Yellowstone is the largest active volcano in the world and it is due for another eruption.

Five miles beneath Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano that sits on an immense pool of red magma that is 31 miles long, 19 miles wide and six miles deep. There are only a handful of supervolcanoes in the world. The power of a supervocano is 1,000 times greater than an "ordinary" volcano as it explodes in a single mighty rupture that will most probably be heard around the world. The explosion would be beyond the scale of anything known to humans.

Geologists discovered that the Yellowstone has blown 100 times since the first known eruption 16.5 million years ago. Its eruptions have average one every 600,000 years. Since the last one was 630,000 years ago we are due.

When the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park blew 640,000 years ago, it left behind a hole or caldera that is 40 miles across and covers 2.2 million acres. It changed mountain ranges and left a hole the size of the Los Angeles Basin.

Yellowstone is one of the most seismically active places on the planet, with hundreds of shakes and earthquakes a year. It had 1,260 earthquakes in 2002. The north part of its lake bulged 170 feet over the past 50 years and the caldera rose an inch a year until 1985. It then fell an inch over the next two years. In 1995 the caldera started to rise again and is bulging towards the Southwest.

A massive eruption of the Yellowstone volcano would be catastrophic for North America. Yellowstone’s volcanic ash has been found in nineteen western states, Canada, Mexico and the states west of the Mississippi. The eruption would result in years of freezing temperatures for the rest of the planet. The sky would darken, black rain would fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter and push humankind to the brink of extinction.

Yellowstone is a beautiful geologic park with the largest display of geysers, hot-springs and steam vents in the world. Some 250 geysers spout off each year. It is both awesome and chilling to know that the same geologic forces that sculptured Yellowstone will do so again.