"Underneath the bubbling geysers and hot springs of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming sits a volcanic hot spot that has driven some of the largest eruptions on Earth. Geoscientists have now completely imaged the subterranean plumbing system and have found not just one, but two magma chambers underneath the giant volcano.

'The main new thing is we unveil a deeper and bigger magma reservoir in the lower crust,' says study author Hsin-Hua Huang, a seismologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Scientists had already known about a plume, which brings molten rock up from deep in the mantle to a region about 60 kilometers below the surface. And they had also imaged a shallow magma chamber about 10 kilometers below the surface, containing about 10,000 cubic kilometers of molten material. But now they have found a deeper one, 4.5 times larger, that sits between 20 and 50 kilometers below the surface. 'They found the missing link between the mantle plume and the shallow magma chamber,” says Peter Cervelli, a geophysicist in Anchorage, Alaska, who works at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yellowstone Volcano Observatory."

Eric Hand reports for Science magazine April 13, 2015. [2]

SEE ALSO:

"Giant New Magma Reservoir Found Beneath Yellowstone" (Smithsonian) [3]

"Scientists Find Missing Link in Yellowstone Plumbing: This Giant Volcano Is Very Much Alive" (Washington Post) [4]

"Giant Magma Reservoir Mapped Deep Beneath Yellowstone Supervolcano" (Los Angeles Times) [5]