magma chambers

Some news for today: Yellowstone National Park, USA. Another fine example of media headline versus actual research, an article in the Jackson Hole Daily about a new study by Dr. Robert Smith and others on the Yellowstone plume was titled "Park's giant magma plume eating up mountains". Yikes! Well, the actual study published recently in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research is more about the geophysical parameters of the Yellowstone plume - a plume that might reach as far as 500 km below the caldera itself. As for the mountain eating part, I think they were trying to get at the…
The southern Washington (and northern Oregon) Cascades, with Hood (foreground), St. Helens and Adams (middle) and Rainier (background). Remember a few months ago when an abstract from a meeting got people are ruffled because the study said there was a "giant magma chamber" feeding all three of St. Helens, Adams and Rainier in the Cascades? Well, Nature Geosciences has been kind enough to publish the work (the article) and yes, yet again, we can say it is still most likely not true at all. Graham Hill and others claim that their magnetotelluric work in the Cascades show that a vast magma…