There are thousands of active volcanos in the world, in all sorts of different sizes and shapes. Some more powerful than others. Some that only spew steam and smoke. There is also a type of volcano that isn’t even a volcano really, but more like a water balloon right under the crust that is inflating slowly. It is called a super volcano and erupts extremely violently. Here I tell about the super volcano that is under the Yellowstone National Park and may explode at any time.

Yellowstone Park was established as a National Park in 1872 by the US congress. It is located in the in the north-east of the state of Wyoming and a tiny bit in Montana and Idaho. Yellowstone National Park is quite big, to be exact 2,219,789 acres, as big as Rhode Island or Delaware.
Lakes and sparkling rivers cover 5% of the park, while forests and grasslands, abundant with life cover the rest. The largest river in the park is Yellowstone River, hence the name of the park. Yellowstone River was named by French trappers after they saw the yellow color of the rocky sides of the Yellowstone Grand Canyon. They called it "Roche Jaune" (Rock Yellow).
Yellowstone National Park sits directly on top one of the biggest super volcanoes in the world (Yellowstone Super Volcano). The largest super volcano on the North American continent. Super volcanos or super calderas are huge magma plumes that rise from the Earth’s mantel all the way up to the crust where they continue rising until they eventually break through the crust and explode violently. There have been many supervolcanic eruptions throughout the Earth’s history, but only a few in the history of man.
When a super volcanos plume gets close to the crust, it might make holes in the crust and form geysers or maybe boiling mud holes. When the plume reaches the crust, pressure will start to build and cause the earth over the plume to rise. Fissures are created around this dome, almost like when a thief is sawing a circle in the floor. The eruptions of all super volcanos erupt very violently. After the eruption(s) the earth that rose sinks and forms a caldera.
Yellowstone’s super volcano’s latest eruption, but not its largest, was 1000 times bigger than Mount St. Helens. Its largest eruption shot debris all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and all of the eruptions have spread ash around the world. Some have even caused volcanic winters by blocking out the sunlight and sinking temperatures.
The super volcano under Yellowstone National Park hasn’t always been there. The super volcano has been moving ever since it was born in the south west of Idaho. It has moved 350 miles in 18 million years. That’s 1.8 inches a year.
In 1980, in the state of Washington the most violent eruption of Mount St. Helens and the most violent eruption in the whole world for the last 40000 years took place. It spewed ash and debris almost 1.5 miles in to the stratosphere and destroyed and then flattened almost everything several hundred miles north of the volcano. Fifty seven lives were taken during the eruption including 84 year old Harry Truman who had lived on Spirit lake (a lake on the north side of Mount St. Helens) for over 50 years, Jim Schmanky, a logger and his three men and David Johnston the only vulcanologist that didn’t give up waiting for the eruption. All of these men died during the explosion except Jim Schmanky. They were killed by the pyroclastic flows.

Conclusion:

Volcanos are holes in the Earth’s crust where ash, magma and molten rock can slip out from the Earth’s mantel and cause enormous damage. We cannot and probably never will be able to predict and pin point the exact time and date of an eruption so we must always be on the alert, because eruptions can seem harmless but then destroy all in there path.
 

References

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ggNyQozurw&feature=related

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/supervolcano/interactive/interactive.html

http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_St._Helens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBJ9xZws7ro&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee9CPox93OQ&feature=related

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera