In the visualization of Yellowstone Lake above, black arrows show thermal fluid movement, and chestnut arrows show thermal fluid moving along brown fault lines. “What we can see is how some of these faults actually bring water to the surface,” Finn said.
You can think of this complex hydrothermal plumbing system like a city infrastructure, with all the pipes carrying water through the landscape. And it’s important to understand how it works because there’s a lot of geological activity beneath Yellowstone. “There’s not too much worry right now that we’ll see a volcanic eruption from Yellowstone in our lifetime — it’s not one,” said Michael Poland, chief scientist at Yellowstone Volcano. The system is on that edge. observatory and a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey, who was not involved in the study. “But what many people don’t fully appreciate is that hydrothermal explosions – essentially steam explosions – are also an important hazard.”
These happen about once a year, as water vapor accumulates underground until the soil above emerges like a pimple, rocking far and wide. About 13,000 years ago, one of these explosions left a bay on the north side of Yellowstone Lake more than a mile wide. “It’s the largest explosion crater on the planet that we know of,” Poland said. “There could be some big steam explosions in Yellowstone. So understanding more about these hot water recirculation patterns is really important to understand more about that kind of danger. ”
Maps are also useful when looking at geothermal energy or using Earth’s natural warmth to generate electricity or heat homes. Such energy extraction is illegal within Yellowstone itself, but if it were mined nearby, Idaho, that could affect hydrothermal activity in the park. “There are examples around the world of geysers that have gone silent when geothermal energy is harnessed nearby,” says Poland. “But we don’t know what the hydrothermal system is like [in Idaho] connected to Yellowstone. So this kind of thing starts to give us some clues about how the system works, how the system is interconnected. ”
The geothermal industry already has a good idea of the active areas for energy extraction; they used a method similar to the one from this study, just with instruments on the ground that image directly below them. But for scientists trying to study geothermally active bands of terrain, a helicopter offers a wide field of view. “It provides a spectacularly comprehensive view of the hydrothermal systems of this very famous volcanic region, and I hope that it prompts further studies of other systems that may be revealed. like that,” said geophysicist Philip Wannamaker of the University of Utah, who was not involved in the study. “They’re breaking through on that front.”
Understanding how Yellowstone’s groundwater mixes is also an important missing piece of research into the many microorganisms that live in the park’s 10,000 hot springs. Each spring has a unique chemistry based on the special water bubbling into it, which has created some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. The hot springs contain many species of organisms that live not by photosynthesis from the sun above, but by chemical energy from below, similar to how bacteria live on sulfur in the deep sea hydrothermal vents.
