Yellowstone super-volcano eruptions were produced by gigantic ancient oceanic plate – A totally different history than previously thought

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Yellowstone super-volcano has a different history than previously thought, according to a new study by a Virginia Tech geoscientist. Scientists have long thought that Yellowstone Caldera, part of the Rocky Mountains and located mostly in Wyoming, is powered by heat from the Earth’s core, similar to most volcanoes such as the recently active Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. However, new research published in Nature Geoscience by Ying Zhou, an associate professor with the Virginia Tech College of Science’s Department of Geosciences, shows a different past.Yellowstone super-volcano eruptions were produced by gigantic ancient oceanic plate.

yellowstone hotspot, yellowstone hotspot formation, yellowstone formation, yellowstone volcano formation
This is the location of the Yellowstone’s hotspot track. The triangles indicate general locations of the Yellowstone and Snake River Plain age-progressive volcanoes with ages shown in millions of years, plotted on a topography map of the Western United States.
Map by Virginia Tech

This is the location of the Yellowstone’s hotspot track. The triangles indicate general locations of the Yellowstone and Snake River Plain age-progressive volcanoes with ages shown in millions of years, plotted on a topography map of the Western United States.
Credit: Virginia Tech

In this research, there was no evidence of heat coming directly up from the Earth’s core to power the surface volcano at Yellowstone,” Zhou said. “Instead, the underground images we captured suggest that Yellowstone volcanoes were produced by a gigantic ancient oceanic plate that dove under the Western United States about 30 million years ago. This ancient oceanic plate broke into pieces, resulting in perturbations of unusual rocks in the mantle which led to volcanic eruptions in the past 16 million years.

The eruptions were very explosive, Zhou added. A theoretical seismologist, Zhou created X-ray-like images of the Earth’s deep interior from USArray – part of the Earthscope project funded by the National Science Foundation – and discovered an anomalous underground structure at a depth of about 250 to 400 miles right beneath the line of volcanoes.

This evidence was in direct contradiction to the plume model,” Zhou said.

In her study, Zhou found the new images of the Earth’s deep interior showed that the oceanic Farallon plate, which used to be where the Pacific Ocean is now, wedged itself beneath the present-day Western United States. The ancient oceanic plate was broken into pieces just like the seafloor in the Pacific today. A section of the subducted oceanic plate started tearing off and sinking down to the deep earth.

The sinking section of oceanic plate slowly pushed hot materials upward to form the volcanoes that now make up Yellowstone. Further, the series of volcanoes that make up Yellowstone have been slowly moving, achingly so, ever since. “The process started at the Oregon-Idaho border about 16 million years ago and propagated northwestward, forming a line of volcanoes that are progressively younger as they stretched northwest to present-day Wyoming,” Zhou added.

The previously-held plume model was used to explain the unique Yellowstone hotspot track – the line of volcanoes in Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming that dots part of the Midwest.If the North American plate was moving slowly over a position-fixed plume at Yellowstone, it will displace older volcanoes towards the Oregon-Idaho border and form a line of volcanoes, but such a deep plume has not been found.” Zhou said.

A great video explaining the volcanic evolution of the Pacific Northwest:

So, what caused the hotspot track?

It has always been a problem there, and scientists have tried to come up with different ways to explain the cause of Yellowstone volcanoes, but it has been unsuccessful,” she said, adding that hotspot tracks are more popular in oceans, such as the Hawaii islands. The frequent Geyser eruptions at Yellowstone are of course not volcanic eruptions with magna, but due to super-heated water. The last Yellowstone super eruption was about 630,000 years ago, according to experts. Zhou has no predictions on when or if Yellowstone could erupt again.

The use of the X-ray-like images for this study is unique in itself. Just as humans can see objects in a room when a light is on, Zhou said seismometers can see structures deep within the earth when an earthquake occurs. The vibrations spread out and create waves when they hit rocks. The waves are detected by seismometers and used in what is known as diffraction tomography.

