Yellowstone Super-Eruptions More Numerous Than Thought?

Giant blasts consumed much of what's now Yellowstone National Park.

Much of Yellowstone National Park—which covers parts of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming—lies in a roughly 40-mile-wide (70-kilometer-wide) crater formed by the collapse of a massive volcanic cone during the area's most recent super-eruption, some 640,000 years ago.

Before then, Yellowstone had seen two other super-eruptions: one about a million years ago and another about two million years ago. Now, however, it seems the earliest blast might actually have been two cataclysmic explosions, thousands of years apart.

(Related: "Yellowstone Has Bulged as Magma Pocket Swells.")

Among geologists, it's no secret that the two-million-year-old Yellowstone lava deposit has three layers.

"That got us thinking whether these things were representing different magma batches [from a single eruption] or different events," study leader Ben Ellis,

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