Comment on checkmate, big geology!!

supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Big volcanoes look like this

Image

(Mount Rainier, Washington)

The BIGGEST volcanoes look like this

Image

Or this

Image

Notice how they don’t have that nice big pretty volcano cone shape? It just looks like some drunk geologists scribbled on a map and drew circles around a low lying area with a lake or two in it and called it a “volcano” or a “volcanic zone”.

The reason though is that the BIGGEST and most destructive volcanic eruptions tend to happen with lava/magma that doesn’t flow very well and thus like you getting a stuffed nose, shit gets blocked up. Like many of us, these volcanos don’t solve the problem and go take a decongestant or blow their nose, they just sits there sniveling and stewing, failing to release the pressure that keeps building and building and building.

These eruptions are called felsic reactions (the opposite of mafic, goopy eruptions you have seen footage of from Hawaii). An immense amount of gas is released by magma as it becomes exposed to the surface as the gas is no longer kept in the magma at immense pressures. The magma can’t flow and “pass the gas” so to speak so a plug forms and what you get is a terrifyingly big pressure cooker that just builds and builds like that person on the plane next to you that just keeps sniffing and sniffing and never blowing their nose.

When it finally explodes because the built up pressure overcomes the plug the explosion is so catastrophic it doesn’t leave a clean volcano shape. What you are left with is an uneven low topography dotted with lakes that marks the site of an incomprehensibly large explosion, hence the topography of Yellowstone and the Taupo Volcanic Zone.

source
Sort:hotnewtop