Question: Have you ever been to Yellowstone National Park if so what is the chances of it erupting

Kate Dobson answered on 8 Nov 2014:

No, unfortunately I have not been to Yellowstone, but I sure want to. It’s an amzingpolace for wild life as well as for geology. My parents went on holiday there this summer and I was very jealous – they didn’t even bring me back a t-shirt! I will get there someday – and I am working on rocks that other people have collected.

Yellowstone is an active volcano. We know there are pockets of magma beneath the surface that drive the hydrothermal geysers and hot springs. But I think you mean when is the next big eruption going to be?
What are the chances of it erupting? Now this is a tricky answer.

Predicting or forecasting when a volcano will “go off” is difficult. The first thing we can do is look at the past eruptions. Some volcanoes go off regularly, and some don’t, but we can start to get an idea about the probabilty of an eruption by looking at the previous ones.

The last “big” eruption happened about 640,000 years ago, the one before was about 1,300,000 years ago, and the one before that was at about 2,300,000 years ago. From this we can guess that the next eruption should be somewhere between 600,000 and 1,200,000 years after the last one. So, the chances of it “going off” in the next thousand or even 10,000 years are extremely slim, but in terms of geological history (where 1 million years is a blink of an eye) it is due sometime “soon”.

Geologists have been monitoring Yellowstone, and many other volcanoes carefully for the last 30 years or so, and most volcanologists agree that we will probably see evidence that something was happening for weeks or even years before hand. We watch for earthquakes and ground movements that can indicate magma moving or accumulating beneath the crust, and there is no evidence for that at the moment.