well good morning everybody welcome to Ellensburg Washington USA the local time is 8:45 and we will begin our program train boy on Yellowstone geology at nine o'clock 15 minutes from now so glad you could join us are we functional good evening from Denmark well good morning from Washington state from Portland the Czech Republic I'm gonna spend an extra few moments here just saying hi to folks Croatia good evening / good morning Japan Montana Great Falls 5x5 that's wonderful to see hello dick from the Netherlands the Netherlands Stefano from Italy these Sunday mornings are special we have an extra dose of worldwide folks which is terrific Laramie washing out Laramie Wyoming excuse me how dare I San Fran alive and kicking says John Thomas from Germany good morning Evelyn age 8 thank you and happy Father's Day to you too Scotland secular tube Switzerland call me well let's do a few more of these this is fun I just especially if you're new to us Ryan and Jack ages 15 and 13 the teenagers are with us Spokane Northern California Brian from Scotland to lo hice hi Brian hi Brian PJ wandered a field trip to Yellowstone Park sorry to let you down maybe it's time to go back to bed PJ get in your PJs PJ Joanie from the UK she's in the house in the his a Olympia Washington I don't mean to ignore the Pacific Northwest folks but I'm I'm fishing for I'm fish I'm getting greedy I'm fisherman oh good lord we have a Karthik from Nepal hello Pennsylvania Myrna Myra from the canal Jason's insulted in Wenatchee another Scottish person wonderful to see you all Oh it's breezy this morning all right but we can handle it can't we 20 mile an hour winds ish another Netherlands the Netherlands give me a big thumbs up if you liked this video give me a big thumbs up and subscribe down below and then I'll see you at the next video good lord we are we're swimming in Scots this morning and Danes Heinrich hello stingray is from geologically challenged Florida I like that and another Florida okay I've got a bunch of thank yous to just blow through real quick not the way to say that I want to thank some people I've got a piece of mail from the Rose doctor from Olympia Washington he noticed on one of our live streams that we had some roses that's Liz's domain but Gary thank you for your book on proper Rose care and this is already taking a look and she will read more about that so thank you terry from yakima thank you for your heartfelt two-card of appreciation I appreciate you this this all arrived yesterday this is from Ralph and Ellen from modern and medieval woodturning we have another wood artist you know we had that was from Pat's and Karen Miller yesterday and look at why I should I must make sure I don't screw this up this is a chalk holder made out of soapstone due to the soft nature of the stone I stabilized it as well as I could but I would recommend gentle use Ralph thank you Ralph and Ellen thank you I have good memories of old-time professors that I had 40 years ago that would have their little chalk holder so I have my own chalk holder made out of soapstone and I'm gonna be violent this morning so I'm not going to use it this morning but I'll make sure to to put it to good use Thank You Ralph and Ellen what the boy yoky and gene dropped in to deliver some chanterelles and some dried peaches and nectarines from Zilla and red Electra so as a pleasure to meet you Jean and Yuki thank you for the gifts if you're new to us you're totally confused like what is this guy doing why isn't he talking about Yellowstone I tuned in to listen to a guy talk about Yellowstone it's coming but this is a live broadcast and we still have eight minutes before we begin at the top of the hour go ahead and skip ahead if you want let's go ahead but I'm talking to folks folks live here and I'm I'm thanking them Evelyn age 8 dropped by the house yesterday afternoon I'm sorry Evelyn that I was not here I was up at school cramming for this morning so I'm sorry that I missed you but you dropped off Gould Rainier cherries Bing cherries fresh I love cherries Evelyn and I love you thank you and last but not least from Wisconsin go Badgers from Joann in unity Wisconsin Joanne from unity Wisconsin she operates North Woods 3d printing ideas I've heard about 3d printing Joanne but I still don't really have a concept of what that is Nick if I can be of service in any way please just let me know repair parts for the chalkboard actually I'm hanging on by a thread here these sprockets these plastic sprockets since this thing is face-planted so many times they're totally unusable so I'm going to come right back to you I'm happy to pay you for that Joanne and a wonderful card as well so what did Joanne create well she created this on her 3d printer keychain very kind but that's not all that would have been plenty but wait there's more so much for the dramatic reveal I'm fighting the wind here thank you very much okay we still have four minutes according my watch let's look at the schedule for next week dramatic reveal I'm not gonna see you tonight I'm not gonna see you tomorrow night Monday night but I will see you Tuesday night oh right yeah right is this huh CW geology that's what you said last week and then we ended up doing something different is this a placeholder too maybe I don't know but if I can't think of something good we'll go to the geology building and look around Wednesday Bailey wellis thank you to Robert in Cle Elum for sending a ton of links to get me started on Bailey Willis that will be the last of our men of rock series Wow Wow look what we have here finally crossed the Columbia south of here and go into that exotic state known as Oregon and I got a question mark just like I had for British Columbia geology huh that's going to be one of those shows that I will learn as much from you as I'll be able to share but I know a few things about what's going on down there Saturday morning next weekend I know there are some cinder cones in Oregon but I want to kind of break that out and do something different with cinder cones in the Pacific Northwest and the last live stream before we take a break for a little while can you guess I'll wait can you guess next Sunday I've already done brats drink hope you can join us well we've got papers flying we got all the rocks in the backyard used as paper weights as per usual but that that still doesn't do the trick half the time but I got kind of a plan through this one together last night and this morning but I think I got I think I have some decent stuff for you so I've got two minutes according to my watch give me two minutes would you I need to concentrate on what we're doing and I'm so glad that you can join us this morning to talk about Yellowstone geology I got Packard well a pleasant good morning to you all welcome to Ellensburg Washington USA this is the backyard of our residents here in town just a few blocks away is Central Washington University the college in town where I teach geology and I've been here for 30 years if we go back earlier than that 35 years ago I was a graduate student in southern Idaho I was at Idaho State University studying under a professor by the name of David W Rogers who was fresh out of Stanford at the time he was just a couple years older than Iowa's and he's still there at Idaho State at ISU and I mentioned that right off the bat because I do have some personal experience with studying Yellowstone geology I don't work for the USGS I don't work for the National Park Service and I really haven't done a lot of thinking about the details of the Yellowstone National Park area geologically since thirty-five years ago but of course I've been teaching geology 101 pretty much every quarter since 1987 and so I have a standard routine I've already kind of done the standard routine on a supervolcano's program that we had here and I suppose all that can you remember but we probably have talked about the standard routine with a few other things as well so what can I offer you this morning that might be a little different than other programs that you've seen other forms of media that you've seen on this supervolcano from Yellowstone National Park so this came out recently June 15th less than a week ago and this is just the latest of what seems like weekly stories weekly articles weekly YouTube videos weekly whatever's that are all talking about Yellowstone and I don't know about you but I think people are confused should I be worried about this thing I've heard Yellowstone's a volcano is that true yes it is I've heard Yellowstone Volcano when it blew last was way bigger than Mount st. Helens is that true yes it's true I've heard that that Yellowstone Volcano according to reports kind of like this is overdue that it's not just a question of if but it's a question of when these trite phrases keep being thrown around and pessimistically I do think that oftentimes people are being manipulated to click on the link to click on the article and I'll give you a few examples in the cozy fort here about what I consider not the best way to go about this and it gets depressing in a hurry I was gonna find a bunch of these video clips on the Yellowstone supervolcano that I was going to share with you and I watched about three of them and I you know they're not good they're hyping they're feeding into the hype and then I go down and look at how many views there were millions how many subscribers there are tens of millions gobbling up this garbage so it's like boy no wonder we're kind of in this situation and by situation I simply mean I think there's a general misunderstanding about the future with Yellowstone so what can I offer as a teacher well I have some things and I simply just want to look at some facts look at