magma chamber
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- Instance of
- geological structure
- Material used
- magma
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- Yellowstone magma chamber.jpg
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- Magma chambers
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Encyclopedic overview
11 – magma chamber
A magma chamber is a large pool of liquid rock beneath the surface of the Earth. The molten rock, or magma, in such a chamber is less dense than the surrounding country rock, which produces buoyant forces on the magma that tend to drive it upwards. If the magma finds a path to the surface, then the result will be a volcanic eruption; consequently, many volcanoes are situated over magma chambers. These chambers are hard to detect deep within the Earth, and therefore most of those known are close to the surface, commonly between 1 km and 10 km down.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “magma chamber” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.