A giant magma reservoir beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano has been discovered and mapped for the first time by scientists from the University of Utah.
The magma reservoir lies 12 to 28 miles beneath the supervolcano and has a volume of 11,000 cubic-miles. The reservoir contains 98% of solid rock and only 2% of motel rock, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Seismic waves sent out by earthquakes travel through hotter, more molten material more slowly. Scientists used seismometers to detect the time the seismic waves took to pass through the molten material to calculate how much of it is underground, Los Angeles Times reported.
"Until now we hadn't combined this data," Hsin-Hua Huang, a geophysicist at the University of Utah and the lead author of the research told Discovery News."It's not a new technique, but no one had ever applied it to Yellowstone."
Yellowstone supervolcano erupted 2 million, 1.2 million and 640,000 years ago.
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