some good geology that's been done in the last 30 40 years and try to just give you the best information that I can without an agenda without wanting you to click on this thing there's no motivation except that just tried to be as true to the evidence as possible and to be fair there are certain articles and there are certain video programs that are very good and very accurate but there's just as much maybe more of garbage okay so for instance this one that just came out this week biggest ever Yellowstone eruption revealed okay and then you read a little bit more actually the subtitle is the ancient supervolcano under the National Park was much more explosive in its early history and could be slowing down a new study suggests oh that's great that's good news there's so much we're worried about so great I don't wreck this one off my list I don't have to worry about it well but then next week the hey now have you heard who bad news coming out of Wyoming it's gonna be a big one and it's going to be bad and make sure you got stuff you know packed in your car so what are we supposed to believe who are we supposed to listen to I'm not saying that you should listen to me and nobody else I just want to share some basic information that is well known in the geological community and I think you should know about it if you do not that was my introduction are you still with us 1.1 thousand viewers good good I think I shared this with you once before just to flesh this out so here's my little field notebook from my fieldwork at Lady Hot Springs on the northern edge of the Snake River plain right here or I spent week upon week upon week by myself doing fieldwork in the summers of 1987 and 1988 and was I a gifted geologist not really did I take legible notes yeah I suppose I did what was I doing I was making maps a geologic map of three ignimbrite s' which are ash float Tufts okay I'm already lost you say good lord I don't know that word okay well we'll get into it but I was working with volcanic deposits from the Yellowstone hotspot from the supervolcano but when the hotspot was here making the high sea volcanic field and not here where the Yellowstone mantle plume is currently okay and so you know you eventually kind of publish a master's thesis it looks like this and I'll give you a little sense of what you can do before computers all right so here's my stratigraphic column from my field area Glen Embry I think is no longer with us but Glen was a very generous field geologist who had published on the high sea volcanic field tied to the Yellowstone hotspot and he was from Rick's College as it was called back in the day so Glen spent multiple days with me out in the field getting me set up so I was working with these toughs these ash flow tufts and following them in the field section after section after section a section is one square mile not very glamorous work just had a rock hammer Brunton compass and a topographic base and a bunch of pop tarts in my pack literally I'm from Wisconsin that was my diet at the time a bunch of pop cards to keep myself a lot and I was working with intersections of the Snake River plain where the Yellowstone hotspot used to be and these calderas that are buried underneath the Snake River plain but I was on the margin of the Snake River plain where you can actually see some of this you're like whoa ho ho I thought you were going to tell us about the future of Yellowstone what are you doing talking about yourself well really to understand the future of Yellowstone I think we need to go into the geologic past and to do that we need to go here and you're like why would you go here why wouldn't you just stay in Yellowstone Park and go deeper and deeper and deeper into the geologic past isn't that what you do with most volcanoes if I want to know about the history of Mount Rainier a different volcano a different kind of volcano I would look at deposits surrounding Mount Rainier going back thousands and hundreds of thousands and even millions of years why would I leave Yellowstone and go into Idaho where I was studying to learn the history of Yellowstone that doesn't seem to make any sense but it makes perfect sense for the many of you who know about this system the heat source that is now beneath Yellowstone Park hasn't always been in Yellowstone Park four million years ago the heat source was making the ash flow toughs that I was working on ten million years ago the ash the heat source was down here seventeen million years ago the heat source was in Northern Nevada so there's this migrating I'm not flipping you off there's a migrating heat source across southern Idaho making the snick over plain but of course it's not the heat source that's migrating it's the North American plate drifting over the top I assume most of you have been introduced to that concept so we're not going to do that let me pause right so for the kids and the brand-new people thinking about geology for the first time let's make sure we know what kind of volcano we're talking about and then we'll get back to our more advanced geological of discussion so there are three very different kinds of volcanoes on planet Earth shield volcanoes with low amounts of silica volcanoes that are of a different shape like Mount Rainier Mount st. Helens I'm biased to the Pacific Northwest you probably have a stratovolcano near where you live in other parts of the world higher silica values and then these super volcanoes don't look very harmful for hundreds of thousands of years they have the highest amounts of silica and you like that's just a hill big southern Butte in southern Idaho is the hill that's just a plug I should really be the most concerned about this yes because here we have eruptions that are continual essentially here we have eruptions every few hundred years that's the cycle of stratovolcano explosions but here we have cycles of what hundreds of thousands of years between supervolcano explosions and it's just a little dome like this for hundreds of thousands of years until we do have a supervolcano explosion we blow up the hill we blow up a bunch of surrounding real estate we make a caldera that's more than 30 miles across you know we have an explosion and I've got animations in the cosy for it and a few other things up my sleeve in the cosy fort so in case you're looking for a road map this morning some of this stuff cosy fort to look at some slides and some animations and some video clips and then live Q&A with you but what I want to stress here is that the caldera creates these ash flow Tufts on the flanks up to a hundred miles is a nice round number there's a hundred miles in on from both edges of the caldera kind of a halo of ash flow tough and those are lethal ash flow Tufts ignimbrite pyroclastic flows they all mean the same thing and so I was mapping these for million-year-old roughly ash flow Tufts from four million year old explosions that made four million year old calderas that you can no longer see why not why not because let's do this that's the cartoonish way to do it in geology 101 this is the Yellowstone Caldera we'll talk about ages in just a second and is this caldera now we'll get into it in a second this is the way to show it at the first order there's a trail of these calderas but I drew them in yellow I don't know if you can tell the difference between yellow and white from where you are but I drew them in yellow because all of these calderas are buried you can't see them anymore they've been buried in younger lava so if we draw a cross-section we can pick anywhere let's just pick my field area because I love myself deeply let's go from lighty hot springs where my field area in 1987 which is in the southern tip of the beaver head Mountains that's the north part of this cross section and let's dry this is a two-hour drive across the Snake River plain which is perfectly flat by the way and let's drive over the top of one of these Buried calderas and then let's show up at I don't know we could pick Rexburg if you want or Idaho Falls I went to school and lived in Pocatello that's where I met Liz by the way she's from Pocatello and that's where we're going for vacation in it and we can have spent time with family so going from north to south north to south you got it we're looking underground now this is a very cartoonish way to view of the Snake River plain so as you drive interstate 84 or interstate 86 if you're east of Twin Falls it's flat and there's a bunch of potato fields and it's basalt and yes craters of the moon is there but we're gonna save that till next Sunday but underneath the kilometer worth of basalt is all of this supervolcano material as flow tuff and if you can get down there deep enough there's the smoking gun there's the actual caldera that's the actual circle that is buried are you with me so far generally these calderas get older and older because of the tectonics that I'm choosing not to talk about this morning because we've done it a million times already if you're totally confused about why this pattern exists I guess you'll need to go back to our super volcanoes livestream or other geology programs about the Yellowstone hotspot okay so North American plate drifting over a stationary hotspot so we go from 17 million years ago until the hotspot being here today because of the moving tectonic plate all right so that's pretty much the end of geology 101 let's get more sophisticated now in more specific does it really look like this I know the calderas are buried but does it really look like Olympic rings or something in the overlap just just perfectly no and when I was doing my mapping and was publishing my thesis we didn't have any idea really about the dimensions and ways to map the look