"Repeatedly throughout Earth’s history, giant pools of magma greater than 100 cubic miles in volume have formed a few miles below the surface.
"They are the sources of super-eruptions - gigantic volcanic outbursts that throw 100 times more superheated gas, ash and rock into the atmosphere than run-of-the-mill eruptions, enough to blanket continents and plunge the globe into decades-long volcanic winters.
“Now a team of geologists have developed a new “geospeedometer” that they argue can help resolve this controversy by providing direct measurements of how long the most explosive types of magma existed as melt-rich bodies of crystal-poor magma before they erupted. They have applied their new technique to two super-eruption sites and a pair of very large eruptions and found that it took them no more than 500 years to move from formation to eruption.”
“New ‘geospeedometer’ confirms super-eruptions have short fuses”