Nor’easters, rainy days, ice, historic blizzards, and extreme humidity are often the natural storms and obstacles New Englanders have grown resilient to. Some even go so far as to turn the coin on its head and appreciate the snow on the slopes or a moody rainy day at the Boston Public Library.
Volcano, and especially “super volcano,” are not in the New England vocabulary. Or at least, they weren’t.
Geologists recently discovered massive molten rock creeping toward the Earth’s surface under Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Traces of the molten mass only became apparent in a recent large-scale seismic study.
State of the super volcano
The new study found the brooding molten blob centered under Vermont, with parts of western Massachusetts and New Hampshire within its radius. Geologists discovered an anomaly hundreds of degrees hotter than its neighboring areas.
While the findings shocked geologists, unraveling many things learned in the classroom and the formation of the Earth, they’re not too concerned yet. With the timescale of Earth’s geological processes, the magma would take tens of millions of years to brew above the surface, according to geologists.
“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,” says Rutgers University geophysicist Professor Vadim Levin.
“It will likely take millions of years for the upwelling to get where it’s going,” Professor Levin explains. “The next step is to try to understand how exactly it’s happening.”
How is a super volcano different than a regular volcano
Unlike a regular volcano, a super volcano is a “massive volcanic system” capable of producing a super-eruption with a magnitude of 8 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, VEI. For context, most volcanos rank between a 0 and 6 VEI. While super volcanoes are rare, their eruptions are globally catastrophic.
Unlike the tall mountains of regular volcanoes, super volcanoes exist in sunken caldera depressions and contain extensive magma reservoirs.
Volcanoes erupt more frequently with localized impact while super volcanoes erupt every 100,000 to millions of years, with global implications. Geologists determined at least 60 super volcano eruptions in Earth’s history.
Right now, New England is geological stable and there are no active volcanos. However, scientists note while not “Yellowstone-like,” it is a distant relative.
