The Yellowstone supervolcano sits above a river of red-hot magma that stretches to the national park covering parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho all the way from under Mexico, suggest scientists studying the caldera which hasn’t blown its top for 630,000 years.
The magma plume that University of Texas researchers Stephen Grand and Peter Nelson believe they found under Yellowstone is described as "a long, thin, sloping zone" inside the Earth’s mantle, the website Phys.org reported.
That fact that seismic waves in the zone are traveling slower than the areas around them makes the researchers believe that section of mantle is very hot: 1,112 to 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit,
Grand and Nelson's research in which they make their case about the long, narrow, cylindrical river of magma was published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"The Yellowstone hotspot, located in North America, is an intraplate source of magmatism the cause of which is hotly debated," says the study’s abstract.
"Some argue that a deep mantle plume sourced at the base of the mantle supplies the heat beneath Yellowstone, whereas others claim shallower subduction or lithospheric-related processes can explain the anomalous magmatism."
Phys.org said the plume, still just a theoretical abnormality at the boundary between the Earth's core and the mantle, rises through the mantle into the crust and exists as a vertical stream of magma.
Grand and Nelson suggest previous research missed the plume because global tomography is not capable of capturing thin thermal plumes such as the one they believe is under Yellowstone.
For their research, Grand and Nelson used new imaging techniques and analyzed seismic activity around Yellowstone using data obtained by the USArray network, which has listening stations positioned across North America, the Daily Mail reported.
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