page_title: Snake River Plain
section_title: Geology
hierarchical_section_title: Snake River Plain / Geology
caption_attribution_description: English: Location of the Yellowstone Hotspot. Numbers indicate the time of the eruption, in millions of years ago.
context_page_description: The Snake River Plain is a geologic feature located primarily within the U.S. state of Idaho. It stretches about 400 miles westward from northwest of the state of Wyoming to the Idaho-Oregon border. The plain is a wide, flat bow-shaped depression and covers about a quarter of Idaho. Three major volcanic buttes dot the plain east of Arco, the largest being Big Southern Butte.
  Most of Idaho's major cities are in the Snake River Plain, as is much of its agricultural land.
context_section_description: The Snake River Plain can be divided into three sections: western, central, and eastern. The western Snake River Plain is a large tectonic graben or rift valley filled with several kilometers of lacustrine (lake) sediments; the sediments are underlain by rhyolite and basalt, and overlain by basalt. The western plain began to form around 11–12 Ma (million years ago) with the eruption of rhyolite lavas and ignimbrites. The western plain is not parallel to North American Plate motion and lies at a high angle to the central and eastern Snake River Plains. Its morphology is similar to other volcanic plateaus such as the Chilcotin Group in south-central British Columbia, Canada.
  The eastern Snake River Plain traces the path of the North American Plate over the Yellowstone hotspot, now centered in Yellowstone National Park. The eastern plain is a topographic depression that cuts across Basin and Range mountain structures, more or less parallel to North American Plate motion. It is underlain almost entirely by basalt erupted from large shield volcanoes. Beneath the basalts are rhyolite lavas and ignimbrites that erupted as the lithosphere passed over the hotspot.
  The central Snake River plain is similar to the eastern plain but differs by having thick sections of interbedded lacustrine (lake) and fluvial (stream) sediments, including the Hagerman fossil beds.
  Island Park and Yellowstone Calderas formed as the result of enormous rhyolite ignimbrite eruptions, with single eruptions producing up to 600 cubic miles (2,500 km³) of ash. Henry's Fork Caldera, measuring 18 miles (29 km) by 23 miles (37 km), may be the largest symmetrical caldera in the world. The caldera formed when a dome of magma built up and then drained away. The center of the dome collapsed, leaving a caldera. Henry's Fork Caldera lies within the older and larger Island Park Caldera, which is 50 miles (80 km) by 65 miles (105 km). Younger volcanoes that erupted after passing over the hotspot covered the plain with young basalt lava flows in places, including Craters of the Moon National Monument.
caption: Location of Yellowstone Hotspot in Millions of Years Ago
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