Supervolcano in Utah: The eruption of 20 ancient “supervolcanoes” discovered near the Utah-Nevada was 5,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption

For 30 years, BYU geologists have searched for the volcano that produced thousands of cubic kilometers of pyroclastic flow on the Utah-Nevada border. Piecing together the geologic evidence from five different mountain ranges across hundreds of miles, they report the discovery of a massive 30-million-year-old supervolcano in Utah. The ancient caldera, which would have been several miles deep, is no longer visible as it has eroded and filled with pyroclastic flow many years ago. The original Wah Wah Springs pyroclastic deposit associated with this caldera covered an area of ~12,000 square miles and had a volume of 5,900 cubic kilometers or ~1,400 cubic miles (5,000 times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption that emitted just one cubic kilometer of material). The researchers report that this is one of the largest documented supervolcanoes worldwide.