Yellowstone Volcano Update — June 2023 (Old Faithful doesn't always empty)

Old Faithful one of the icons at Yellowstone National Park and probably the most famous Geyser in the world but how Faithful Is it really well that's the question we're going to tackle on today is June 1st 2023 update of the Yellowstone volcano Observatory now remember if you enjoy content like this please be sure to like And subscribe down below we can bring you more videos in the future hold Faithful is actually not faithful in three different ways today interrupts every 94 minutes give or take about 10 minutes or so that happens 98 of the time the other two percent of the time there's just 65 minutes between eruptions that happens after very short duration eruptions almost like Old Faithful doesn't completely empty itself when that happens there's a shorter time between eruption so if you happen to be here and see it maybe an unimpressive eruption wait around 65 minutes or so and you might see a more impressive one another way in which Old Faithful is not entirely faithful isn't looking over the decades now when Old Faithful was first scientifically documented in the 1870s it was erupting every 60 to 70 minutes but as we just discussed now it's every 94 minutes what happened up until the 1950s that 60 to 70 minutes was maintained but there were a series of earthquakes that caused the time period to lengthen the 1959 magnitude 7.3 hemian Lake earthquake The 1975 Norris earthquake 6.1 and the 83 Borah Peak earthquake in Idaho that was a magnitude 6.9 after that the Old Faithful eruption interval increased by almost 10 minutes so that earthquake sort of changed the plumbing system a little bit and can cause the interval between eruptions to lengthen or short a third way in which Old Faithful is not entirely Faithful is looking over centuries there's actually evidence that trees were growing in the Old Faithful mountain now clearly nothing's growing there today Fen for good reason nothing can grow in all that hot water so the fact that there were trees growing at one time means that old Faith must not have been erupted by dating those trees we know that they grew from about 650 to 800 years ago so there was a time period hundreds of years ago when Old Faithful must not have erupted at all now this corresponds to a time period of great drought in the west and Southwestern U.S in fact it affected many indigenous cultures at the time so it appears that during time periods of drought when there's not much water available Old Faithful might go completely dormant not erupting at all this is actually reasonable given what we see today when rivers are running high and there's a lot of water the interval between Old Faithful eruptions is a little bit shorter than if the rivers are lower and there's not as much water only by a few seconds to minutes but water availability clearly makes a difference well that's the story of Old Faithful now let's talk about what happened during the month of May in terms of seismic deformation and geyser activity in Yellowstone there's been some interesting hydrothermal activity in the area of geyser Hill which is near Old Faithful over the past few weeks there's been a general increase in the temperatures of the features and in fact a new hydrothermal feature formed unfortunately right next to the boardwalk and it's thrown some mud and hot water onto the boardwalk so the portion of the trail there has been closed in order to ensure visitor safety this is not unlike what happened in 2018 in the exact same area when we saw increase in temperatures some new features formed and that was the year of a rare eruption of ear spring that eruption was nowhere that because it brought Decades of human garbage up to the surface coins hats a cinder block cans with pull tabs even a baby's pacifier things that had either been thrown in or fallen in over the years this really emphasizes the dynamic nature of Yellowstone's hydrothermal system these systems are always changing and so the kinds of activity that we see this year 2018 that kind of thing happens all the time throughout the park so we'll report on this further in the months to come as it evolves turning now to earthquake activity we've seen background levels of activity throughout the month of May when the University of Utah located 148 earthquake events the largest event of the month was a magnitude 2.8 earthquake that occurred in late May about halfway between the Norris geyser Basin and Mammoth Hot Springs area in the area near Grizzly Lake this has been an area of constant seismicity for the better part of the past year during the past month 34 earthquakes were added to the Swarm activity in this area there was also a swarm to the northeast of West Yellowstone there were 28 earthquakes that occurred as part of this one there were two other swarms during the month both down by West thumb near Yellowstone Lake one of these occurred on May 5th there were 19 events and then another 12 events occurred on May 29th this is pretty common activity for Yellowstone the Swarm activity is about 50 percent of all earthquakes that are located in the region over the course of a given year so background levels of seismicity turning now to ground deformation this is the last two years of vertical deformation at the White Lake GPS station which is on the east side of the Caldera the sour Creek resurgent Dome each one of these blue dots is one day of data and downward Trends indicate subsidence while upward Trends indicate uplift there is an overall trend of subsidence at this site as we've seen since 2015 at this particular site the Caldera has been overall subsiding by a few centimeters per year about an inch or so per year that's interrupted during the summer months by a little bit of uplift as water from snow melt and runoff sort of Puffs the ground up almost like a sponge that gets wet and then after the summer months we see a resumption of the substance we might be seeing the turnaround to a little bit of uplift just now and that's occurring as all of that runoff from a really heavy snow year starts to percolate into the subsurface we see the same sort of patterns at Old Faithful which is on the west side of the Caldera and the Mallard Lake resurgent Dome over the course of the last two years there is an overall subsidence you can see it really well here from October of 2022 to the current times and we might start to be seeing that reversal now into the summertime substance pause or possibly a little bit of uplift as that groundwater percolates into the subsurface and now looking at the Norris geyser Basin we've seen not a whole lot of change over the last couple of years there's that summertime uplift in 2022 and then since October of 2022 there's been about two centimeters that's less than an inch of subsidence we haven't seen much in the way of other changes except for some snow storms during the winter that covered the antenna and caused these brief periods of artificial substance these are all artifacts finally turning to everyone's favorite guys are Steamboat guys are the tallest Geyser in the world in Norris geyser Basin we finally got the temperature sensor back online in May unfortunately the temperature sensor itself was not working but that was corrected right at the end of the month in time to record some minor activity of the geyser now looking back at past records that we were able to collect recently we saw that the guys are erupted on March 11th and it also erupted on May 7th so there have been four eruptions of the geysers so far this year and with this sort of minor activity we're seeing now it looks like the geyser is still active and so we can expect an eruption perhaps in the days and weeks to come hopefully we'll see an eruption here coming in June well that's it for the June 1st Yellowstone Volcano Observatory update please like And subscribe down below if you'd like to see more content like this and if there are any questions you have you can feel free to email us anytime our address is yvo web Team all one word at usgs.gov we'll be back next month so stay tuned stay safe stay healthy and we'll see you next time bye-bye foreign [Music]

Channel: USGS

Views: 362,206

Keywords: usgs, science, Yellowstone Volcano, YVO Monthly Update, Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, volcano, earthquake, seismicity, GPS, ground deformation, Steamboat Geyser, Old Faithful, Yellowstone national park geysers, geysers, yellowstone geysers

Id: pblfg8EMcks

Length: 7min 26sec (446 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023