Thinking of Yellowstone
24/04/15 05:24
I grew up with Yellowstone National Park in my back yard. Not literally, but we lived north of the park. To get to Yellowstone Park by driving, we could either go 30 miles to the west to the town of Livingston and turn south to the North entrance at Gardiner or head over to Red Lodge and take the winding road to the heights and on to Cook City. But our most common method of going to the park was to get in an airplane and head straight up the Boulder Valley to the Slough Creek divide and into the Park. I got to ride along on a lot of flight seeing tours for visitors. The Upper and Lower Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is spectacular from an airplane. Yellowstone Lake is impressive from any point of view. The steaming Mammoth terraces and Norris geyser basins are easy to see from the air. And, when your timing is right, Old Faithful is equally impressive.
My father and a friend once took a jeep up over that divide and drove into Yellowstone through the roadless country that these days is a wilderness area. There was a little shovel and axe work to clear the path, but there were no physical obstructions such as cliffs or drop offs that prevented their trip.
So I understand people who live in the shadow of volcanoes. The beauty of the mountains and the setting make a great place to live and the slowness of geological time means that the threat of an eruption seems so remote that it is easy not to think about it.
The North America tectonic plate under Yellowstone is moving at a rate of almost an inch a year and the pools of magma beneath the surface sort of slosh in that movement. Earthquakes are common, but most of them are very small and don’t really cause much damage. The giant earthquake in 1959 caused the side of a mountain to create a dam on a river and there were several fatalities in a campground that was buried in the rock, but that is the only event in my lifetime that was of the scale to make people think about the danger of living near such a volcano.
The bottom line is that today, living much farther from Yellowstone in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I’m not far away enough to escape the dangers of a super eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano. Scientists estimate that in a big eruption, Yellowstone would eject 1,000 times as much material as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Since we had ash enough to coat most surfaces 1,200 miles downwind from Mount St. Helens in 1980, when we lived in North Dakota, the closer eruption downwind and much closer to Yellowstone pretty much means that we’d be buried in ash after a major Yellowstone eruption. The bentonite mining to our northwest is the excavation of ash from an earlier eruption of volcanoes in north-central Montana. A Yellowstone eruption would pretty much bury us all in that mixture of greasy, ashy stuff.
Of course if there really were to be a super eruption in our lifetimes, we’d be pretty small scale. Such an eruption would be a global disaster, changing weather patterns and affecting life all around the world.
Thoughts of a Yellowstone super eruption, however, don’t occupy much of my mind. After all, Yellowstone has been sitting there, spewing steam and rumbling with tiny earthquakes for at least 17 million years. Recent studies have enabled scientists to get a better picture of the shape of the various pools of magma in the upper crust, lower crust and even beneath the mantle of the earth. They have a much clearer idea of what lies 10 to 50 miles beneath the surface than was the case of earlier generations of people who studied the earth’s geology. Computers aid in giving graphic representations of the various pipes and pools that lead to the earths molten core. This more complete picture of the dynamics of the area, however, don’t really aid scientists in making predictions about a possible eruption.
Not long ago, the rising dome of magma beneath the lake was being measured and studied and there were thoughts that it might be the precursor of an eruption, but as the dome recedes a bit, it seems that perhaps the rising and falling of the dome is more frequent than previously thought and simply not known or recorded because we have better instruments to observe than did previous generations. Floating in a boat on the surface of the lake, it is easy to be completely unaware of what is going on beneath the lake’s bottom.
When I have the opportunity to go back to Yellowstone, I am eager to look a the park. One of the things that interests me is how events on the surface change the appearance of the place. The 1988 and 1989 fires were so intense and hot that I expected to see a wasteland when I returned after those events, but the land recovered much quicker than I expected. There were lush green hillsides where I thought the soil had been sterilized by the heat of the fires and new vistas opened up to see things where before all I had seen were acres of lodgepole pine. Now, decades later, many of the standing snags have fallen and though there is plentiful evidence of fire, the evens that seemed so big at the time seem to be already fading from memory.
