I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Turns Out Magma Is Locked in ‘Cold Storage’ Before Volcanoes Dramatically Explode.

“The older view is that there’s a long period with a big tank of molten rock in the crust,” says geoscientist Nathan Andersen from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“A new view is that magma is stored for a long period in a state that is locked, cool, crystalline, and unable to produce an eruption. That dormant system would need a huge infusion of heat to erupt.”

Such a huge infusion of heat is what’s thought to have unleashed a violent supereruption in California some 765,000 years ago. . . .

Unfortunately, while scientists are doing everything they can to read the signs of volcanic supereruptions – something NASA views as more dangerous than asteroid strikes – the reality is, the new findings don’t bring us any closer to seeing the future.

“This does not point to prediction in any concrete way,” Singer explains in a press statement, “but it does point to the fact that we don’t understand what is going on in these systems, in the period of 10 to 1,000 years that precedes a large eruption.”

Well, that’s comforting.