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supervolcano

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun volcanology, neologism A powerful volcano, often having an explosive or cataclysmic eruption

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

super- + volcano, coined in a 2000 documentary about the Yellowstone Caldera.

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Examples

  • The technical term for Yellowstone's supervolcano is "caldera," a Spanish word meaning

    Aspen Times - Top Stories 2010

  • Effects of a major eruption: When the Yellowstone Caldera, or "supervolcano," in Yellowstone National erupts again, it will render a huge swath of North America, from Vancouver to Oklahoma City, uninhabitable.

    Latest Articles The Week 2010

  • The term "supervolcano" refers to any volcano capable of throwing out at least 300 cubic kilometres of magma during an eruption.

    Signs of the Times 2010

  • - The Yellowstone "supervolcano" will soon be among the best monitored hot spots in the world with the installation of new earthquake monitoring equipment.

    WN.com - Articles related to The Dawn of Facebook's People-organized Web 2010

  • The media does love the term "supervolcano", and a number of

    ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science Erik Klemetti none@example.com 2010

  • But a wave of recent earthquake activity is raising fears that have their origins 642,000 years ago, when a Yellowstone "supervolcano" exploded so violently that it created the caldera itself.

    Red Ice Creations 2009

  • But a wave of recent earthquake activity is raising fears that have their origins 642,000 years ago, when a Yellowstone "supervolcano" exploded so violently that it created the caldera itself.

    Red Ice Creations 2009

  • But a wave of recent earthquake activity is raising fears that have their origins 642,000 years ago, when a Yellowstone "supervolcano" exploded so violently that it created the caldera itself.

    Red Ice Creations 2009

  • Steve, as Mark says, just waving your hands and suggesting one of the great extinctions was caused directly by a "supervolcano" lacks something - citation, that's what's missing; evidence, found and published, for some physical process by which it could occur.

    RealClimate 2009

  • Steve, as Mark says, just waving your hands and suggesting one of the great extinctions was caused directly by a "supervolcano" lacks something - citation, that's what's missing; evidence, found and published, for some physical process by which it could occur.

    RealClimate 2009

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  • treeseed commented on the word supervolcano

    Supervolcano is the popular term for a large volcano that usually has a large caldera and can potentially produce devastation on an enormous, sometimes continental, scale. Such eruptions would be able to cause severe cooling of global temperatures for many years afterwards because of the huge volumes of sulfur and ash erupted. They are the most dangerous type of volcano. Examples include Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park of western USA, Lake Taupo in New Zealand and Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. Supervolcanoes are hard to identify centuries later, given the enormous areas they cover.

    _Wikipedia

    February 5, 2008

  • mollusque commented on the word supervolcano

    Aha! Supervolcanic is panvocalic.

    February 5, 2008

  • MaryW commented on the word supervolcano

    By the time the hotspot reached what is now Yellowstone, it let loose its wrath in three colossal eruptions. All three spread ash and debris—enough ash to fill the Grand Canyon—over nearly the entire western half o fht eUnited States, and left behind colossal craters known as calderas, formed as magma beneath the ground drained out. The most recent eruption happened around 640,000 years ago and was about 2,500 times the size of the 19880 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The oldest of the three Yellowstone blowouts happened 2.1 million years ago and was 6,000 times bigger than Mount St. Helens.

    That makes Yellowstone the quintessential example of a 'supervolcano', a word that has little technical merit but that is helpful for thinking about the relative scale of eruptions. BBC producers coined the term in 2000, to describe planet-altering eruptions that disgorge an immense volume of ash and other rock fragments—as a general rule, the volume of material that settles onto the ground is about two to three times the volue of the magma that fuelled the eruption.

    Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 63, Kindle loc 705

    February 18, 2019