of those Peary calderas since 35 years ago we've improved that using tomography and other kinds of seismic studies to map that out so here's an example to show you how more complicated this pattern looks it doesn't look like this in real life it looks like this so here's one section I'll just let you kind of figure out where you are can I help you Yellowstone parks up here my field area Indian Creek oh yeah that's where I was I was near Indian Creek so what are you looking at you're looking at a map from I think this is from Lisa Morgan I can't remember I was hanging out with most of these people 35 years ago and many of them are still publishing it's kind of fun to see mark Anders and a bunch of folks but what you're looking at our dashed circles right that they do choosing a dashed line because it's buried but can you see that we're we're getting away from Olympic rings that are slightly overlapped and instead we're getting into a much different geometry I'm leading towards something remember I'm going to circle back and eventually no pun intended I'm going to try to actually talk about the future but if we realize this is a complexity that it's not just a marching line of circles I don't think we can say if you're looking for the first thing to kind of really sink your teeth into I don't think we can really say that the next Yellowstone supervolcano eruption is going to look like that I don't think we can say that and here's one of the reasons these calderas are not perfectly lined up and they don't even perfectly go Southwest to Northeast as you young in age let me build on that let's look at not only the so I'm going to get this out of here that's the future right so is there a Yellowstone Caldera you bet there is how about the second-oldest explosed no so this is the youngest explosion how about the one that happened before it and the one that happened for it can we know anything about those yes we've got those three calderas mapped out very carefully they're shallow enough they haven't been buried like the rest of these to know the last three explosions of the Yellowstone supervolcano system here's what it looks like he goes to the white board okay so have you seen a map like this before have you seen a dancing power line with a shadow good I hope you can ignore it so let me just pause for a second make sure you can see this and we can see what's going on okay so yes for the first time I'm giving you dates the last time there was a supervolcano explosion was 640 thousand years ago that's the same as 0.64 million right 640 thousand years ago and then before that 1.3 million years ago there was an explosion that was much smaller that's the green caldera the Henry's for caldera and then if we go back earlier than that the third most recent I don't know how to say this properly the third most recent explosion of the Yellowstone hotspot system the island park caldera which was a doozy 2.06 million years ago so if you're a math person right off the bat you're like well hold on I I thought I heard from all these articles that the Yellowstone system explodes every six hundred thousand years that's a nice round number every six hundred thousand years and I'll admit it hand up I'll admit it that's what I've been saying for a long time because when I had 35 years ago that was roughly the date that we had the Yellowstone Caldera the date we had when I was around 35 years ago as the lava Creek tuff which is from the most recent explosion was 600,000 years old well now as we know it's 640 thousand years old that's that's a big difference that's 40,000 extra years more precise dating now and so I'll back up what was my point yeah my point was if you just use this number that's out there a nice round number of 600,000 years and you listen to geology 101 what does the person say well this this system makes a supervolcano explosion every six hundred thousand years and by the way it's been six hundred thousand years and then they go well wait a minute no there's a there's a more precise date now six hundred forty thousand years and I thought I just heard that this thing goes every six hundred thousand years so we're overdue I don't think we can say that why well it's been six hundred and sixty thousand years between the Yellowstone Caldera former and the Henry's Fork caldera former and by the way here's the volume of material produced from the incredible super volcano explosion 640,000 years ago look at the lava Creek lava flows look at the Mesa Falls tuff in other words look at this second most recent event a third of the amount of material came out and then look at the third most recent explosion to make the island park called there that's called the huckleberry Ridge tuff many of you I'm sure part of it two and a half times the volume of the most recent explosion and it was 800,000 years between this and this and hang with me let's go down one more which I didn't put on what's the next oldest event it's more than four million years old so there's the number of years between the four plus million year old caldera and the huckleberry Ridge event so if you're looking for major messages major messages it's difficult to say anything definitive and therefore is like so you don't know so it's okay if I'm worried because you don't know you say you don't you can't you can't be definitive you can't prove that the things not going to Rupp tomorrow you're right we can't prove that but we can say something intelligent can't we based on just the last three events you know what I did last night as I was actually drooling and falling asleep as I was sitting there at the desk I don't know why I had to throw in the Drule thing that was not good I found a paper from 2002 so it's almost 20 years old it's not late-breaking news but I I think so highly of Michael Perkins and Barbara Nash at the University of Utah and they did in a scientific paper in 2002 there's the title of it you can find it online I found it and printed it out because I was so impressed I printed out the first few pages they did just what I was looking for I was going to kind of sit down and do the whole thing myself I wanted to just keep going back and get the best dates that we have to get a sense of the regularity is this a kaboom every six hundred thousand years is there's a Kabul and every eight hundred thousand years what dates do we have once we get back to these buried calderas and not the three calderas that we can still see in the Yellowstone Park area and so Barbara Nash I have talked about before because she has done an amazing job I assume with Mike as well I don't know Michael Perkins at all you only met Barbara once but they have this incredible database of tephra zuv ash deposits around the American West and maybe beyond and they run the chemistry and they get precise ages on these on these tephra sand they can work that out that's too complicated to look at but this is what I wanted I wanted two columns worth of Yellowstone supervolcano explosions realizing we're going all the way back to Northern Nevada I don't want to just talk about the last three events and make some bold statements about the future you can't do that statistically can you three events and say well here you know week from Tuesday we got problems oh and even if we go back 17 million years with the ash flow Tufts that are exposed on the margins we still can't totally come up with as precise a forecast as we want but what I did was go through each of these events jot down the best date that Barbara and Mike have from almost 20 years ago that's the most current information I have maybe these dates have changed a little bit and I don't know how I'm gonna do this it's not the sexiest way to present but I just I had my purple pen it feels nice in my hand a purple pen and I'm just gonna give you a little roll call well let's do it this way dramatic reveal what everybody's not walking this morning okay most recent supervolcano explosion from the Yellowstone system you know we're doing this from barbara nash and michael perkins data that looks familiar - right that looks familiar too correct these are the three most recent guys you know what I'm just want to double check of course we know the most about the most recent geology that's how this works but to really get a handle on this which nobody seems to be doing with these dopey videos I'm about to show you and they're not all dopey so I got to be careful I don't want to offend somebody can we go back further these are the best dates we have from past supervolcano explosions and I'll just show you the numbers in millions of years there's that crazy gap between huckleberry Ridge and the youngest of the Heisey volcanic field and we've got somebody watching now is kind of a Dustin Hoffman you know toothpicks on the floor I'm not mocking I'm sorry that was I wish I had that ability to look at these numbers and say well this is obviously uh a recurrence interval of a point Bob uh plus or minus so those are a lot of explosions what a few dozen in the last seventeen million years and I think we need that data set as opposed to just the last three events to figure out how concerned we should be and along those lines let me muddy the waters just a little bit more how are we doing nine thirty not bad here's I was working so fast last night I can't I don't even have credits for this I'm sorry this might be Lisa Morgan as well sorry if it's not look at the error these are pretty good so this is one tough near where I did my work in the high Z volcanic field the tough of Kilgore I got sick of that one following it around in the desert dodging rattlesnakes but there's the date plus or minus 0.5 million which translated is fifty thousand years so even these