Assignment - Hot Spot Tectonic Shift

Hot spots are areas where hot magma from the mantle rises upward to produce occasional volcanic eruptions. As a tectonic plate shifts above the hot spot, the volcanic eruptions occur in different locations of the crust of the Earth. Near the town of McDermitt, Nevada, an eruption occurred 16 million years ago to produce what is now called the McDermitt Caldera. A series of other eruptions produced other calderas, the most recent of which is one in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

Find a web site that gives direct distances between places on Earth. Enter McDermitt, Nevada, and Yellowstone National Park and divide that distance into 1.6 x 107 years to get the number of years for the North American plate to shift 1 mile.

As the North American plate keeps shifting, the hot spot could match up somewhere near Ottawa, Canada, which is at roughly at the same longitude as Baltimore and 427 miles to the north. Find the direct distance between Yellowstone and Ottawa and find out how many years in the future the hot spot might be within what is now a long day's drive from Baltimore.