A supervolcano in Massachusetts may sound like it’s out of a Dwayne Johnson movie, but geologists claim they have detected a huge magma blob beneath the New England region.
Vadim Levin, a geophysicist at Rutgers University, told the News Corp Australia Network that research shows the magma is rising, but it would take "millions of years" before it would ever result in a major volcanic eruption.
"The upwelling we detected is like a hot-air balloon, and we infer that something is rising up through the deeper part of our planet under New England," Levin said. "It will likely take millions of years for the upwelling to get where it’s going. The next step is to try to understand how exactly it's happening."
In the research first published in the scientific journal Geology last November, Levin and his team used a large-scale study of seismic waves to locate the magma buildup in western Massachusetts as well as central Vermont and western New Hampshire.
Seismic measurement devices connected with EarthScope technology had been placed all over the continental United States for two years in hopes of finding movement which eventually leads to earthquakes and volcano eruptions.
The Rutgers-led study focused on New England, where scientists had previously documented an area hundreds of degrees warmer than neighboring areas in the Earth's upper mantle.
"The Atlantic margin of North America did not experience intense geologic activity for nearly 200 million years," Levin said. "It is now a so-called 'passive margin' – a region where slow loss of heat within the Earth and erosion by wind and water on the surface are the primary change agents.”
"So we did not expect to find abrupt changes in physical properties beneath this region, and the likely explanation points to a much more dynamic regime underneath this old, geologically quiet area."
Levin told National Geographic he doesn’t know how it would reshape New England when the magma finally reaches the surface.
"Maybe it didn't have time yet, or maybe it is too small and will never make it," Levin said. "Come back in 50 million years, and we'll see what happens."