Chinese supercomputers help crack the mystery of Yellowstone’s volcanic plumbing: paper
Scientists who started research in the US make breakthrough after returning to China and gaining access to domestic computing power
Yellowstone is the world’s largest active volcanic system – its eruptions are hundreds of times more powerful than Vesuvius’ blast and its ash could blanket half the US. Yet, for decades, scientists could not agree on what drove its underground magma system.
A new finding detailed by Chinese researchers could settle the dispute.
They declared that Yellowstone’s magma channels were not blasted open by magma forcing its way upwards. Instead, tectonic forces tore the lithosphere apart first and only then did magma rise into the pre-cut pathways, the team said in a paper published in the journal Science on April 10.
Their proposed model, which overturns a long-held theory, was made possible by a resource the team could not adequately access in the United States – supercomputers – according to an official science outlet in China.
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To solve the puzzle, Liu Lijun and his colleagues at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, wrote in Science that they had built a three-dimensional numerical model spanning the distance from the surface down to the core-mantle boundary.