Guest Column

You can celebrate Yellowstone’s birthday worry-free

By Erin Campbell
Posted 3/1/22

Yellowstone National Park is celebrating its 150th birthday this March! Yellowstone was established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, and as any fan of geology knows, it was created …

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Guest Column

You can celebrate Yellowstone’s birthday worry-free

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Yellowstone National Park is celebrating its 150th birthday this March! Yellowstone was established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, and as any fan of geology knows, it was created to preserve the area around the Yellowstone volcano.

Much of Yellowstone National Park sits atop an active volcano, and it has enjoyed eruptions, lava flows, faulting, and ground movement over the past 2.1 million years. The rock record preserves three major explosive eruptions from the Yellowstone area, which created giant calderas. The first was the largest, erupting 2,450 kilometers of rock and ash about 2.1 million years ago. The most recent eruptions, between 180,000 and 70,000 years ago, were thick lava flows rather than catastrophic caldera-forming eruptions. 

Yellowstone will erupt again, but rest assured that the myth of an imminent “supervolcano” eruption is just that — a myth. Yellowstone is not “overdue” for an eruption, because volcanoes do not erupt at regular intervals: They erupt when magma moves into the chamber beneath the volcano. That magma may escape through fissures in the crust and pour out gently as lava flows, or burst through the surface as violent explosions. If either of these occur, we will have plenty of warning, as Yellowstone is under constant surveillance by the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO). The YVO is part of the U.S. Geological Survey, but involves researchers from around the country, including two hazards geologists from the Wyoming State Geological Survey.

So how is Yellowstone monitored? When magma starts to move beneath the volcano, it creates a series of earthquakes. YVO scientists have established seismometers throughout the volcanic system to record those earthquakes; you can view recent earthquakes here: https://quake.utah.edu/earthquake-center/quake-map.

Additionally, when magma starts to collect beneath the volcano, the surface will rise, and when that magma moves elsewhere or erupts, the surface will subside. We may also see changes in topography as active faults move. All of these changes at the surface are monitored via satellite using GPS (Global Positioning System) and InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar), which are high-resolution techniques that measure ground deformation continually and over long periods of time.

If you celebrate Yellowstone’s milestone birthday this year by visiting the park, you can do so worry-free, knowing that you won’t be surprised by an eruption.

 

(Erin Campbell is the director of the Wyoming State Geological Survey and the state geologist. She is based in Laramie.)

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