On the verge of catastrophe? (file picture).  
 DailyMail.co.uk (excepts):  Is the world's largest super-volcano set to erupt for the first time in 600,000 years, wiping out two-thirds of the US?  The super-volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has been rising at a record rate since 2004.  It would explode with a force a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980.  Spewing lava far into the sky, a cloud of ash that would fan out and dump a layer 10 ft deep up to 1,000 miles away.  Two-thirds of the US could become uninhabitable as toxic air sweeps through it, grounding thousands of flights and forcing millions to leave their homes.  This is the nightmare that scientists are predicting could happen if the world's largest super-volcano erupts for the first time in 600,000 years, as it could do in the near future.  Yellowstone National Park's caldera has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years and researchers monitoring it say we could be in for another eruption.  They said that the super-volcano underneath the Wyoming Park has been rising at a record rate since 2004 - its floor has gone up three inches per year for the last three years alone, the fastest rate since records began in 1923.  Hampered by a lack of data, they have stopped short of an all-out warning and they are unable to put a date on when the next disaster might take place.  When the eruption finally happens, it will dwarf the effect of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which erupted in April last year causing travel chaos around the world.  The University of Utah's Bob Smith, an expert in Yellowstone's volcanism told National Geographic: "It's an extraordinary uplift, because it covers such a large area and the rates are so high."  In Yellowstone, some 400 miles beneath the earth's surface is a magma "hot spot" which rises to 30 miles underground before spreading out over an area of 300 miles across.  Atop this, but still beneath the surface, sits the slumbering volcano.  Scientists monitoring it believe that a swelling magma reservoir six miles underground may be causing the recent uplifts.  They have also been keeping an eye on a "pancake-shaped" blob" of molten rock the size of Los Angeles which was pressed into the volcano some time ago.  Due to the extreme conditions, it has been hard to work out what exactly is going on down below.  Leading researchers are unable to say with certainty what will happen or when.  "Clearly, some deep source of magma feeds Yellowstone and since Yellowstone has erupted in the recent geological past, we know that there is magma at shallower depths too," said Dan Dzurisin, a Yellowstone expert with the US Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington State.  There has to be magma in the crust, or we wouldn't have all the hydrothermal activity that we have."

My Comments:  There is a lot of uncertainty among the scientific community about this volcano, but I can tell you that there are currently 15 volcanoes erupting across the globe at the present.  Compare that to six during the month of July last year (www.volcano.si.edu)!  The Bible tells us there will be great signs in the heavens and earth in the last days, "I will show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath, blood, fire and vapor of smoke" Acts 2:19