Supervolcanoes evolve superquickly

Huge underground magma chambers appear and erupt within just several hundred years

California’s Long Valley is the remains of a supervolcano that exploded 760,000 years ago. Quartz grains in rocks from the eruption  suggest the magma chamber beneath it was there only briefly.

G. Gualda/Vanderbilt University

The biggest eruptions on Earth may happen faster than volcanologists had thought.