Presenter: Claire Getz
Faculty Mentor: Paul Wallace, Madison Myers
Presentation Type: Poster 14
Primary Research Area: Science
Major: Geology
Funding Source: Mini Grant, UROP, $600
The focus of my senior thesis is to study the gas rich volcanic glass fragments, or pumice, that were ejected from the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming. A supervolcano is a volcano of massive scale. For Yellowstone, this means a volcano with the capacity to erupt over 6000 times more material than the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Research suggests that the rising magma in the conduit of the Yellowstone eruption exhibited strange stop-start behavior. This means that there were breaks in the eruption in the order of months to years where magma and ash were not being ejected. To study this theory, a very important piece of information to obtain is the magma ascent rate, which is the rate at which the magma in the volcano’s conduit was rising. I will be studying three members of the eleven member pumice that was ejected during the eruption to find the ascent rate of this eruption. Then, I will use computer programs and high-resolution images to study the pumice and gather data on the character of different layers of the Huckleberry Ridge Deposit. I will be able to calculate and estimate for how fast the magma rose during the eruption by looking at the range of vesicle sizes, shapes, and numerical densities. This research will contribute to a larger project in the Geology department. The goal of the project is to help understand how this supervolcano works.