Rapidly Inflating Volcano Creates Growing Mystery: It’s CSI: Geology as a group of scientists study a mysterious and rapidly inflating South American volcano. Researchers from several universities are using a suite of tools to piece together the restive peak’s past in order to understand what it is doing right now.
Uturuncu is a nearly 20,000-foot high volcano in southwest Bolivia and is inflating at an astonishing speed. Researchers realized about 5 years ago that the area is rising steadily, and is one of the fastest uplifting volcanic areas on Earth. The magma beneath the volcano is growing at 27 cubic feet per second.
Uturuncu is surrounded by one of the densest concentrations of supervolcanoes on the planet, all of which fell silent some one million years ago. The most recent supervolcano eruption happened about 74,000 years ago in Indonesia.
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