Uturunku: The Zombie Volcano Rising Beneath the Bolivian Andes

In this episode we explore Uturunku, the Bolivian stratovolcano that's far from sleeping. Decades of InSAR monitoring reveal a giant, sombrero-shaped uplift over about 1,000 km^2 driven by magmatic intrusion from the Altiplano Puna Magmatic Body—the largest known crustal magma reservoir, spanning ~50,000 km^2 with roughly 0.5 million km^3 of magma, of which 20–30% is molten. We trace the deep plumbing, including an 80 km-long tooth-like seismic conduit, and explain how three to four small earthquakes per day fit into this planetary-scale magmatic system. This episode shows how modern Earth science watches continental magma systems in real time and what Uturunku teaches us about the hidden plumbing beneath our feet.

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