dates which are presented as you know here's what happened six point two seven million years ago you're like okay alright well there's error there's error of forty thousand years plus or minus there's error of thirty thousand years plus or minus and if you're in the research world you know you know there's error with all these dates I'm not saying it's worthless information of course it's not and these dates are way more advanced than they were thirty five years ago but anytime you come up with some sort of absolute age date depending on the technique you use and the geochronology you use there's there's error there's plus or minus and my only point including that is that we can't talk about the chances of an eruption you know December 10th 2020 because we have dates on these past eruptions plus or minus 40,000 freaking years and those are well dated another just sample of using Santa Dean's one with zircon again this a little sense of how you report these dates in a scientific journal you know what I'm saying right this is excellent work I'm not saying walk table they got all these errors this isn't correct I'm saying that I think you know what I'm saying from Mark Andrews who I remember from 35 years ago still publishing and he's sampling one of the peekaboo Tufts the peekaboo Idaho downhill skier from there what's her name oh no her name was Picabo Street I guess she was named was that her name I think she was named after the town of peekaboo but she's from Sun Valley whatever ok sidetracked so he's just sampling these are the different samples he has from the peekaboo ash flow Tufts and he's got these are the ages in millions of years and then you kind of average those together all right not my strength geochronology but just it's just an attempt to try to give you a sense of what goes into these numbers and how it's irresponsible irresponsible to tell people that my Yellowstone systems overdue what are you doing you're just trying to get people to click that's it how do you sleep at night so I've told you that I stopped at a master's degree and now I'm scolding people whatever the only published report that I have is in this journal it might if you're really into the Yellowstone system and more than you might ever want to know there's a nice volume here also from probably 15 years ago now put together by the Idaho Geological Survey press and there's one so my work as a master student under Dave Rodgers this is not mine but this is somebody else giving us a sense of the mantle plume we're going to go in the cozy for it in just a second the mantle plume beneath the area I didn't even bookmark it anyway I've got I'm one of the authors as well as others who worked with Rogers David Rogers and put this together by the way if you like my style probably the most influential no the most influential person in the way that I present and think and comprehend sciences is due to my former graduate adviser David Rogers so Dave thank you we're gonna have a big reunion in Pocatello this Labor Day weekend big one everybody coming back I think Paul link is retiring so we're gonna have a big blowout down there Pebble Creek and and the ski place and cancelled like everything else I think we should go to the cozy for because I got plenty there let me just pause hang on Patrick let me just pause and see if I got anything else that I was dying to share with you this might be worth it back in mod day back in the late nineteen eight thirty-five years ago this is how we showed the volume of supervolcano we didn't call them super volcanoes by the way sue solicit eruptions from the Yellowstone system compared to the volume of material with more common commonly known eruptions I don't even know who made that originally but we all used it and now it seems like it's more common to see this one which tells basically the same story but if you're if you're unfamiliar with the volumes of a super volcanic explosion compared to some of these others this is a good way to do it alright the wind isn't even picking up I swore I checked the forecast will be okay if you're worried about Pat and Karen's thing I've got the whole chalkboard anchored down I'm not concerned all right give me a second here box emic box is going back we're gonna go into the cozy fort and I have some things prepared for you I hope that helped a little bit and now we'll go to the horse's mouth we're gonna look at some junk but we're also going to look at some very valuable stuff including directly from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory and I don't understand who's driving the most recent engine of the USGS is misleading everybody that's a new thing from my point of view I don't know why that started who's trumping that up like they're hiding data don't trust them excellent scientists presenting information what's with this where does this come from don't trust the USGS give me a break and yeah I'll say it for some of this clown show stuff that exists online it it hurts those of us that are trying to present information in a reasonable way it drowns out what we consider to be valuable information and it's it's frustrating sometimes demoralizing other times and again you look at the number of people that digest this stuff oh my god so it's a it's a losing battle in many ways it feels like hang on now daddy's angry and he's not concentrating you know we've we've been very positive with all this stuff and that's a good thing we all need positivity and we will continue to be positive with these live streams but this manipulation of information to serve some other purpose is offensive in many ways you notice it takes me longer and longer to set up the coffee forked I don't know that's about got stuff hanging and threads and everything okay I got Patrick I've never had a Rainier cherry before Ray Rainier cherry this is like candy like nature's candy that was a premature sound by the way I hadn't even tasted it yet I knew it was gonna be so good and it is Thank You Evelyn well I feel like I need to share this with you I shared it with you yesterday but it's a fun way to get us into this this is a silent movie from Pierre the artist in Boston who is addressing some of this hype stuff and being tongue-in-cheek about what I might be doing here this morning sorry Patrick oh man it just I don't really have advice for you I guess the next time you read a young stone article and The Associated Press or whatever but maybe yeah maybe my biggest message is just let's learn more than just the last two million years worth of history let's use more than just those last three events to look to the future sasquatch okay thanks again Pierre you're a talented guy what's the weird part you know you don't you know any of these people so weird and cool all right let's go here before we look at some video clips or some local here beautiful place I know many of you have a very soft spot in your heart for Yellowstone you went there as a kid your parents took you there it's a rite of passage for many of us and of course these national parks bring back a lot of very personal feelings and memories and that's a big part of why we all love Yellowstone Park there's the most recent caldera what's the age not six hundred thousand six hundred and forty thousand years ago oh let's go to the professional diagram uh-huh what's going to happen yeah kaboom and and resurgent domes which I didn't mention but we'll talk a little bit about them getting breezy here in the cozy fort so are we talking about a cone volcano now we are not we're talking about a massive super volcanic event that appears to have they collapse structure and that's why the caldera formed so to just say everything blew up to make a caldera is not correct you collapsed the roof of the caldera caused you evacuate so much of the material and then there's these resurgent domes of rhyolite typically that come up since that time another look at yes all yellow stones the one with Old Faithful it's the one with the stinks like rotten eggs there's mud pots there's all sorts of interesting geochemistry going on and here's speaks for itself I guess it's what I did in the whiteboard right there's our three most recent calderas and they've included a couple of the lava domes another view another way to show the the the two older calderas besides the Yellowstone Caldera now the resurgent domes have been looked at very carefully over the last hundred years and you may not be aware but Yellowstone continues to inflate and deflate on the order of millimeters sometimes centimeters and so if you're gifted to be able to read this quickly the brown things down below are earthquakes the red line is the kind of cumulative total of earthquakes I can't even read these dates I should yeah in the last 50 years basically but I really want you to notice this black line so there's there's instruments that have been put on some of those research and domes within Yellowstone Park and between 1970 and 1987 when I was actually in the area there was a general uplift or inflation of those resurgent domes what's the scale here I can't read that quickly 22 millimeters per year of uplift and then reasons unknown the thing starts to deflate like a breathing animal and those research and don't within the park started to deflate between 1987 and 1997 at an average of 19 millimeters a year so there's lots of activity kind of on a smaller scale that's tells you this is an active system but we can't take something like this and make a bold prediction about the next colossal supervolcano can we so there is a little bit of cartoonish work and the cartoons have improved as we get more tomography and more sorts of geophysical evidence about the mantle plume and the fact that