Learn what is an hotspot in this video:

This is the first time the new imaging theory has been applied to this type of seismic data, which allowed us to see anomalous structures in the Earth’s mantle that would otherwise not be resolvable using traditional methods,” Zhou said.

Zhou will continue her study of Yellowstone. “The next step will be to increase the resolution of the X-ray-like images of the underground rock,” she added.

More detailed images of the unusual rocks in the deep earth will allow us to use computer simulation to recreate the fragmentation of the gigantic oceanic plate and test different scenarios of how rock melting and magma feeding system work for the Yellowstone volcanoes.

Here the abstract of the Nature Geoscience article:

The origin of the Yellowstone and Snake River Plain volcanism has been strongly debated. The mantle plume model successfully explains the age-progressive volcanic track, but a deep plume structure has been absent in seismic imaging. Here I apply diffractional tomography to receiver functions recorded at USArray stations to map high-resolution topography of mantle transition-zone discontinuities. The images reveal a trail of anomalies that closely follow the surface hotspot track and correlate well with a seismic wave-speed gap in the subducting Farallon slab. This observation contradicts the plume model, which requires anomalies in the mid mantle to be confined in a narrow region directly beneath the present-day Yellowstone caldera. I propose an alternative interpretation of the Yellowstone volcanism. About 16 million years ago, a section of young slab that had broken off from a subducted spreading centre in the mantle first penetrated the 660 km discontinuity beneath Oregon and Idaho, and pulled down older stagnant slab. Slab tearing occurred along pre-existing fracture zones and propagated northeastward. This reversed-polarity subduction generated passive upwellings from the lower mantle, which ascended through a water-rich mantle transition zone to produce melting and age-progressive volcanism.

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Nature Geoscience – Anomalous mantle transition zone beneath the Yellowstone hotspot track

16 Comments

  1. Hotspot chain traces out a line that looks like it continues on westward and connects to the Mendocino Fracture Zone

  2. More than 300 heavy stones of grave yard destroyed in Japan. People are saying that more than 20 people needed to create this kind of destruction. In the same day, the grave yard near this place got the same destructive condition.

    My guess is Galactic Federation of Light or Holy entities destroyed those useless grave yard, especially, those grave yards are related to religions created by reptilian entities. After human bodies died, souls are going to be sent where they belong (recycled back to the Earth to reincarnate, or sent to some other planets or dimensions). So basically, grave yards are really wasting land just to keep the dead bodies. If you (readers) like to communicated deceased relatives or friends, you can do it at home by meditation. Or you can see them while sleeping. Your soul can move out from your body and can go to another dimension to see them while you are sleeping.

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    On this video, you can see so many orbs around this explosion of transformer. Where transformer is, where Reptilian Secret Underground Base is. Toronto is the biggest city in Canada. There should be a huge reptilian underground cities or bases, too.

  4. Judgement from God! Northern California Fire (Carr Fire) selected the houses to be burnt down!

    I want to look at the scene of God’s Judgement. 2 houses are next each other. One house was completely burnt down to ash, and next house was intact. Fire stopped at the boarder line of the properties. On good people’s house, even dry grass are NOT burnt at all. Starting at 1:32 ~ 1:33 on the video below, you can see the front yard of dry grass is intact along the house, but the next house was completely burnt down to ash. Please focus on the property boarder line where the fire stopped completely. I do not know how God judge who is good person or not. But you cannot deny this is the judgement from God.

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    • Carr Fire Explodes In Size
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      At 0:22 on the video above, you can see again! the judgement of God. The house in the front was completely burnt down to ash, but look at the white house behind! This house is not only intact but also does not have even black soot from the smoke. The house in front burnt down with extreme temperature, but this white house has even INTACT old wooden fence. Isn’t it amazing? This is the judgement of God, which houses are burnt down, and which houses are saved. If not, tell me what it is.

      • 38,000 evacuated as Carr wildfire continues to burn
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        Starting at 0:36, again, you can see 2 houses intact just behind many houses were burnt down to ash. You can even see the green grass in the front yard. God has decided that those houses were owned by good people: therefore; he had decided to spare those houses along green grass in the front yard.

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