Yellowstone Hydrothermal Explosion

I must confess that there are some things I really try to avoid, and mechanics is one of them. Without going into any of the gory details about what’s been going on with my vehicles lately (and how I have had to spend far too many hours with greasy hands), I also discovered that it was time to get the oil changed in my truck.

This is surely one of things which I no longer like to do, so there I was: sitting at the express lube facility at 7:30 am when they open. The oil change dude offered me a newspaper to read while I was waiting. It turned out to be the Grants Pass Daily Courier, which I have to say I have not spent much time looking at for a very long time. But what the heck, I had to do something for the forty-five minutes I was gonna be stuck there.

I was flipping through the paper and at the bottom of page 5 was an article on a 23 July hydrothermal gas explosion at Yellowstone National Park. I probably should have known about this earlier, but I’ve been busy with so many other things; including trying to get the last of the editing done on Marker Bed so I can get the damn thing published (hoping, again, in time for Christmas, but we’ll see). Click here for an index of earlier posts regarding volcanoes.

Anyway, it looks like the recent explosion was caused by a blockage in the plumbing system in what’s called “Biscuit Basin,” an active hydrothermal area and a couple miles north of Old Faithful — arguably the most famous geyser in the park.

This plug caused an increase in pressure, which led to the eruption. According to the article, nobody was injured, although some were scared and ran. (As an aside, it’ll be interesting to follow the inevitable lawsuits that will somehow blame the National Park Service for their obvious negligence in allowing the blockage in the volcano’s plumbing.)

Feel free to go to YouTube and type “Yellowstone Explosion” into the search engine if you want to see video coverage of the event. I couldn’t bear to subject my fragile mind to the warning, but of special interest may be the clip where Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson — two leading volcanologists — apparently tell us we’re all gonna die…

The Yellowstone super volcano is one of the earth’s truly incredible volcanoes. It has had some amazing eruptions in the past. Click here for a brief discussion of what are called “Super Volcanoes” (of which Yellowstone would likely qualify as the earth’s foremost example).

Along with blowing the massive hole in the Rocky Mountains as the North American plate moves across the hotspot (see the above post for before and after Lidar images), it has left behind calderas measuring tens of miles across in past eruptions. These are truly earth-shattering events, and nothing that anyone, even a nutjob like myself, wants to see happen.

Will the Yellowstone Supervolcano experience a major eruption again in the future? Absolutely. Is there any way we can predict when that eruption will happen? Sadly, there is not. All we can do is look at how often it has erupted in the past, and try and project a future timeline. From that sort of study, it looks like it’s due. Oops.

(By the way, if you get a chance, take a look at the disaster movie 2012, and check out the scene where Woody Harrelson is literally blown away in a major eruption at Yellowstone while live-streaming the event. No matter what, I really doubt that the hero would be able to escape with his kids and estranged wife (and her boyfriend) in a recreational vehicle with ejecta falling all around them. Just another example of Hollywood doing what it does best.)