this is a bimodal volcanic system it's not just raya lights that are produced you also create the salts from deeper depths so this gives you a sense what are the colors here I'm not actually sure are the colors geyser basins are the colors actually telling you different kinds of lavas that have come out regardless I can tell you that what's the what's so the dashed circle is the most recent caldera right that's the big kaboom the big super volcano explosion 1000 cubic kilometers that there has been lots of lava coming to the surface basically between 160,000 and 70,000 years ago but not a big kaboom so that's a whole nother wrinkle to this if you talk about volcanic activity in Yellowstone Park it's not all the huge supervolcano events there's also these smaller basaltic flows these smaller rhyolite flows that don't even make sense to me I've got some photos that I found this morning that I'm totally stumped by but maybe you know more about obsidian flows and rhyolite flows but they're younger that I parent Lee as young as 50 59 thousand years ago within the Yellowstone Caldera oh I need to read this just back to our kind of men of rock series Ferdinand Hayden was on one of those great surveys and in 1872 an early written account of Yellowstone's earthquakes was given by Hayden in 1872 when his survey party was camped on the northeast shore of Yellowstone Lake we were this is Hayden now we were informed by mountain men that these earthquake shocks are not uncommon and at some season of the year very severe and this fact is given by the Indians as the reason why they never visit that portion of the country I have no doubt that if this part of the country should ever be settled and careful observations made it will be found that earthquake shocks are a very common occurrence well it has been settled and yes careful observations are being made we're going to visit the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory video in just a second with Mike Poland and there are monthly reports on seismic activity but maybe you're unaware that some of the big earthquakes in the area are not tied at all to the Yellowstone hotspot but instead tied to a more regional tectonic story of basin and rage extension so the Bora peak earthquake in central Idaho in 1983 normal fault the recent earthquake this spring on the Wasatch Fault or down there some place in Salt Lake normal fault facing the range extension Hebgen Lake 1959 that was a magnitude 7.4 earthquake right in the edge of Yellowstone Park not related to the volcano instead related to this accordion opening so even looking at earthquakes you need to parse out which our tectonic earthquakes in the Yellowstone area and which are truly earthquakes tied to the geyser basins and the read the resurgent dome activity etc this is the fault scarp a 22 foot high fault scarp from the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake and what I'm telling you in case you didn't hear it is that the ground shifted vertically that far side lifted 22 feet compared to the foreground or you can think of the foreground dropping 22 feet compared to the background but it was a normal fault that's the hanging wall in the foreground that dropped similar to the bar peak quake similar to many normal fault earthquakes that are in Nevada western Utah Southern Idaho etc and again I did my master's thesis on the intersection of the basin arranged normal faults and the normal faults tied to the down warping of the Snake River plain as the Yellowstone hotspot passes through so that's a significant event that's a tragic earthquake that killed almost 30 people it struck almost midnight in August of 1959 terrible event for those campers some of them with painful memories of that night back to the volcano this is a common way to do this and this is from a super volcanoes lecture that I put on YouTube last year Mount st. Helens 1980 total volume of ash and other kinds of material coming from that eruption one cubic kilometer long Yellowstone volcano if we picked the you see I rounded there and just said two million if we look at the huckleberry Ridge tuff the numbers speak for themselves this is not a normal volcano and what we were doing on the chalkboard was kind of looking at this Marching caldera business getting younger and younger as you go towards the north east away from northern nevada okay there it is before computers I don't know how I can't remember how I made these slides and there's that area where I was mapping three of the welded tufts or the ash flow Tufts tied to a three different calderas that were underneath that eastern Snake River plain somewhere at that time didn't know now we do know they're nested calderas underneath all boy from the archive hmm give me some of that damn get those shorts so that's my that's my setup water bottles and pop-tarts and a rock hammer and a map and that's what some of these rhyolitic welded tufts look like can't see the volcano underneath the Snake River plain but you can see these incredible deposits from these past Yellowstone supervolcano explosions and there's that intersection if you're unaware there's animate look at some time on Google Maps you'll see this crazy crazy intersection between these perfectly oriented Basin and Range mountains on both sides of the plain and they just disappear they just disappear into this volcanic swamp and then they come up on the other side so I was studying the interaction between those two systems and that's I forgot I had this so I so the blue is basalt covering the older Yellowstone Caldera z-- but the whatever that is pale yellow as is looking at the Rio lytic welded tuff there are bigger vog super volcanoes than Yellowstone ok I did this for the supervolcano talk just saying hey you know if you have a big explosion of the Yellowstone system there's the caldera in that black circle the ash flow Tufts are killing everything in the red zone about a hundred mile radius and then you've got 12 inches of air fall ash falling out of the sky on average and then one inch of ash falling out of the sky thousand miles away so I had these maps made will do them very quickly oh no this is this is an animation from a PBS program we did I don't know if I like it but they spent some time on it collapsed the caldera yeah that should be way more catastrophic than what they're showing they're showing cotton candy coming out of the ground but I guess the point is it's not a Mount st. Helens thing and here's some semi recent work to show that mantle plumes really are a thing for a while there geophysicists were saying I'm not even sure I believe that mantle plumes exist but here's some of this tomography work look at the depths look at how deep into the mantle these profiles are going this is not from direct observation of course but you can get a sense of that I don't like that they put a cone volcano for Yellowstone but that's just me yeah so here's these maps just starting 17 million years ago the Yellowstone hotspot made a caldera there uh-huh uh-huh right and each of those are buried by younger lavas but even so we can we have a decent feel for the size of those buried called arrows now this one I do like just talking about ash all directions all directions from a supervolcano event that's not an exaggeration not an exaggeration I really liked that one if we're talking about thousand cubic kilometres 2,500 cubic kilometers compared to Mount st. Helens you're going to get something like that so I did the same kind of thing talking about just imagining like where's all that ash from all these past events some of those past Yellowstone explosions have produced volcanic ash fall away from the Yellowstone hotspot but my gut feeling is there's a lot more Yellowstone related ash in the American West and we realize and maybe locally people have always just assumed it's from a local volcano but I think if we continue to sample and date and get some chemistry on those ashes we're gonna realize we're gonna see a bigger signature of super volcanoes across the American West and we currently realize we'll finish this from just some old animations I've used for years can't remember who made these I like how they show the collapse to form the caldera and they're showing there's there's different ways to show magma reservoirs and the certain depths of them but it appears they're kind of mid crustal reservoirs of magma so I like that part too what are they doing here oh yeah this could be one of those that 50 years from now we'll laugh at these but based on what we can understand from the deposits currently this is not a bad not a bad approach yeah oh that did actually I really like this one and then this one's crummy oh and then this one from a TV program Kabam splud am Oh given the impression that you know every six hundred thousand years and by the way it's been six hundred forty thousand years since the last one so pack your bags if nothing else I hope you've learned that that's incorrect to just leave that impression all right we got it we got it okay so the last thing in the cosy fort before we go to your questions I know it's 10 o'clock it's the top of the hour but you knew this was going to be a long one didn't you come on now it's Yellowstone and we have a record number of viewers 1,400 people watching live terrific let's start with one that I think is quality and if you're unaware I'm not paid by the USGS I know many of the USGS geologists out here in the Pacific Northwest they're all top-shelf hard-working honest scientists I'm not reading I'm not reading on a cue card now okay you got to take my word for it including Mike who visited last year and we had an interesting visit about how he's trying to continue maybe even had