Researchers at the University of British Columbia and McGill have simulated the conditions that result in so-called "supervolcanoes,'' the massive historic eruptions that can change weather patterns and wipe out whole civilizations.
And they did it using corn syrup.
The natural disasters are extremely rare -- the last one took place on Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 -- making them challenging to study.
"These eruptions are big enough to wipe out entire continents,'' said Ben Kennedy, a volcanologist at UBC's department of earth and ocean sciences.
Holding a bubbly, white rock of cooled lava the size of a basketball, Kennedy explains that the magma chamber is a space in the earth's crust filled with molten rock.
With childlike excitement, he explained that during an eruption the molten rock explodes out, flying at lightning speed in all directions.
"They annihilate everything around it,'' said Kennedy, who became interested in volcanology after building a standard baking soda volcano at a science fair when he was young.
There are potential supervolcano sites around the world, according to the researchers, including in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
So, in a sophisticated version of the grade-school science fair project, the team of researchers built a small model to recreate an eruption.
The researchers wanted to know what goes on inside a volcano's magma chamber when a supervolcano blows.
The study by Kennedy and Mark Jellinek at UBC and John Stix of McGill's department of earth and planetary sciences will be published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The team built a Plexiglas box to represent a magma chamber and filled it with corn syrup speckled with hundreds of plastic beads to represent the magma.
They then hoisted up a large, round weight above the plastic box with a pulley and released it over the makeshift magma chamber to see what would happen.
What they found was that the magma doesn't erupt in layers but is actually stirred, or mixed, as it's erupting.
Kennedy used the example of a coke bottle when comparing a normal volcano to its super counterpart. Shake up the bottle, open the top and the contents will explode straight out the top.
But with the supervolcano, the bottle would be disc-shaped. It would follow the same pattern as the exploding coke bottle, but the top would collapse in, pushing out everything that was left inside.
The residue powder produced from the rock fills the atmosphere after a supervolcano explosion, launching it around the world with the potential of causing the planet's temperature to drop.
When the Indonesian supervolcano exploded in 1815, it lead to more than 100,000 deaths and launched a column of ash about 70 kilometres into the atmosphere.
The damage it did to the world's climate led 1816 to be known as "the year without summer.''
The Mount Tambora eruption was 10 times more powerful than Krakatoa, also in Indonesia, and more than 100 times more powerful than Vesuvius in Italy or Mount St. Helens in Washington State.
And it's considered a small supervolcano.
Researchers say a big one would be the equivalent to a "global nuclear winter.''
