A caldera-causing eruption is the most devastating type of volcanic eruption. It permanently alters the environment of the surrounding arehey are usually created by explosions of rock during an eruption. Calderas are formed when magma empties from a chamber beneath the volcano. When this happens, the land around the crater may collapse." According to usgs.gov, "Bob [Christiansen] reports that he traced out the caldera boundaries through old fashioned field work. walking around with a hammer and hand lens and looking carefully at the rocks and their distributions." When a volcano erupts, the magma is known as lava. Yellowstone's magma is found within a magma chamber. The chamber consists of not only magma, but molten rock. The top of this chamber is about 8 km deep and the bottom is around 16 km deep. According to usgs.gov, "The average rate of movement of the plate in the Yellowstone area for the last 16.5 million years has been about 4.6 centimeters annually.".
Yellowstone National Park is located in the Western United States, as shown in the image to the right. The park's area is 3,472 square miles (8,987 square km). Yellowstone National Park is located at 44.6 ° N, 110.5° W. Yellowstone is bordered by Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. Ninety-six percent of the park is located in the state of Wyoming, three percent is in Montana, and one percent is in Idaho. According the USGS website, Yellowstone's name was attributed as "early as 1805 to Native Americans who were referring to yellow sandstones along the banks of the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana, several hundred miles downstream and northeast of the Park." Yellowstone has many different natural geographic features such as geysers, volcanoes, and hot springs. Water beneath Yellowstone geysers is recharged via rain and snow melt then cycled beneath the surface where it is heated by magma as shown in Figure 1.