increased the amount of public communication because he knows about these battles of communicating the correct information so you might want to consider it subscribing to the USGS YouTube channel if you haven't already now there's 78,000 subscribers and you're like wow okay there's 78,000 people who watch USGS videos on a regular basis to get information directly from the horse's mouth well some of this garbage stuff I'm going to show you there's millions of subscribers okay I can't keep going in that direction so let me this is a monthly thing that Mike Poland does he's currently the scientist in charge at about Yellowstone Volcano Observatory let me give you a little sense of I think he's very effective in what he does here maybe you can agree or disagree hi everybody I'm Mike : the scientists in charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory and I'm coming to you from Yellowstone National Park for the June 1st 2020 update Yellowstone is open so it was a good chance for us to come and do a little bit field work do a little bit of maintenance on some of our monitoring stations but we were also fortunate enough to catch an eruption of steamboat geyser now steamboat just erupted on May 31st at about 6:20 3:00 in the morning it erupted so with a water phase that can be up to 300 or more feet high that lasts for tens of minutes and then after the water phase you get a very vigorous steam phase and that's what we're seeing right now the steam phase might last actually for just a couple of days and it's like a jet engine that gradually diminishes the geyser goes quiet then it starts bubbling again and we'll go into a new interrupted cycle so steamboat still as active as ever it's been doing ok you can watch that one on your own so he's not always at Yellowstone sometimes he's at his home office but recently especially since you just opened up they always start with a little bit of you know standing right there one of the geyser basins but let me skip ahead because then he goes to kind of a pre-recorded thing that's equally impressive and not only is it good information it's fresh you know these are these are this is the last month you know he just recorded that a few weeks ago there'll be another one in week and a half right on July 1st ish and so here's talking about plotting some data about temperatures of the geothermal system at Norris Geyser Basin that's just air temperature because the geyser is dry then there's increasing minor eruptive activity that culminates in a major eruption you can see the increasing temperatures through that minor activity now this cycle repeated itself five times culminating in major eruptions on May 8th May 14th May 19th May 23rd and finally May 31st so steamboat remains just as active as ever in terms of earthquakes there were 288 quakes located by the University of Utah seismograph stations the largest was a magnitude 3.1 on May 29th just five miles to the west of Norris Junction in fact there were three earthquake swarms that occurred in this area during the month the first was May 4th to the 5th when 12 events were located 39 events were located between May 22nd 23rd and I may 29 2014 that occurred May 9th to the 11th and involved 80 located events this is pretty average seismicity for the Yellowstone region where most seismicity occurs in swarms and if we zoom out a bit we can see that regional activity is continuing in Idaho and also in the Salt Lake City area these related to the tectonic earthquakes that occurred in March and these are not related to the Yellowstone system so that's getting information from trained scientists who have a job to do and to communicate their science now if you've been told to thumbs down that and that's not to be trusted you're being manipulated by somebody else you're being manipulated by somebody else then knock it off these are the people who know what they're talking about but had it with this other stuff speaking about their stuff let's look at a little bit of this eight and a half million views this one's been watched a quarter of a million times about Yellowstone this title called this supervolcano has scientists freaking out National Park and its picturesque Hot Springs lurks a monster of unimaginable proportions waiting in a very fitful slumber and ready to wipe humanity off the face of the earth directly under the National Park one of the most visited in the world lies a plume of liquid magma five miles deep Rahzel fed by a huge plume of molten rock that boils up from deep beneath the earth's crust the churning magma directly beneath Yellowstone is so voluminous that it regularly causes the entire National Park to rise and fall by inches at a time from time to time the pressure beneath Yellowstone gets to be too much in a volcanic eruption occurs and currently for whelmingly these are relatively minor and are comparable in size to a moderately sized traditional volcano however every six hundred thousand years or so the pocket of magma beneath the current and correct so much pressure that the entire park explodes out well your homework credibly violent events known as a supervolcano eruption such an eruption can have widespread consequences for the entire earth enveloping the planet in volcanic ash and plummeting global temperatures causing a small ice age which can decimate all life in North America though extinction is all but guaranteed we should thank our lucky stars that these super eruptions happen so rarely yet today scientists have confirmed that Yellowstone can and will blow its top in a super eruption by the end of this year 2019 or at any time in the next 400,000 years by discovering geological evidence of past Yellowstone eruptions scientists have been able to pinpoint three major eruptions with the first being 2.1 million years ago the second 1.3 million years ago and the third 630 thousand years ago this has led some scientists to predict that Yellowstone is likely to blow again in the next half million years or so meaning that it could happen as soon as tomorrow it could happen by the time you finish watching this video meaning that it could happen as soon as tomorrow it could happen by the time you finish watching this video or it could happen later today when you're on your way to the store boom you're trying to buy some snacks and instead you get the extinction of the human race point is Yellowstone is trying to kill all of us and it could happen at literally any time but as many scientists point out listen to me if that's some clown making a cartoon for a bunch of friends fine eight point three nine million subscribers what are we doing am I out of touch am I am I not understanding how new information is being passed along yeah I'm probably out of touch I just can't believe it touched a nerve obviously but I'm getting emails daily about Yellowstone about to erupt because of this clown and many many more I'm not even sure you the other ones at bookmark I'm too ticked off at the moment good god yeah there's three more lined up that are like that I can't I can't like you get the point the misinformation is worse than you think I think that's the message it's worse than I thought and as I finally get down to this level and realized that that's drowning out anything that we are doing from mainstream science that's why stop stop okay train boy and I need another cherry to calm down Evelyn thank you we'll do some live Q&A kidding me sorry Patrick I'm sorry I got one more thing can you imagine spending a career I'm not talking about myself now can you imagine spending a career working hard working diligently collecting data as accurately as possible never saying anything more than your data allows being as conservative of possible with a message if you ever get interviewed about your work and have thousands of people listening to you and then you got somebody sitting in their bedroom in their jammies making that stuff and millions of people are listening to it and I guess it's just a matter of opinion like they have their opinion we have ours whatever equal okay if you're new to us I don't want to keep in that vein so I'm hoping to just switch up the dynamic here I'm going to pop out the chat like a boss and if you're new to us we ask questions with the upper case I know normally that means you're screaming and you're upset but you're just trying to get your question to stand out a little bit for moi that's French and I'll try to answer as many as I can based on my background which you know is not David day by day in Yellowstone Park Patrick aged six hello Patrick does the size of the eruption change as the hotspot moves farther under North America is there a pattern wonderful question as always Patrick there is no pattern there is no pattern so I would love to report to you Patrick that as we get remember this is 17 million years ago until today that the eruptions are getting bigger and bigger that would be bad news right Patrick the eruptions are getting smaller and smaller actually this media report this this paper that came out in the last week said that an eruption here about nine million years ago was much bigger than previously believed and they quoted and they worked with some news geology reports so I don't doubt that there was kind of a breakthrough and understanding that some of the events back here are bigger than previously believed I think it's incorrect then just to say we're you know less worried or more worried based on what I've been talking about here so I like what you're doing Patrick most of us want to do that we want to take a bunch of random things and organize it what's the pattern here and sometimes there is no pattern or we don't have enough understanding to see the pattern Thank You