A volcanic eruption at Yellowstone is unlikely anytime soon, but evidence is growing that a violent hydrothermal, or steam, explosion is possible.
Mount Ontake in Japan rises 3,067 meters above sea level — a windswept giant standing head and shoulders above densely forested hills. This ancient volcano is a popular trekking site. A trail traverses its ash- and boulder-strewn ridges. There are several huts and a shrine. On September 27, 2014, hikers took advantage of a blue sky and gentle wind. At 11:52 a.m., over a hundred of them stood on the summit, eating snacks and taking photos. Disaster struck with little warning.
The tempo of hail quickened, as millions of rocks came down — most smaller than baseballs but some as large as beach balls. More and more people fell. The ones that happen at active volcanoes are called phreatic explosions. They occur when underground water is suddenly heated by magma or gases. But similar steam explosions, called hydrothermal explosions, can happen in areas without active volcanoes. Like Ontake and White Island, destructive force comes from water expanding into steam.
But Morgan is getting a clearer picture of the triggers, and whether predicting the timing of these explosions might be possible. Exploring the bottom of Yellowstone’s largest lake, she and her colleagues have discovered a restless landscape dotted with hundreds of previously unknown hot vents, some of the world’s largest hydrothermal explosion craters and the brittle geologic pressure cookers that could one day unleash new explosions.
That summer, Patrick Muffler, then a young scientist with the USGS, stepped for the first time into Pocket Basin, near Yellowstone’s western edge. He was there to map the hydrothermal system for NASA, which wanted to understand the volcanic landscapes that future missions to Mars might find. But this explosion had not been triggered by a sudden injection of volcanic heat from below, White and Muffler believed. Instead, they surmised, it was caused by an environmental change on the surface.
Before long, these maps revealed an unknown structure southwest of Mary Bay. Now called Elliott’s Crater, this 830-meter-wide depression is the third-largest hydrothermal crater in world.On the floor of Yellowstone Lake are hydrothermal explosion craters, like Elliott’s Crater and Mary Bay, plus domes like the North Basin Hydrothermal Dome, which mark where explosions could occur.
When such a dome seals, “you’re going to have a pressure cooker as opposed to a pot boiling on the surface,” Bedrosian says. It may set the stage for catastrophe. In 2016, scientists took a coring platform out onto Yellowstone Lake to collect sediments from the lake bottom and learn more about what triggered past explosions.The debris layer from Elliott’s Crater sits just below a well-known volcanic ash layer derived from the eruption of Mount Mazama, which formed Crater Lake in Oregon 7,600 years ago. Morgan’s team estimates that Elliott’s Crater exploded 8,000 years ago, triggered by a major earthquake that happened around the same time.
Eroded into these slopes are two stranded shorelines, one above the other, formed by the lake when its water level was higher in the past. The lower shoreline is younger, with an estimated age of roughly 13,000 years, suggesting that the lake level suddenly dropped from the higher shore to the lower shore, right around the time of the earthquake.It would have lowered the water pressure over Mary Bay by around 20 or 30 percent.
The blasts all happened about 700 years ago. His team is trying to pin down the exact timing. He believes they may have unfolded over a period of months or years, with each explosion triggering the next one, possibly by creating new cracks in the bedrock that destabilized other hydrothermal areas. The notion of such a domino effect is alarming. But the idea that a single earthquake might have triggered them simultaneously is even more so.
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