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“Supervolcanoes: The Sleeping Giants” Transcript
Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Tornados. Tsunamis. We’re familiar with these natural disasters. But
for all the death and destruction they cause, they’re minuscule compared to the full force of
planet Earth.
Beneath our feet are what National Geographic calls “sleeping giants” that “stir occasionally”
but will someday wake up and roar with “unprecedented force.”
What are these sleeping giants? In a word: supervolcanoes. Supervolcanoes don’t erupt often, but
when they do, they transform our world.
As a geoscience major, I’ve been fascinated by supervolcanoes for a long time, but I know even
more about them after doing research for this speech.
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The tell-tale sign of an ancient supervolcano is a giant crater known as a caldera. The photo you
see here is a caldera that is now Lake Toba, in Indonesia. The largest volcanic lake in the world,
it was created by a super eruption 75,000 years ago.
This aerial view from a NASA satellite gives you a sense of the Toba caldera, is 18 miles wide
and 60 miles long.
The geysers and hydrothermal pools are some of the most beautiful sites above ground at
Yellowstone. But things are quite different beneath the surface.
What’s down there? First, there’s a large magma chamber, as shown here in a picture from
National Geographic. This chamber contains enough magma to fill the Grand Canyon eleven
times over.
But second, even though this chamber is huge, it’s dwarfed in comparison to a giant magma
plume that extends more than 20 miles into the earth. When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts
again, all this magma will be devastating.
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But this is no reason for us to be alarmed today. In fact, to me, it’s cause for awe at these
sleeping giants and what they can do.