The Yellowstone Caldera, sometimes known as the Yellowstone supervolcano, is a volcanically active region in Yellowstone National Park.

It measures 55 kilometers (34 mi) by 72 kilometers (44 mi).

Yellowstone, like the Hawaiian Islands, is believed to lie on top of one of the planet's few dozen hotspots where light hot molten mantle rock rises towards the surface.

The Yellowstone hotspot has a long history.

Over the past 17 million years or so, successive eruptions have flooded lava over wide stretches of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and Idaho, forming a string of comparatively flat calderas linked like beads, as the North American plate moves across the stationary hotspot.

Currently, volcanic activity is exhibited only via numerous geothermal vents scattered throughout the region, including the famous Old Faithful Geyser, but within the past two million years, it has undergone three extremely large explosive eruptions, up to 2,500 times the size of the 1980 Mount St.

Helens eruption..

For more information about the topic Yellowstone Caldera, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Supervolcano — A supervolcano refers to a volcano that produces the largest and most voluminous kinds of eruption on Earth. The actual explosivity of these ...  > read more

Caldera — A caldera is a volcanic feature formed by the collapse of a volcano into itself, making it a large, special form of volcanic crater. A caldera ...  > read more

Hotspot (geology) — In geology, a hotspot is a location on the Earth's surface that has experienced active volcanism for a long period of time. Hotspots were thought to ...  > read more

Mantle plume — A mantle plume is an upwelling of abnormally hot rock within the Earth's mantle. As the heads of mantle plumes can partly melt when they reach ...  > read more

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