article_snippet.sent: it may help scientists better understand why Yellowstone's previous eruptions, in prehistoric times, were some of Earth's largest explosions in the last few million years.
article_snippet.sent: Compared to Yellowstone's past, Mount St. Helens was a picnic, when Mount St. Helens covered Washington state with an ash bed about the size of Lake Michigan in 1980.
article_snippet.sent: To understand the consequences of Yellowstone's previous eruptions, open the history books to 1815, when Mount Tambora blew many cubic miles of debris skyward and killed about 10,000 inhabitants of Indonesia in an instant, according to a report in Smithsonian Magazine.
article_snippet.sent: Mount Tambora blew 36 cubic miles of debris into the sky.
article_snippet.sent: Yellowstone has dwarfed that at least three times, the USGS says.
article_snippet.sent: The explosions have left deep scars, and park goers often become familiar with one -- the Yellowstone Caldera, which takes up much of the park and is lined by a roundish mountainous ridge.
article_snippet.sent: the Yellowstone Caldera is a volcanic crater some 40- by 25-miles large, left behind when 240 cubic miles of debris ruptured out of the Earth and into the air during volcanic discharge some 630,000 years ago, the USGS says.
article_snippet.sent: Long before that, 2 million years ago, volcanic activity blew 600 cubic miles of Yellowstone debris into the air.
article_snippet.sent: Those were the two largest eruptions in North America in a few million years, the USGS the USGS said, and Those each buried in ash more than a third of what is now the continental U.S.
article_snippet.sent: If another large caldera-forming eruption were to occur at Yellowstone, another large caldera-forming eruption were to occur at Yellowstone effects would be worldwide," the USGS the USGS says.
article_snippet.sent: another large caldera-forming eruption were to occur at Yellowstone would drastically shift the world's climate.
article_snippet.sent: It allowed shake and shock waves to develop a detailed model of the seething expanse beneath Yellowstone that makes it what it is.
highlights_snippet.sent: Prehistoric eruptions of Yellowstone supervolcano were some of Earth's largest explosions .