I don’t lose any sleep worrying about Yellowstone. It remains, as it has been for all of my life, a place of great recreational potential. Paddling a canoe along the shore of the lake or hiking a backcountry trail offer opportunities for solitude and renewal. It isn’t hard to get away from the crowds if you know how. The unique geothermal features are fascinating and worthy of a look. The waterfalls and canyons are glorious beyond words to describe.
Just as it did when I was a child, Yellowstone continues to call me and I know I will return again and again.
My father and a friend once took a jeep up over that divide and drove into Yellowstone through the roadless country that these days is a wilderness area. There was a little shovel and axe work to clear the path, but there were no physical obstructions such as cliffs or drop offs that prevented their trip.
So I understand people who live in the shadow of volcanoes. The beauty of the mountains and the setting make a great place to live and the slowness of geological time means that the threat of an eruption seems so remote that it is easy not to think about it.
The North America tectonic plate under Yellowstone is moving at a rate of almost an inch a year and the pools of magma beneath the surface sort of slosh in that movement. Earthquakes are common, but most of them are very small and don’t really cause much damage. The giant earthquake in 1959 caused the side of a mountain to create a dam on a river and there were several fatalities in a campground that was buried in the rock, but that is the only event in my lifetime that was of the scale to make people think about the danger of living near such a volcano.
The bottom line is that today, living much farther from Yellowstone in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I’m not far away enough to escape the dangers of a super eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano. Scientists estimate that in a big eruption, Yellowstone would eject 1,000 times as much material as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Since we had ash enough to coat most surfaces 1,200 miles downwind from Mount St. Helens in 1980, when we lived in North Dakota, the closer eruption downwind and much closer to Yellowstone pretty much means that we’d be buried in ash after a major Yellowstone eruption. The bentonite mining to our northwest is the excavation of ash from an earlier eruption of volcanoes in north-central Montana. A Yellowstone eruption would pretty much bury us all in that mixture of greasy, ashy stuff.
Of course if there really were to be a super eruption in our lifetimes, we’d be pretty small scale. Such an eruption would be a global disaster, changing weather patterns and affecting life all around the world.
Thoughts of a Yellowstone super eruption, however, don’t occupy much of my mind. After all, Yellowstone has been sitting there, spewing steam and rumbling with tiny earthquakes for at least 17 million years. Recent studies have enabled scientists to get a better picture of the shape of the various pools of magma in the upper crust, lower crust and even beneath the mantle of the earth. They have a much clearer idea of what lies 10 to 50 miles beneath the surface than was the case of earlier generations of people who studied the earth’s geology. Computers aid in giving graphic representations of the various pipes and pools that lead to the earths molten core. This more complete picture of the dynamics of the area, however, don’t really aid scientists in making predictions about a possible eruption.
Not long ago, the rising dome of magma beneath the lake was being measured and studied and there were thoughts that it might be the precursor of an eruption, but as the dome recedes a bit, it seems that perhaps the rising and falling of the dome is more frequent than previously thought and simply not known or recorded because we have better instruments to observe than did previous generations. Floating in a boat on the surface of the lake, it is easy to be completely unaware of what is going on beneath the lake’s bottom.
When I have the opportunity to go back to Yellowstone, I am eager to look a the park. One of the things that interests me is how events on the surface change the appearance of the place. The 1988 and 1989 fires were so intense and hot that I expected to see a wasteland when I returned after those events, but the land recovered much quicker than I expected. There were lush green hillsides where I thought the soil had been sterilized by the heat of the fires and new vistas opened up to see things where before all I had seen were acres of lodgepole pine. Now, decades later, many of the standing snags have fallen and though there is plentiful evidence of fire, the evens that seemed so big at the time seem to be already fading from memory.
I don’t lose any sleep worrying about Yellowstone. It remains, as it has been for all of my life, a place of great recreational potential. Paddling a canoe along the shore of the lake or hiking a backcountry trail offer opportunities for solitude and renewal. It isn’t hard to get away from the crowds if you know how. The unique geothermal features are fascinating and worthy of a look. The waterfalls and canyons are glorious beyond words to describe.
Just as it did when I was a child, Yellowstone continues to call me and I know I will return again and again.