Patrick for the question a shot at Jen good ok it's just water the outburst was 50% real 50% for entertainment value but I mean 50% real it's just water this episode of Nick from home on a Sunday morning Father's Day brought to you by Tanqueray imported London Dry Gin it's just water you gotta love it clown Matt some people like to hear about bad stuff it's easier to digest than facts and science there there is plenty of Matt thank you there's plenty of interesting psychology and sociology involved here and business let's be honest and business and I'm not trained in any of that so I try to make sense of all this and you know 35 years ago you know I'm talking to my aunt about what I'm doing out there in Idaho and she's like do they have McDonald's out there and Pocatello oh yeah they got two of them they got to McDonald's out there and and there's no comprehension of Yellowstone the the term supervolcano didn't exist and my point is my aunt was a wonderful woman very bright woman it just didn't exist in the national consciousness and now this is kind of mushroomed up I guess pun intended I don't know last 10 years maybe we're what's the future of this of this hand wringing over over this that it's not just Yellowstone it's many things now some things are worth okay that's not getting to current events here was the Yellowstone hotspot the source of the flood basalt flows in eastern Washington Oregon Mac's in a word yes the the fissures that the cracks that opened up and produced a bunch of flood basalts in the Inland Pacific Northwest match perfectly timing why with this hot spot here and these cracks began to form down here by the Yellowstone hotspot and work their way north so there is a relationship you got to show you the only rock samples I brought in for you today so this is what welded tuff looks like it's a beautiful Rock so well thank you Sam Zentner just happy Father's Day our happy dad day as he says people texting here so this is what high silica magma looks like after it high silica magma collapse make the call there this is long before the basalt comes in so the high silica rhyolite is here and then these samples I'm showing you are from my field area where you have this pyroclastic flow with all sorts of energy finally coming to rest and welding so this is not lava this is the reason it's very hard it's very hard rock difficult to break open even with a sledge but these are the rocks that you study on the margins of the Snake River plain to learn about past supervolcano explosions and this is also generally what it looks like from the most recent Yellowstone supervolcano eruption as well got sidetracked there but maybe I answered your question yeah Mack so there is a tie well has anyone looked at hot spots together as a clue to what's up in the mantle hot spots together there's we're still pretty clueless about what's going on in the mantle and from my point of view we'll and so if you're saying our hot spots kind of bunching together I'm not sure what you mean by the hot spots together as a clue but the newest development in the last 15 years is that there is a mantle plume coming from deep in the mantle maybe at the mantle core boundary that you can trace using the real data up through the man and coming at least to Yellowstone unclear about the other hot spots Gary why does the Snake River plain seem to curve north away from the hot spot trend Gary knows that there's if you're driving through southern Idaho and you get to Twin Falls or Glenns Ferry and then the drive accident continues this way it doesn't continue this way and this is just as flat you know mountain home I got that drive memorized that's to my in-laws right so we always drive from Ellensburg and Baker City blah blah blah and then you drop down to Ontario and then it's nice and flat so Gary's wondering about this extension it's always confused me thirty-five years ago Gary it was viewed as some sort of rift that is a failed rift I don't really know what the most recent view of it is but the point for today is there is not a hotspot tract that continues and hangs a right there there's no super volcano beneath Boise let's say a Joe Lena what's the actual size of the magma chamber hmm I don't know how to answer that you think I would Robert Smith from the University of Utah has been a longtime valued researcher with the Yellowstone system and I think he was involved in trying to come up with a 3d model with data about that magma chamber and I was just reading last night about much of the chamber is solid and not liquid and confused enough that I don't know how to answer that question I'm sorry Tom what caused the lava flows that covered the Snake River plain next Sunday we'll talk about craters of the moon national monument well here's the Snake River plain essentially down there and there are so this was a cross-section like we had before but there are normal faults basin and range extension basin and raised extension at least 35 years ago and I'm hoping to get updated on the craters of the moon in the Latin next week or so it was thought at least back when I was around that those normal faults continue essentially through or under the Snake River plain surface and feed younger lavas to the surface so I may read this week and realize I'm out of date but I think the idea is that many of the younger lavas are coming up along normal fault structures and not tied to the Yellowstone hotspot when it was their mark what's the what am i doing I'm about seven minutes behind real time mark what is the eruption frequency when based on the whole dataset all 17 million yeah I haven't done that I I just kind of showed you those numbers I mean that would be that was I kind of made that kind of insensitive joke about Dustin Hoffman but definitely definitely I can't find it but I I don't know I wrote down all those numbers and you would just run some stats on that I basically gave you remember with those those purple numbers those are all the known supervolcano ash flow tuff dates that we have and you would work with that date but I haven't done it Jeff do hot spots subside like la garita or Siberian traps I don't know Jeff I don't know how to explain other super volcanoes in the American West are there really hot spot trails with each of those I don't know if anybody knows that yet automatic scroll what else is new hang on hang on Patrick all right I'm gonna find this white sir here Calogero what technology is used to find the calderas underneath the basalt good question all I can say is geophysical work so whether that's studying how earthquake waves travel through the subsurface or I think there been some seismic surveys where you literally send out kind of artificial earthquakes and and map out how those waves are traveling through but there's no drilling that deep I don't think to get down to those buried caldera so it's all kind of cat scan like stuff involving seismic data but I'm it's not my strength there so I'm not totally sure thanks for the question fellow Schweitzer you must be in the Italian part huh Dave is the same hotspot responsible for the UK Lake District caldera I'm sure not Dave there are a couple of dozen hot spots that are known and if there is a caldera in the UK Lake District there must be because you're referring to it I don't know about a hot spot nearby but there must be a heat source there the Yellowstone history depending on who you talk to now but if you talk to some of us you can follow the hot spot from Yellowstone you can follow that history going back offshore of California 55 million years to large igneous province called so let's see I've talked about that a number of times priscila I don't understand what you're asking how far below is the cooler plate as it's abducts the Farallon oh I don't know what happened there rattling papers annoying me I so you are referring to a past live stream where we had the cooler plate subducting beneath the Pacific Northwest until about can we remember now until about 50 million years ago and then the Farallon plate started subducting and we had terrains coming in as well there's a lot going on in the last 17 million years which is the story we're talking about there's no influence of the subducting plates nearby there's been so much material added that by the time we start this story 17 million years ago we have a well-behaved Farallon plate subducting where it should be way offshore so I see what you're doing there I understand why you're doing it but the timing is wrong and there's no influence of a subduction zone at all in this last 17 million years Marlowe why is the Fisher from the hot spots only norther direction fishers from all I think they are going south as well but there's less exposure of those fissures Vik camp at San Diego State University has been doing a nice job with mantle plume org if you're looking for a new website to visit I believe that's Vic who put that together Vic camp and he seems to have good evidence for fissures going other ways instead of just north away from that 17 million year old hotspot the McNair the McDermott caldera Randy how deep did the flood basalts originate difficult for me to say there Randy I would think mid crustal levels so were maybe 10 15 miles down getting some repeat questions Adam are the toughs volcanic Tufts in Oregon and Idaho linked to hotspot volcanism it depends if we if you have your favorite tough volcanic tuff first thing I would do is look at the age if it's a tough that's in southern Idaho and it's less than 17 million years old it's got to be tied to Yellowstone if it's a tough that's in central Idaho that's 50 million years old to be tied to the Challis Magnus system which I've talked about in past live streams so