists, do not know if there will be
another super eruption of Yellowstone.
Is volcanic activity and volcanic eruptions,
are they in Yellowstone's future?
Definitely.
But, the most probable eruptions are much smaller
than these super eruptions.
Now by smaller, we may mean they might be as large
as a Mount St. Helens sort of eruption,
or even much smaller than that.
Maybe an individual vent that puts out a very nice
Hawaiian type basalt flow.
A very robust monitoring network is in place
in Yellowstone National Park
that monitors earthquakes,
monitors ground deformation,
monitors stress and strain within the earth,
and all of these data are online, real time,
through the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
So, none of those data, which are publicly available,
have ever indicated to the experts
that there's even a potentially small impending eruption.