I would instead of chemistry I was just tired to age and see if you can come up with the pattern the Tufts in Oregon I don't know that much about obviously I'm doing an Oregon question mark session next week but some of those Tufts in South Eastern Oregon might tied to that I enjoyed this book by the way just pictorially this morning at breakfast so thanks whoever sent that to me I forgot your name already sorry Deb is there a major faultline through Yellowstone that's it it's tough to say a major faultline goes right through Yellowstone Deb I wouldn't say that but there is this intersection so what fault is that that's a beautiful normal fault that's one of the youngest faults in the basin and range it's a normal fault it's south of Yellowstone anybody know I'm back sorry this is the Teton fault so if you're familiar with the Teton Range and Jackson Hole Grand Teton National Park U and D this Teton Fault has been making big earthquakes I forget the date now over the last I'm going to recently I can't remember let's say less than five million years I'm sure I'm wrong less than five million years the Teton Fault has been making big earthquakes and each time there's an earthquake on that normal funk the Teton fault the Jackson Hole side the valley side drops compared to the Teton side which lifts and there's considerable concern for the next earthquake on the Teton Fault similar to the normal fault that made the Hebgen Lake earthquake in 1959 magnitude seven point four and I'm guessing there are other normal faults up here as well I think it's more than against I think I know that so there's this so there are normal faults both north and south of Yellowstone but to connect the dots and say there's a major fault going through Yellowstone now that I am thinking the answer's no thanks for the questions let's do a few more it's 10:30 I'm at 10:20 now I'm about eight minutes behind scrolling are the geysers within Yellowstone just boiling groundwater that's about my knowledge yes cold water from the nearby mountains filtering in in the subsurface beneath Yellowstone Park heating up by the hot spot and then geyser activity I don't know more than that but you need to get those geyser basins as I understand it you need a water supply you need faults to concentrate the water up and you need a heat source there are many specialists who study geyser activity not me Steven do super volcanoes have to be directly related to a hot spot currently studying the conflict legree Vesuvius shared magma volcanic zone which has been given a causing which has been giving given as causing the extinction of Neanderthals my short answer would be you need to tie super volcanoes to hotspots Steven however I gave that super volcanoes lecture last year online I'm happy with it but I said one thing boldly which is incorrect I said humans have never seen a super volcano erupt and I was using the 70,000 year old to powell no can't remember which volcano was the erupted 70,000 years ago and all my friends from New Zealand said you know come on is it top hole super volcano which is not in the middle of a continent and I'm not sure as a mantle plume and yet was a significant supervolcano so and I've already commented that even in the Cascades their supervolcano like events that dwarf regular cone eruptions so I'm less confident that every supervolcano has a hotspot beneath it to get around to your question I did talk to Emily kohonen on the podcast that I have and she's a PhD student at Portland State who's been studying calderas while she was studying about calderas or more just picture Gord basalts and things like that so there are some young students who are really into this story especially from Oregon State University as I understand it and they're advancing our knowledge significantly three more and we're done yeah just another note many of you are asking about Oregon and again I'm going to do Oregon geology question mark next week there are some solicit eruptions in other words super volcano eruptions that are about the same age as some of the early Columbia River basalts ABBA's and we don't have that up in Washington we have the German chocolate cake the flood basalts but we don't have rhyolites that match an age so you're all asking something and it's interesting you're all asking about a tie between explosions of rhyolite and dassault that's not on the trend of the hotspot and I'm excited to learn what I can about that thank you ok scrolling down to live going back to just grab a couple more and we're done Evelyn age 7 Jerry's age 8 was the Island Park caldera eruption so big because it hadn't erupted in a long time that's how we'll finish Evelyn thank you for bringing it back so Evelyn's noticing that we have three of the most recent supervolcano explosions in Yellowstone they're not the same size and the one in Blue Island Park caldera was clearly much much larger than the others and Evelyn then is just taking excellent notes or a very clever oh I already erased it oh no I rubbed it off by mistake so Evelyn's saying if you have to go back to older than four million years ago to find the next oldest explosion was this one so big just because it had to wait so long and I don't know how to answer your question except to say sounds like good logic to me Evelyn it sounds like good logic to me that a few wait more than two million years between super volcano eruptions it's gonna be a big one I don't know how you would draw another conclusion except to say I don't know maybe there were a bunch of eruptions three or three and a half million years old that we just haven't found yet well that could be true there could be a caldera and all the ash flow tuff completely buried beneath the eastern Snake River plain from let's say 3.5 million years old but since we don't have any of that data all we can work with is the available geologic evidence the available geologic rocks the geologic dates the geologic chemistry's and put a story together we all know don't we that geology is using fragmental evidence we never have the full news paper to read we just have little pieces of the newspaper and we're trying to put a story together based on just those few fragments that we can find thanks for that final question Evelyn eight-six a toast to you and a look ahead to next week I smashed my Rainier cherry by mistake so I revealed next week scheduled at the top of this program and now we're doing it at the end as well our next see some of you Tuesday night at six o'clock that's for sure I think it's supposed to be really hot like over 90 but if it's calm and I can find some decent cell coverage somewhere I might go someplace but I also just might go to the geology building and enjoy the air-conditioning so that's Tuesday night Wednesday night Bayley Willis in early Washington geologists who I don't know anything about but I've been sent a bunch of links and I will enjoy putting that together as I have the other early geologists programs Oregon geology huh I'll share a few things that I know mainly from Marlene Miller's excellent roadside geology book second edition but I'm be looking for tips from many of you Oregon viewers as well Saturday morning separate from Thursday I'd like to talk specifically about cinder cone volcanoes what are they where can we find them in the Pacific Northwest and what stories might they be telling us and finally the grand finale of this livestream series craters of the moon in Idaho and if you missed the inside joke way back in March somebody asked about craters of the moon and I flipped out in a positive way because I said hold it right there I don't care what the topic is I don't care what group I'm talking to back when we used to talk to live groups there'd always be questions about craters of the moon like it left such an impression and craters of the moon national monument is out there by itself it's not on the way to anywhere really and yet if you if you invest the time and the energy to get out there it is a cool place and it's quite close to my former mapping area that I was talking about today so I haven't physically been to craters of the since 1988 but I'm looking forward to updating myself and that would be a nice way to finish out our program and by the way I think it would be dumb just to totally stop these live streams we've built such a nice community I don't know how many subscribers and all that not as much as that clown but plenty and there's such a nice warm group of people here so I'm kind of trying to decide how to continue I do want to continue but I can't I can't keep these five live streams per week I can't keep that schedule and Liz is just done with school and I'm done with my teaching school for that for a while and it's time to go visit family and other things but I'll I'll have Freddie the phone with me and that's all I need to livestream so just letting you know that I'm trying to kind of just think about do I do things spontaneously when I feel like I have cell coverage and a cool thing to share do I set up some sort of schedule although I don't really want to set up the schedule for myself and commit myself to that but there will be more live streams after next Sunday I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do it now a toast to you here's to your health and your commitment to learning geology whether you wanted to or not here's to all of us hoping to god we don't go the wrong way again with this virus thing and here's to all your family and friends and I'll see you on Tuesday night signing off from Ellensburg Washington USA it's been a pleasure to be with you this morning enjoy the rest of your Sunday and Monday and Tuesday morning and I'll see you Tuesday at 6 p.m. I love you goodbye
